Most evangelical Christians don’t cotton to horror movies. Ever since King Saul and the Witch of Endor spent some scandalous time together, we’ve been cautious of anything that carries the tang of the occult—the bread and butter of most horror flicks. They’re typically filled with all sorts of issues that we call out at Plugged In, and some Christians believe they’re the work of the devil.
Given the general evangelical loathing of fright flicks, it’s interesting how oddly moral they can be.
I reviewed Unfriended last week—the story of a young high school suicide victim who scares the jeepers out of her frienemies before killing them. A couple of weeks earlier, I saw It Follows, in which a girl and her friends must outrun and outwit an ever malleable demonic entity.
The movies felt entirely different, but they did share some commonalities. Both looked like they were made for about what Avengers: Age of Ultron spent on hair gel, for instance. Both were surprisingly well-received (Rotten Tomatoes gave Unfriended a 64 percent “freshness” rating; It Follows’ marks are at awhopping 95 percent). And both were unapologetic morality fables, dishing out secular sermons with some seriously bloody garnish. These aren’t just movies: They’re extended PSAs with casualties, spiced with a hint of brimstone to boot.
Take a look at Unfriended. Laura Barns is the movie’s big bad, returning from the grave to haunt, troll and kill a clique of her former high school comrades. But she’s not just out for blood: She’s out for revenge. Each one of her would-be victims had a hand in her suicide a year before. The movie tells us that Laura was bullied to death.
YouTube provided the trigger: One of Laura’s victims posts a scandalous, embarrassing clip of the girl, explicitly telling her to “go kill urself.” Hundreds of like-minded comments follow, at least some of which were written by her “friends.” And during the horror-fest that follows, each tormented high schooler discovers that Laura knows not just about their secret bullying activities, but all the other horrible things they’ve done to each other … making them divulge each sordid secret one by one. And how could she know? Because a record of every vile deed is stored somewhere on their computers or the Internet. And death has really improved Laura’s ability to hack.
And just like that, Unfriended’s supernatural bogeyman gives us two sermons: Been told that what post online could haunt you forever? Unfriended takes that cautionary message quite literally. Already know that bullying can hurt? Through Unfriended, we see it can be painful for the bullies, too—at least if there’s a blender nearby. Moreover, Laura’s victims don’t just get their comeuppance for their bad behavior; they die because they lie. Confession, we’re told, is about the only way to avoid a particularly vengeful online ghost.
Unfriended follows, in some ways, the template of many a teen slasher flick. Jason and Freddy and Michael Myers always seem to kill off a movie’s biggest “sinners” first—the ones who do drugs or have sex or are just plain jerks. And those bogeymen, in turn, are just the latest in a long litany of twistedly moral monsters. In 1931’s Frankenstein, the titular scientist was tormented by his creation because he was audacious enough to play God by creating him. Even from 1922’s Nosferatu, we learned that characters with the purest of hearts and the cleanest of motives have the best chance to live to the credits. But even with this pedigree, it’s rare for a teen-centric horror flick to tie the sin so directly to a character’s bloody doom.
Well, with the exception of It Follows, of course—which if anything makes the links between sin and death even more explicit.
Jay (Maika Monroe) plays our heroine—a girl who made the (ahem) grave mistake of having sex with her boyfriend (Jake Weary). The guy, Hugh, turns out to be a loutish lout of a lout, who simply wanted to pass on the creepiest venereal disease in history. Hugh hurriedly tells her the lay of the land: From here on out, Jay will be stalked by a demonic specter that can take the form of anyone, living or dead. If it touches her, Jay will die (fairly horrifically, as it turns out), and the demon will begin stalking Hugh again. If Jay has sex with someone, though, the demon will stalk them until they’re dead, then return its murderous gaze back on Jay.
As a morality tale, It Follows has an obvious flaw: The premise turns into a lethal pyramid scheme. It behooves Jay to sleep with as many people as possible to keep death away from her own door. But even so, It Follows is a clear safe-sex parable. The theme of a lost childhood comes up again and again here: Innocence is a thing to be truly treasured, and anyone in Jay’s world who stays true to their promise rings will stay absolutely safe.
None of this is to say that Christians should be morally compelled to embrace these, or any other, horror movies. As I get older, scary movies get harder and harder for me to watch.
And yet by their very nature, some horror movies aren’t as far afield from Christianity as we think. What other genre allows for such frank discussions of good and evil? Where else can we sometimes find God’s power so alive and real? (Some such movies spend so much time talking about God that, if they weren’t horror flicks, they’d be labeled Christian.) And even movies like Unfriended and It Follows, where the name of God is only uttered as a curse, are not afraid to preach. Their messages aren’t strictly Christian, necessarily, but they’re often compatible. Be kind to others, even if they don’t deserve it? Don’t have casual sex? Tell the truth? Yeah, I think lots of us can get on board with what these movies say—even if we loathe how they say it.
“Repent!” they say, “for the end is near!” When we hear a street preacher start wailing about our sin, we’re liable to turn around and walk the other way. When a horror flick does it, we’ll slap down twelve bucks to hear it.
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