I would agree that LEFT BEHIND is a strange amalgam of genres, noting that it begins as a spy thriller, but I’m not sure that once you start getting into the Antichrist and the Tribulation that it doesn’t qualify as horror in every sense of the term’s maligned applications. I mean, I wouldn’t consider it good horror in the sense that I consider classic, Gothic horror to be good horror (that is, sublimely atmospheric and ultimately life-affirming)… but you do have both the occultic, supernatural element of angels and demons and the Antichrist and the torture porn element of the Divine punishments of the Tribulation, final war and Second Coming.

I do know that nobody else considers it horror, which was a bit of the point of my post. I’ve been in my share of debates where someone didn’t take very kindly at all to my comparing how tame the Universal Studios Monsters films were to the SAW-like content of premillenial dispensationalism. Ultimately though, it always seems to boil down to how LEFT BEHIND is different because it’s evangelism.

As to evangelical fiction like Left Behind, taken from the perspective of the authors, publisher, and evangelical reading audience it would be a form of pop fiction more akin to a thriller which they believe is connected in reality to their religious views. But they certainly wouldn’t consider this horror. Again, I think it would be legitimate to consider aspects of it horrific, but there are elements of this in other genres like action, adventure, and perhaps mystery that still doesn’t qualify it for classification as horror.

We may have to disagree on this, but I do appreciate your continued reflections and interactons on this.

I would be interesting in hearing your thoughts on how it isn’t horror though.

It’s inaccurate, I think, to say that conservative Evangelical Christians eschew horror. I would argue that it’s only the name they don’t care for, since “horror” conjures up images of violence, blood, perversity and gore for its own sake. Of course, that’s not an accurate assessment of horror, but it does allow them to disguise their own unique brand of horror under a different title.

Consider LEFT BEHIND and all the myriad dispensationalist eschatological schemes, which sort of begin as political spy thrillers but quickly pick up the pace and dive headlong into torture porn. What is the Tribulation – God’s unrelenting punishment of those who are not conservative Evangelicals – but an apocalyptic, mythologized version of SAW? Or, for that matter, Hell and its local manifestation of Hell Houses? The parade of titilating gore seen in those curls the toes of anyone more accustomed to graveyards, bats and misty, moonlit nights. And what of Jack T. Chick tracts?

From the One World Government cataloging everyone with barcodes to Satanic baby-killing conspiracies to eternal suffering in a lake of fire, conservative Evangelical horror passes as not being horror because it goes under the label of “evangelism”. Though indistinguishable from horror, its seen as having a pious purpose and therefore is not horror. Though they may condemn horror as scaring people for the sake thereof, they are perfectly content to try and scare people into Heaven.

The weird thing about it is that, of course, it’s often directed far more towards those who are already Evangelical as a means of acting out their own shadow-side fantasies. I don’t know of anyone who has been converted by the threat of missing the Rapture, but I have met many, many people who are sweaty-palmed with anticipation over how God is going to destroy in lengthy and painful ways all those who are not Evangelicals. Evangelical horror, unlike even the goriest of slasher pics and torture porn, seems to draw from an unrepentant hatred of those who are portrayed as its victims.

The hard part is coming up with horror that is truly metaphysical. At least, it’s difficult nowadays where Christian-themed horror/evangelism is a cookie-cutter of the same anxieties over the body and death as regular slasher films and torture porn. It’s all about the destruction of the flesh, whether its done by Jigsaw or the Antichrist. One almost has to go back to the 1930′s and 40′s for truly metaphysical horror where the loss of a single soul was worse than the death of a dozen men.