This is the second part of a series on horror’s cultural moment
Why is horror apparently ascendant at the box office? Why is Sinners beating, well, everything? This series attempts to answer these questions, and today I want to reflect for a moment on how the world is a horror story.
Obviously to say the world is a horror story doesn’t mean nothing good ever happens. It doesn’t mean that the good guys don’t win (spoiler alert: He does). It doesn’t mean there’s not humor or joy or whimsy or delight in the world. It means that one of the ongoing narratives in which we live is horror. There are scary monsters in the dark, villains doing terrible things, and supernatural forces lurking beneath the surface working their ill wills.
The book Old Country is an excellent example of this. Harry and Sasha leave their fast-paced life in the city (Denver, I think) to take up farming in rural Idaho. (No, they’re not really being farmers full time–that lifestyle is over; they’re doing remote work while living on their affluent hobby farm.) Settling into an idyllic lifestyle in the mountains, the couple seem to be set to start the family they’ve always dreamed of in the place they’ve always wanted to live.
Instead, what they find is that a terrifying spirit haunts the valley they live in. This spirit requires certain rites (which vary by season) in order to placate it so the couple can live in peace. Any attempt to escape is punished, and the couple quickly find that their idyllic lifestyle has a horrific side which they cannot escape.
This is where we all are. However peaceful, decent, or prosperous our life might be, there really are terrifying forces at work in the world which we must face. I don’t mean to do a deep dive into the politics of the last decade, but whatever your political orientation we’ve all these terrifying forces on greater display in recent years. We know there is evil in the world, and we know we cannot escape it. Horror alone as a genre requires us to face this truth head-on and without flinching from doing so.
So this is why, I think, horror is coming into its own: it tells us the truth that we live in a world that has its terrifying aspects. That’s not the only thing true about the world, of course, but it’s something which we as Christians cannot ignore.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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