The Horror of the Horror Film

Joan’s eerie voice is still in my head, the lit tree house for lack of a better word and the end of the film Hereditary.

You are Paimon, one of the eight kings of Hell. We have looked to the Northwest and called you in. We’ve corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy male host. We reject the Trinity and pray devoutly to you, great Paimon. Give us your knowledge of all secret things. Bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars. Bind all men to our will, as we have bound ourselves for now and ever to yours. Hail, Paimon!

As to horror movies, I’m a little divided. At the same time they talk of things I cannot believe in, they also speak of the deepest truths we know. Hereditary was a brilliant movie, and like all good movies it was not simply the surface content, but a story of intergenerational trauma, beautifully acted in which, after layer of layer of pain there is no redemption. I could not watch the whole movie, only the highlights. I have a hard time wth movies in general, but especially movies that are pretty chock full of despair and which, in the end, I can’t believe in. I do believe in redemption, and I do believe in real and actual horrors, but horror films are not things I can give a great deal of time to anymore.

One of my early film memories was of the second Omen movie. Let me explain that I love my mother dearly and she is not a total nut job, but she thought I just had to see it when I was nine because she loved scary movies and she thought I should too. You could even say her head was in the right place and she assumed I would know the truth from fiction, and I did. I remember the scene where Damian confronts his terrified cousin in the woods, but the more he cries out to him, the more terrified Mark is, and Damian, angry and having fully accepted his mantle as anti Christ, uses his power to give Mark and aneurysm. As the other boy screams, clutches his head and crumples over dead in the snow, Damian has crossed  line from which he cannot return. Amidst the screams and frights, as we see everyone close to Damian die, is a chilling study of a boy being left alone to become a monster, something a little too real in our present world. Damian is a much stronger version of Peter in Hereditary who is also left alone at the mercy with dark inner forces.

In the editor’s cut of the movie The Exorcist, the director talks of little details in the movie, children wrecking a car and children out of line as if to say that the girl we are going to meet later on is experiencing a very imminent possession, but the rest of the world is experiences a minor possession too. Something has shifted. Evil is real and evil is here. aSo I have a weird interest n those horror movies with all of their devil worship and rejection of the Trinity and yet there is a problem them for me. I cannot really be scared by them, not in any authentic way. And I can only be disturbed by the unrelenting sadness, not the demons, because the horror movie is a Christian construction. It is the methane of orthodox Christianity, and if I am a Christian, I am an heretical one at best, and so what they show me is a world I already lived in, but from a warped and medieval Christian view

I mean, a lot of people reject the Trinity. Unitarians for one, and though I find them a little useless, I don’t find them demonic.  I’m not saying anything new but maybe I’m explaining why the genre of horror strikes me as strange. Christians didn’t invent demons, not as we know them. That was begun by the Jews who, as they gradually separated their religion from the neighboring religions began to call not only other peoples’ gods, but other names for God Israelites had decided not to use, demons. This view was solidified by Christians in the middle ages who created books full of spirits to be commanded by magicians, spirits with names like Ashtoroth and Beelzebub, names which are corruptions of Canaanite names for their Gods or older Israelites names for God.

I grew up with the story of Elijah and his contest on Mount Carmel with the priests of Baal. Elijah calls on Adonai and the Baal priests call on… well, Baal. In the end Elijah wins and kills all the prophets. This scene is the quintessential victory for right thinking belief in the one God, but I am not the first person to ask: what is the difference between Adonai and Baal? Both had the exact same qualities and both had the exact same place and people of worship. Both names even mean the same thing: Lord. But one started with an A and the other a B. The religious war between Elijah and the Baal’s followers is the precursor to the long fight in the West about what names one calls God, what people the one who calls to is allied with and how those on the other side are wrong at best, deserving of death at worst, or maybe at worst, worshippers of demons.

Which is what the famous Malleus Mallificorum states. The Hammer of the Witches, a diseased nightmare of Catholic priests in the Middle Ages, stated that there were people out there praying to the demons made up by Christians and Jews, that there were people like our friend Joan in Hereditary who knew that Christianity and the God of Orthodox Christianity was true, but rejected the Trinity and worshiped devils instead. Because that is, in thr view of medieval Catholic Europe, the only alternative to Christianity. This is the ancestor of every horror movie from the seventies onward. Don’t forget, while for two movies you are treated to Damien with gradual truer intention killing all sorts of people including a couple of young teenage boys, in the end Jesus shows up and makes it all right by killing Damien. Yes, that shit happens.  The two priests in The Exorcist die and we get to see a bitch crawl backward up a flight of stairs, but Jesus wins. Paul Blatty, writer of The Exorcist, said that he wanted to prove Jesus to people by proving the Devil and writing something depraved. This is the nonsense wastewater of Orthodox Christianity.

One of my favorite shows was Penny Dreadful, or at least the first two seasons. How mysterious and strange it was, how full of horror and how interesting if they had come up with a new way of making horror, but in the end we were back with the Devil, devil worshippers and Jesus. There is no doubt that horror as we know it in the West is intimately linked with Christianity. I was going to make an exception for Stephen King because I don’t actually read him or watch movies based on his books, but I do remember beginning the Stand and his remark that it was a tale of “dark Christianity”, so there you go. I was going to make the film The Dybbuk the only Jewish horror film I’ve ever heard of, an exception to this rule, but then again, we’ve already talked about Judaism. Even American Horror Story—not particularly scary and not made by a professing Christian, but by an ethnic Catholic, falls into the devil trope. Even when made by people with only passing Christian beliefs, even when the characters in the movie are not especially Christian, the horror movies actually had an old trope: there is God, and there is the garden one should stay in ,and outside of that garden are other forces, and these be devils.

The premise to the classic horror movies—throw in Dracula and then remember that the whole Frankenstein story was not originally intended to be horror—is that there are people out there who light candles and pray to someone not affiliated with you and your idea of God, and they are in fact evil and praying to the Devil. One could dismiss this as silly except that witch burnings, long wars between Catholics and Protestants that tore apart Europe, the complete destruction of Catholic England, imperial wars that stamped out cultures including the Muslim ransacking of India and America’s right to destroy native peoples and enslave Africans and Asians came from this view of things. In truth, watching a teenage girl in bathed in fake blood and humiliated at her prom destroy herself and her enemies will always be terrifying  but only because in some small way it is an ensign of the real horror that comes from bad thinking and the persecution of so called enemies that has bathed the world in actual blood several times over.