The Body and Horror

With my graduate studies drawing to a close I have finally had some time to expand my reading list, and one of the areas I have been exploring is religion and film, primarily as it relates to horror, science fiction, and fantasy. As part of my reading I have a stack of articles from The Journal of Religion and Film, one of them by Bryan Stone of Boston University School of Theology, an article titled “The Sanctification of Fear: Images of the Religious in Horror Films.” I will be posting later this month on the topic of Christian sensibilities and horror as part of a “synchroblog” effort with fellow bloggers and will draw upon this article again at that time, but one aspect was interesting and worth commenting on now. In the article Stone comments on various types of horror, and one facet is “body horror,” which obviously refers to the body and how it is treated as a major facet of films in this category. Writing on the shift from Gothic horror with its connections to a Judeo-Christian vision, Stone writes,

“In America, in the twentieth century, however, death changed hands. The symbols, the myths, and, indeed, the institutions that guided us in coping with and understanding death were transformed before our eyes. Death, once the special province of religion, now became the province of science, and especially medicine. As Bradley says, ‘once intimately connected with the life of the community, death became separated from life by medical technology, which confined it to the hospital and the funeral home.’ Horror in the last century parallels this repression and eroticisation of, and inevitable fascination with death.”

As I reflected on this I wondered if this might be a partial reason why many Christians recoil from horror as a legitimate genre for engagement, let alone enjoyment. I’ll post some thoughts on this later this month as a specific topic so I don’t want to touch on it now. But what I would like to comment on is how the aspects reflected in the quotation from Stone relate to Christianity in the West. I recall during my historical and cross-cultural research on the history of Halloween celebrations how one writer noted that “Americans have a difficult time looking death in the eye,” and I believe this may the case with many American and Western Christians as well. It seems to me as if Roman Catholic celebrations such as All Saints and All Souls Day, as well as the Mexican cultural celebration of Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, represent far more healthy ways in which to acknowledge mortality and death, and yet many Protestants bristle at both of these as somehow inappropriate and off limits (as the blog controversy over my presentations at Imaginarium at last year’s Cornerstone Festival indicate). It seems curious to me that the faith that has the Resurrection as its center piece would have such difficulties at addressing death through community and ritual.

But I wonder if another dynamic might be at work here. After all, “body horror” refers to more than just death as the end result of the body experiencing natural processes. It also involves everything associated with the body prior to death, including many things that make people uncomfortable. My research into what might be called “a theology of the body” as connected to my Burning Man, Neo-Paganism, and even Mormon studies reveals very different attitudes in Christianity to the body than among other alternative spiritual communities. Is it possible that one of the reasons why some Christians have a distaste for horror is due to theological assumptions and attitudes about the body? If this is the case, might there be something to learn in theological reflection by considering the perspectives of alternative spiritualities and their views in this area? How might horror provide a means whereby we can engage such issues?

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