From beyond the grave to on the screen: What horror movies can teach us about being human

Tapestry54:00Facing our nightmares

Originally published on November 4, 2022. 

Between the screams, the jump scares, and the gore, it can be hard to imagine that horror movies might offer something more meaningful than an adrenaline rush. But Brandon Grafius, associate professor of biblical studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit, says horror serves a similar function to church in his life. 

"One of the things that keeps me coming back to church week in and week out, is that it's a structure that helps me make peace with my past and look towards the future with hope," Grafius told Tapestry host Mary Hynes. 

"I think that's the kind of work that horror can do as well."

In his latest book, Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions That Haunt Us, Grafius weaves between horror movies and biblical texts, drawing connections between their place within our lives and their capacity to capture our fear — and resurrect our hope. 

Here is part of his conversation with Hynes.

I love this image of you as a guy who has a foot in each world — one in the world of horror, the other foot in the world of religion. And in the popular imagination, those two things are polar opposites. Tell me why they don't feel all that opposed to you. 

They're two different spaces that help us to ask the same kinds of questions. I think we used to think these questions about what life means, what our role is in the universe, how we relate to each other, what happens when we die — they used to be questions that we thought were reserved for the realm of religion. But I think more recently, we're realizing those are just properly human questions. So they've always been comfortable in the church. But I think horror is one space where we also work those out.

You wrote something really striking, I'm going to quote you here, "The more you probe the walls between horror and religion, the more they start to collapse, leading us to realize we've been in the same space all along, whether it's the sanctuary or the graveyard." 

I'm curious about what happens when those walls collapse. Where do you see the signs that the cemetery and the sanctuary can often be the exact same place?

In my work as an academic, I've kind of explored two different ways of looking at that. One is the acknowledgement and the realization that there's a lot of horror in the Bible. Stories in the Hebrew Bible are frequently terrifying, whether they're stories of warfare, stories of sexual violence, or just stories about monsters. And then the New Testament ends with God throwing everybody into the lake of fire and all sorts of monstrous forces battling with each other. So there's lots of horror in the Bible. But there's also a lot of religion in horror. 

Sometimes, horror movies make my job really easy when they're movies like The Exorcist or Midnight Mass where it wears religion right on its sleeve. But I think a lot of the time, if you dig just a little bit deeper, you find these same kinds of impulses. The Lighthouse is all about our being drawn to the divine and also recognizing that it's dangerous.

So this is the recent Lighthouse with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. What are they getting up to that invokes the spiritual realm for you?

For me, there's this sense of being drawn to the light. I talk some about Willem Dafoe being the high priest who has all the rituals, who understands what you need to do to approach this, and who is keeping his apprentice away from it. The younger character [played by] Robert Pattinson, Ephraim, is wanting to learn so that he can be a part of this ritual as well. He wants to approach the divine. When he finally gets there, it doesn't work out very well for him because he's not ready. He's not prepared. 

I think once you start to see the implications of this being a spiritual discipline, then the movie just unfolds all kinds of layers of richness.

There's a film where you've definitely seen a much deeper reading than I've been capable of. And this is the connection between the Friday the 13th movies and the book of Numbers. What did you find there?

My dissertation was called "Reading Phinehas, Watching Slashers." Phinehas is a priest who only has a few lines in the [biblical] book of Numbers, but in one of the chapters the Israelite men are messing around with foreign women as they have been told not to do. But one of the Israelite men brings a Midianite woman from another tribe into the camp and they go into a tent together. Phinehas picks up a spear and skewers them both. If that's not horrifying enough, God's response to this in this chapter is, "Hey, great job Phinehas. I'm really impressed with your zeal." So first of all, I recognize that that death scene happens verbatim in Friday the 13th Part 2. I see in both of them this anxiety over the collapse of our communities. 

I see the slasher films of the 80s as being really reactionary responses to the more progressive liberatory movies of the 70s. We're worried about our families collapsing, we're worried about social control dissolving. And so we imagine this slasher who comes in and reasserts patriarchal authority through violence. And I see the priest Phinehas as filling that same role.

Are you ever uneasy with horror as an art form, as entertainment, when the real world serves up so much that's frightening all the time?

Horror absolutely makes me uneasy. I think that's one of the things it is supposed to do, is make us uncomfortable and push on those questions for us. I feel like if you're not a little bit uncomfortable when you're watching horror, either you're not watching a very good movie, or maybe you're not paying close enough attention.

I'm intrigued by something you've written, it sounds a bit counterintuitive just at first glance. This is the idea that to have hope and to be afraid aren't different things at all, that they are deeply connected. So that even the most dystopian horror film could have something very profound to say about hope. Tell me what you mean.

The example I use in my book is The Walking Dead. The TV series is, for me, one of the most bleak, depressing things ever. The whole structure of the series is everything we've held on to is falling apart. In the beginning of the series, Sheriff Grimes is fixated on finding his family, his wife and his kid. Are they still alive? Are they out there somewhere? There are all these melodramatic twists and plot turns and what have you, but eventually he gets reconciled with them. And so the next question is, "Okay, what are we going to hope for next?" So their hope is rebuilding this new community, they begin to realize that maybe that's falling apart so they move on to something else to hope for. So it's this constant cycle of, "Let's figure out what we can move on to."

I think on a more maybe a slightly deeper level, we're afraid of things that we hope for not happening. And vice versa. We hope for the things we're afraid of to not happen. So they each carve out a space where we can reflect on the other one. The hope and the fear point towards the same desire, the same anxiety.

I'm realizing here I was dangerously close to saying goodbye without asking you about [1973's] The Wicker Man. What does The Wicker Man say to you as both a fan and connoisseur of horror and as a religion scholar?

I certainly put it into the context of folk horror that's become kind of a buzzy subcategory in the last few years or so. The folk horror tends to be rural and tends to centre on a conflict between some kind of mostly forgotten past and often a present that isn't working very well. 

Frequently, our contemporary life is associated with Christianity. But then there's the sense of something that kind of bubbles up beneath that's much older than Christianity and that's been around longer, and might have a more enduring power in some way. Often, Christianity loses in these folk horror movies. 

I've got an article coming out in a book on folk horror from a movie called Bloodtide. That's this early 80s movie where one of the characters is a researcher in a monastery off a Greek aisle. And she's kind of trying to restore some of the artwork that's in the monastery. And as she begins to restore it, she realizes there is an earlier painting underneath that is of a pagan sacrifice. And this Christian iconography has been painted over the top of it. And for me, that's just such a perfect image of what folk horror is about — that we're really afraid that there is something underneath our modern constructions of life — which would include Christianity or more modern religions. And that that is unstable because what's underneath that is more powerful, maybe a little more dangerous.

I love the way you've summed this up, that "horror provides a window into our culture and what makes us human. The same can be said of religion." I'm curious about some of the more profound spiritual lessons you've encountered at the movies or in reading in the realm of horror. 

One of the more profound messages is that to be human means to be in relationship. I think the best horror, as well as the aspects of religion that I feel most drawn to, are those aspects that are about relationality. Whether that's about relationship with the divine, or relationship with our community, or personal relationships — that relationships are important. I think the other really profound thing that I see echoed in horror all the time, is that what we do matters. Our relationships, our lives and our choices matter. Sometimes we see that in small, almost insignificant ways in movies. 

For me, one of the things that keeps me coming back to church week in and week out, is that it's a structure that helps me make peace with my past and look towards the future with hope. I think that's the kind of work that horror can do as well.

Q&A edited for length and clarity. Written and produced by McKenna Hadley-Burke.