Horror, the Grotesque, and the Macabre: A Christian Appraisal

Note: This article first appeared in the National Catholic Register.

By Steven D. Greydanus

This Halloween, Ridley Scott’s 1979 science-fiction horror film Alien comes back to theaters in a restored director’s cut featuring a few reintegrated scenes. A sci-fi tale of space as the new terra incognita ("here there be dragons") as well as an updated haunted-house yarn complete with dark hallways, a hissing cat, and strobe lighting, Alien has been called "the scariest movie ever made."

As a genre, horror represents a field many Christians would approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk.

Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.

In the Middle Ages, gargoyles and grotesques were prominent features of sacred architecture, and the danse macabre or "dance of death" — a dramatic or artistic representation of men being visited by Death, fruitlessly attempting to resist or escape, and finally being away in a grim procession or dance — was a popular art form.

More recently, the Vatican recognized the first great horror film, F. W. Murnau’s vampire film Nosferatu, on its 1995 list of 45 great films. (Another Vatican list honoree, The Seventh Seal, involves a cinematic take on the danse macabre.)

In Christian households, untold generations of children have been raised on fairy tales featuring all manner of goblins, dragons, witches, and so on. In the age of film, this roster of nursery monsters includes such figures as the winged monkeys and Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and the raucous hellions and demon Chernobog of the "Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia (two more Vatican list honorees).

The grotesque does have a more disturbing and objectionable side. In too many books and films, villains become heroes, imaginative engagement of evil becomes glorification of evil, and mayhem and gore become ends in themselves apart from any sense of artistic restraint or moral context. Examples of such disordered indulgence in the macabre include the celebratory vampire novels of Anne Rice and gruesome slasher flicks like the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

But abusus non tollit usam: The abuse does not abrogate the proper use. As perverse as much modern horror is, one cannot simply throw out the baby with the bathwater. Neither uncritical acceptance nor uncritical condemnation is called for, but critical discernment and moral vigilance.

First, though, it is necessary to understand the proper place of the grotesque and macabre in imagination and culture. Why do we scare ourselves with tales like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula, and so on?

Part of the answer is that there’s simply something cathartic and energizing about stories of danger, stress, and excitement. In journeying with the heroes into the valley of the shadow of death and emerging again, we participate vicariously in the triumph of good over evil.

Children, especially, demand imaginary adversity in the course of developing the emotional resiliency to handle real-life difficulties and dangers — a point argued by Gerard Jones in his interesting book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. Adults, too, crave stories that frighten in part because such stories help us get a handle on real-life fears and anxieties. The simple fact is that we occupy a fallen world, and stories that reflect this reality in imaginatively compelling ways help us with the business of living in it.

But there’s more to it than mere adversity. If Nosferatu replaced Count Orlock with a mere serial killer, it would lose much of its power. Not just fear, but dread is necessary for horror, for in this world there are things not just fearful but dreadful.

Like the medieval danse macabre, horror at its best can be an imaginative way of grappling not only with adversity but with the specter of our own mortality, and the moral and existential implications of the fact that we will die. Indeed, many horror stories are in a sense as scrupulously moralistic as fairy tales, and in the same way, punishing those who transgress moral boundaries. This is especially the case, as Catholic culture critic E. Michael Jones argues in his provocative book Monsters From the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, in regard to moral boundaries that are in the process of being questioned or challenged in the culture at large.

In general, moral transgression per se as a plot point in a story does not elicit dread, though it may elicit condemnation or even revulsion. Similarly, we’re fairly comfortable with seeing the unquestionably guilty punished, while the suffering of the unquestionably innocent tends to elicit sympathy and sorrow rather than dread.

But as taboos fall and men exchange truth for lies, the moral knowledge inscribed on the human heart by our Creator is suppressed but not entirely eradicated. Not moral transgression as such, but the gnawing fear that we as a society have lost our way and no longer know where the true moral boundaries lie, is what we most dread. When horror confronts audiences with the punishment of those whom, from Dr. Frankenstein to promiscuous teens in a slasher film, the audience feels on some level to be guilty but may not be able to unambiguously judge as such, dread and horror is the result.

In the 1940s, when moral taboos against nonmarital sex were much more taken for granted, one might have a film or book in which the wanton were punished and the chaste rewarded, but it would be a morality-tale or parable, not a horror story. As moral norms shifted, however, what was once regarded as sexual immorality became increasingly associated with horror, as slasher films like John Carpenter’s Halloween, the promiscuous die and the virgins survive. The unacceptability of fornication was no longer an idea that enjoyed common acceptance in society, yet on some level society was not entirely reconciled to the new ethic, and the image in the film expressed with fairy-tale inchoate directness something that was felt to be true but could no longer be straightforwardly affirmed.

Jones’s thesis is that the whole taproot of modern horror is the modernist secular morality of the Enlightenment, especially regarding sexual morality. He argues, with varying degrees of plausibility, that horror stories from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and Alien are all rooted in shifting sexual mores.

Regarding Alien, Jones’s case rests in part on images in the film suggestive of conflicted attitudes toward procreation, childbirth, unnatural and contraceptive sex acts, and abortion. (Note: Spoilers.) Certainly the central image of a deadly alien embryo implanted in a character’s torso, maturing and finally bursting obscenely forth, amounts to a hideous perversion of pregnancy and childbirth. The face-sucking alien’s means of reproduction, inserting its reproductive member down a crew member’s throat, is evocative of fellatio, though in this case due to the sci‑fi element the act is not infertile. And when the final alien is destroyed by being sucked out of the ship, dangling on an umbilical-like cable until being shredded in the ship’s jets, it’s a remarkably abortion-like death.

In a key exchange, a treacherous android favorably contrasts the alien with humanity, calling it a "perfect organism," a "survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." The clear implication is that unless we are guided by conscience and morality — unless we resist thinking of ourselves as mere "organisms" — we will be no better than monsters ourselves.

None of this is to say that the gruesome violence in films like Halloween or Alien isn’t morally problematic. It is, though other horror films, from Nosferatu and Dr. Jeckyll to The Sixth Sense and The Others, are more restrained and thus present fewer issues. But even Alien illustrates that the fascination of horror and the grotesque cannot be simply dismissed as a mere disordered fascination with ugliness or evil, and that echoes of unpopular and forgotten moral truths can be found in the most unlikely places.