by Matt Cardin
Holte, James. 1997. Dracula in the Dark: A Study of the Dracula Film Adaptations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Jowett, Laura, and Stacey Abbott. 2013. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.
Melton, J. Gordon. 2011. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press.
RELIGION, HORROR, AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The critical commonplace, largely uncontested, is that horror is marked by a prevalent concern with the material and psychological. However, horror is also concerned with invoking a sense of spiritual and religious anxiety. In fact, authors from Arthur Machen to Clive Barker agree that the roots of horror literature are embedded in religious traditions or theological conflicts. While scholarship on the area of religious horror is relatively new, there are several exemplary books and essays on its literary origins in supernatural Gothic literature. British Gothic literature is marked by certain prevalent religious prejudices both anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. These strains of theological conflict can be read as the attempt to assert a hegemonic Protestantism against the threat of foreign and, in the case of Catholicism, former religious traditions. Although the religious and supernatural codes and conventions set out by the Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are crucial to any consideration of religion’s connection with horror and supernatural literature, it is important to understand that horror goes beyond the traditions and inheritances of Christian Britain and is created within the contexts of different faiths and nationalities. Consequently, the representation of religion and the supernatural in horror fiction does not flow in one direction or from one nation or religion, but is created out of a cultural exchange of religious symbols, narratives, and themes.
It was the religious imagination of such early Christian theologians as Augustine of Hippo that first introduced the Western world to the horror of the human condition, and it was visionaries such as the Italian Dante Alighieri who first journeyed in the imagination to the depths and limits of hell. Their Protestant and Catholic illustrations of divine punishment and human perversity and sin greatly inform European horror to this day. This is not to suggest that horror fiction, as a whole, is orthodox or faithful. The ideology and form of horror fiction tends to focus on the corrupt and perverse; therefore, it is inclined toward showing the reader what is dreadful about church and God. Since the establishment of Anglicanism during the Protestant Reformation in 1534, supernatural and religious horror has become associated with an increasingly secularized form of literature preoccupied with questioning rather than preaching religious lessons and dogmas. As early as the Renaissance period, authors such as Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) used modes of horror, supernaturalism, and the religious to undermine church and state. In the seventeenth century, the English poet John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost (1667), caused religious controversy by suggesting a remarkably seductive and sympathetic devil. It was, however, the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment from the mid-eighteenth century onward that influenced two generations of darkly supernatural writing. This writing was tethered to certain religious and sociohistorical events that would breed religious horror. Events such as the tensions surrounding the Catholic Emancipation campaign through the 1770s, the French Revolution in 1789, and the eventual passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 all had an effect on the supernatural and religious themes of Gothic novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These early Gothic writers made common the tropes of medieval and foreign European settings, entrapments in a monastery or convent, evil clergy and the Inquisition, wandering Jews, satanic or occult ritual, and supernatural occurrences. The holy terrors of the Catholic Church continued to be a favorite theme well into the twentieth century. J. M. Barrie’s Scottish Gothic story, Farewell Miss Logan (1932), for example, tells the story of a Protestant minister working in a lonely highland glen beset by ambiguous vampires, ghosts, and Roman Catholic Jacobites.
However, “foreign” Catholicism was not the only aspect of the religious to make Gothic and horror writers uncomfortable. A second wave of Gothic novels in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century established new religious and supernatural conventions. Taking inspiration from both science and religion, Mary Shelley gave scientific and theological form to the supernatural in Frankenstein (1818). Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) features a scholar who sells his soul for longer life only to become doomed to wander the world seeking death and redemption. Subsequent scholarship identifies the accursed wanderer—a literary inheritor of the anti-Semitic religious identity of Jews—as another horrifying figure popular among Gothic and Romantic writers. The first American Gothic novel is also a religious horror story. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) introduced the subject of America’s oppressive Puritan mindset by featuring a minister driven over the edge of sanity by his supernatural suspicions and sense of spiritual failure. Fanatical Protestant sects and Puritan paranoia are also the principal targets in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). Gothic Scotland is the setting for James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). These stories work through Calvinism’s oppressive guilt, self-scrutiny, and God by describing men pursued by their own demonic doubles.
An interesting thing to note in early Gothic novels is the differences between the authors’ perspectives on the representation of the religious and supernatural. Lewis’s parade of ghosts, demons, and, ultimately the devil himself is at once outrageous and irreverent. Radcliffe, on the other hand, showed timidity when it came to religious and otherworldly matters, offering natural but complicated explanations of the supernatural. Furthermore, the fact that all early Gothic writers show timidity about representing God has been read as underlying Christian values by some scholars and evidence of God’s increasing obsoleteness by others.
This nervousness around the representation of the supernatural was to change with mainstreaming of Gothic in Victorian literary culture and its branching off into subgenres such as the ghost story and weird or cosmic fiction. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, the clergy had been replaced with other fears also tethered to certain religious and social transformations, namely, the increased intrusion of science and materialism into people’s lives. This was sharpened by the discoveries of Charles Darwin on the evolution of the human in The Origin of the Species (1859) and the antimodernist scholarly work Degeneration (1895) by Max Nordau, both of which ignited diverse fears about what it means to be human. In response to the perceived threat of scientific materialism, a variety of spiritual and religious movements—such as, to name one notable example, Spiritualism—sprang up throughout the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, each in its own way attempting to bridge the divide between the rational and the spiritual.
The Victorian occult horror story and supernatural tale features séances, mesmerism, paganism, alchemy, medieval occult religions, and a more exuberant and varied supernaturalism. This indicates that the supernatural was becoming less tethered to fundamental religions or conventional concepts of God. It also suggests that the evocation of strange worlds, peculiar rituals, and exotic supernatural entities enabled readers to entertain spiritual notions that were otherwise fading in their everyday lives. Arthur Machen’s stories are filled to the brim with pagan gods and occult demons and an ambivalent attraction to medieval rituals and religions. Another writer who commonly exploited the occult was Oscar Wilde. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde used the standard aesthetics of Catholicism and an occult narrative to tell the story of the separation of one man’s soul from his body, but turned this into an exploration of his own Catholic tendencies. The fascination with paganism and occult religions remained well into
the twentieth century where it was used to develop the idea of a person being caught between the oppressive horrors of the past and the soulless materialism of the present.
Horror, which is loosely deemed a subgenre of Gothic literature, shares many of that genre’s fears and anxieties as well as its religious ambiguities. But along with being traceable in this way to a late eighteenth-century English literature, there is, in fact, a wealth of horror from a diverse range of spiritual traditions from Judaism to Islam and Asia, each of which use the supernatural to explore the horrors of religious experience.
The zombie, for example, has its roots in the African-derived religious systems of Haitian Vodou—more commonly known in horror literature and film as Voodoo—Jamaican Obeah, and Cuban Santéria. As perhaps the most ubiquitous icon of the horror genre in the early twenty-first century, the zombie lends itself to both shifts and transformations in the religious and cultural experiences of Caribbean and Latin American people. This includes their racist displacement and oppression by white colonialism. The zombie, along with other Vodou spirits such as the Jumbie, was first brought to the attention of colonial readers in horrific tales of slave religion, barbaric ritual, and black magic. Vodou and its ceremonies also played an integral role in the uprising of Haitian and Jamaican slaves during two separate rebellions. However, despite repeated attempts to suppress and delegitimize its practice, Vodou survived by becoming intermixed with the European colonists’ native Catholicism. The interest in Vodou traditions was rekindled in the early twentieth century by both white and African authors playing to colonial mythology and romanticism, and by Caribbean authors looking to understand their religious traditions and the horrors of their past.
The reinvigoration of the zombie in the twentieth century also fit with the turn to the body in the mid-twentieth-century horror aesthetic. As well as making literature more recognizably categorized as horror, the body was the focus of multiple religious and theological fears. In a great many of these books, possession and dispossession symbolize a persistent supernatural dimension. By portraying the evil invasion of the female body, for example, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) suggest a threat from forces not only above and beyond but also within. Unnatural violations also occur in Noel Scanlon’s Black Ashes (1986), a book on the insidious horrors of reincarnation and a Hindu god-demon named Ravana who incarnates as a creepy and charismatic leader of an Indian cult. Other authors return to more typical psycho-religious Gothic ground, albeit in more gruesome manifestations. While echoes of America’s dark English heritage and sinister pagan rites appear in Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), Haitian Vodou is to blame for a series of child sacrifices in Nicholas Condé’s The Religion (1987).
Other authors reflexively explored these literary themes alongside historical events and interpretations of scripture. For example, racism and anti-Semitism are the essence of evil in Dan Simmons’s novel Carrion Comfort (1989). Similarly, in his earlier book, Song of Kali (1985), the setting of Calcutta, the grotesque Hindu goddess Kali, and the hideous ceremony of human sacrifice are used to address such diverse fears as the fear of women, the fear of losing children, and humanity’s unholy passion for violence. In all of these twentieth-century examples, the body—its sexuality, transgression, and ruin—continues to pose as our most absorbing theological conundrum. This culminates most perversely in the “splatterpunk” movement that marked the closing of the century. The supernatural vocabulary and Christian values that underpin the prolific writings of Stephen King, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Peter Straub are made strange and ambivalent by their alternation between apocalyptic and emancipatory transgressions of the body.
Religious Horror around the World
Although Asian horror occasionally borrows the aesthetics of Western Christianity and the Gothic, its supernatural concepts are derived not from Christian notions of sin, evil, or anti-Catholicism, but from various forms of Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist philosophy. In Japanese religious folk tradition, for instance, the Onryō are female ghosts that have died in tragic or unlawful circumstances and are revered as minor deities. Unless pacified by homage and ritual (onyrōgami), these spirits can become restless and nasty, inflicting terrible justice and vengeance upon the guilty.
Islamic horror stories are populated by Jinns, unseen spirits that are derived from the Qur’an and that can manifest as human or animal. Jinns can be good or bad, playful or vengeful. However, as is often the case in these largely conservative stories, an evil Jinn can also be neutralized by prayer and leading a good Muslim life.
American Jewish Gothic stories convey complex fears about the mutability and instability of memory, time, place, and “authentic” Jewish identity. The Dybbuk is a Jewish poltergeist whose name is derived from Hebrew meaning “attachment” or “cling to.” Other undead spirits seeking homes in human bodies appear in early Kabbalistic texts.
Religion and the supernatural continue to be a characteristic of contemporary horror. Religious horror is shaped by many issues, including nationality, race, sexuality, history, politics, and, of course, theology. It is also the case that the genre’s use of supernaturalism challenges and complicates such issues as the boundary between flesh and spirit, the material and immaterial world, and transcendence and transgression. There is not just one religious horror, but religious horrors with many different forms and levels of dread and fear. These change as writers transform and renew the form in order to explore shifting cultural and religious concerns.
Eleanor Beal
See also: Apocalyptic Horror; Occult Fiction; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Devils and Demons; The Exorcist; Harvest Home; Herbert, James; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Machen, Arthur; The Monk; The Numinous; Rosemary’s Baby; Song of Kali; Spiritualism; Straub, Peter.
Further Reading
Beal, Timothy. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge.
Geary, Robert F. 1993. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief and Literary Change. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Ingebretson, Edward J. 1996. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe.
Nelson, Victoria. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
O’Malley, Robert. 2006. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Porte, Joel. 1974. “In the Hands of an Angry God.” In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, 42–64. Pullman: Washington State University Press.
SHAKESPEAREAN HORRORS
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has been an important influence on almost all genres and modes of literature; he casts a significant shadow over literary endeavors to this day. Known principally as a playwright, he also wrote poetical works, acted, and was a partner in the business of the Globe Theatre. He has rarely been considered specifically in regard to horror writing, however, despite the wealth of horror tropes and horrific images contained within his work. This is perhaps mainly due to the perceived gulf between Shakespeare as exemplar of high literary culture and the traditionally low esteem paid to horror as trashy sensationalism. Such a tradition ignores the ways in which the bodily effect of horror fits perfectly with the ideas of humors and passions that prevailed in Shakespeare’s time. Theater was believed to have a physical effect on its audiences, with their emotional response being a result of actual changes to their humoral makeup (changes that still have a metaphorical afterlife even after the decline of humoral theories).
Shakespearean horrors are largely in keeping with the early modern contexts of their authorship. Consequently, supernatural and spectral horror predominates. The ghosts and witches of contemporary cultural belief find their place on Shakespeare’s
stage, alongside the flair for horrific spectacle that characterized the new professional theater. Competing with—often sharing the same performance spaces as—popular public entertainments such as bearbaiting meant that playwrights were keen to appeal to the more bloodthirsty interests of their paying customers. The hugely popular genre of revenge tragedy in particular fits well with horror, as it used increasingly lurid and sensational ways to torture its participants and thrill its audience.
The one play that has attracted most attention for its horror elements is Titus Andronicus (ca. 1594), although this attention has traditionally been far from positive. Generally dismissed as immature juvenilia and, indeed, often argued against being by Shakespeare at all, this dark tragedy bursts onto the stage with mutilations, decapitations, sacrifices, and forced cannibalism. In exploring the results of a corrupt emperor’s rule, the play revels in a view of the human body that is surprisingly close to the modern “torture-porn” of the likes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). It is perhaps no surprise that productions of Titus invariably result in audience members fainting—a fact that publicity material delights in mentioning. In the figure of Titus’s daughter, Lavinia—savagely raped and then mutilated (her hands cut off and tongue removed)—we can see an early example of the displayed victim that haunts horror throughout the ages. Because she is unable to express the identity of her attackers, her family is forced to attempt to interpret what has happened through their engagement with her horrific wounds, a clear metaphorical comparison with the role of horror literature in culture more generally. Although clearly an early work, Titus is far more sophisticated than traditional critics’ dismissals might indicate. The play highlights the traumatic and horrific results of war, and its layering of staged atrocities leads to a bloody climax that wipes the stage clean of the majority of the combatants. The audience is left simultaneously appalled and thrilled by the excesses that they have witnessed—a conflation of feelings that is quintessentially related to the literature of horror.
