Late-night television in the 1970s offered something called “Creature Feature,” and there I was: young, impressionable, and mostly unsupervised, watching monsters lurch across a flickering screen long after any responsible adult had gone to bed. That was my first taste of horror.
By fifteen I’d read The Exorcist—an R‑rated book that genuinely terrified me. By then, my father’s church had made it clear there was a literal Devil who, “like a roaring lion, walks about, seeking whom he may devour.” The demonic was not theory; it was an ever-present threat.
When I later became a member and went to the church’s college, the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. I wrote a celebrated paper on the evils of rock lyrics. We analyzed songs for satanic influence and worried that almost anything in popular culture might open a spiritual doorway. Underneath all of that was a serious instinct: evil is real, and we’re not to trifle with it. That instinct is not wrong.
But it can become distorted into a fear that is not faith, a fear that ends up being more impressed with Satan than with God. It can make us afraid not only of evil, but of honest depictions of evil—and of our own responses to them.
That’s why my conversation with film critic Josh Larsen about his book Fear Not: A Christian Appreciation of Horror was so important. This is not a call for every Christian to go start a horror-movie marathon. If you’re not drawn to the genre, you lose nothing by staying away.
But for Christians who are already interested—and many quietly are—it’s vital to know that you don’t have to check your faith at the door. You don’t have to be afraid of the fact that you’re drawn to stories that take fear, evil, and suffering seriously.
Here are four theological reasons why.
1. The Bible Is Already Full of Horror
One of Josh’s first moves in Fear Not is simple: look at the Bible.
From the very beginning, Scripture does not sanitize the world:
- Genesis 4: the first murder. Cain kills Abel, and Abel’s “blood cries out from the ground.”
- Exodus: plagues, darkness, the death of the firstborn, and 100-pound hailstones that crush everything in their path.
- Judges 19–21: one of the most horrific stories in all of literature—a woman abused to death, her body dismembered and sent as warning to the tribes of Israel.
- Job: sitting on an ash heap, scraping his boils with shards of pottery.
- The Gospels: a demon-possessed man named Legion, living among tombs, gashing himself with stones, a whole herd of pigs rushing off a cliff.
- Revelation: beasts rising from the sea, plagues, blood to the horses’ bridles, people gnawing their tongues in agony and cursing God.
These are not “family-friendly” images. They are images of horror.
Why are they there?
Josh’s answer is that the Bible is profoundly honest about the horror of a fallen world. It names:
- Physical violence.
- Psychological torment.
- Spiritual malevolence.
- The anguish of feeling abandoned by God.
If Scripture pretended none of this existed, its promise of redemption would feel hollow. “Good news” that refuses to look at the bad isn’t actually good; it’s denial.
Christians who are drawn to certain horror films are often, at bottom, responding to this same honesty. They sense that these stories—at their best—refuse to look away from the reality that something is deeply wrong with the world and with us.
That is not a satanic instinct. It’s the starting point of biblical truth.
“The Bible does not pretend we’re not living in a fallen world. It doesn’t avert its eyes.” – Josh Larsen
If the Bible can speak this frankly about horror, Christians need not panic if some of our stories do the same.
2. The Cross Is the Scariest Image in Scripture
When I asked Josh what he considered the most terrifying image in the Bible, he didn’t hesitate:
“The cross.”
It is easy—especially for those of us who grew up in church—to domesticate the cross. It becomes a decorative symbol, a logo, jewelry. But in the first century, it was an instrument of state terror.
Crucifixion was:
- Prolonged torture in public.
- Naked exposure and humiliation.
- A deliberate spectacle meant to crush not only the victim but the hopes of anyone who might think of resisting Rome.
Add to that Jesus’ cry from the cross:
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?”
That is a horror moment.
It is the horror of abandonment: not just physical pain, but the sense of being cut off from God Himself.
When I read, on air, from Bahá’u’lláh’s Fire Tablet—“the hearts of the sincere are consumed in the fire of separation… the bodies of Thy chosen ones lie quivering on distant sands”—I was struck by how closely that language matches the horror of the cross.
Different tradition, same reality: separation from God is hell.
Horror films that honestly grapple with suffering, abandonment, and the apparent triumph of evil can, paradoxically, prepare us to see the suffering of God’s faithful, and its ultimate symbol the cross afresh—not as a tame religious symbol, but as the place where the worst horrors of the world converge.
The difference, of course, is that in Scripture the horror is not the final word:
- The cross is answered by resurrection.
- The cry of abandonment is answered by vindication.
- The nightmare becomes, in ways we can only begin to understand, the site of cosmic victory.
If we flatten all of that into a neat slogan and refuse ever to face horror—in Scripture or in art—we risk turning the cross itself into something sentimental.
3. Horror Exposes Loneliness and Separation from God
One of the more unexpected points of resonance in our conversation came when Josh talked about the slasher subgenre.
These are the films—Friday the 13th, Halloween, and countless imitators—where a killer stalks and picks off victims one by one. At their worst, these movies can be exploitative and cheap. But Josh made a deeper observation:
Beneath the surface, slashers often encode a fear of being alone.
The classic pattern:
- The group is gradually separated.
- The lone character wanders dark hallways or empty woods.
- No one hears their cries. Help is nowhere in sight.
That terror of isolation is not foreign to Scripture. It’s there from the beginning.
In Genesis 3:
- Adam and Eve disobey.
- They hide from God among the trees.
- God asks, “Where are you?”
- Then that devastating question: “Who told you that you were naked?”
God is not surprised by their physical nakedness; He created them that way. The question is: Who taught you to be ashamed of what I made? Who whispered that you must hide from Me and from each other?
Separation begins as shame. It leads to hiding. It deepens into alienation—both from God and from fellow humans.
Multiply that out, and you get the kind of existential loneliness reflected in modern horror: the sense that I am cut off, unseen, and doomed to face the darkness alone.
In Fear Not, Josh argues that the theological root of all human loneliness is precisely this separation from God. The slasher’s isolated victim is a dark, exaggerated picture of what it feels like to be severed from communion.
Which brings us to a very different kind of horror film: The Babadook (2014).
It’s a story about:
- A widowed mother overwhelmed by grief and the demands of a very difficult child.
- A creepy picture book figure—the “Babadook”—who begins to haunt their home.
- A psychological and spiritual unraveling that feels, at times, like pure nightmare.
But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the “monster” is closely tied to the mother’s buried grief, rage, and exhaustion. The horror is not coming from an arbitrary “evil out there” so much as from the un-faced pain within.
Without spoiling the ending, the film arrives at an unexpectedly grace-filled place—a place where the monster is not destroyed but faced, acknowledged, and contained.
It becomes, as Josh put it, “an example of how far the love of God goes for us when we are lost.”
That is a very different vision from “fear of being alone forever.” It is a picture of a love willing to enter our isolated, haunted places and sit with us there.
Horror, in this light, becomes a dark mirror for the loneliness of fallen humanity—and sometimes, unexpectedly, a pointer toward a Love that will not abandon us, even when we feel monstrous.
4. Cheap Moralism vs. Costly Grace
If the church of my youth tended to demonize horror as inherently satanic, horror has its own bad theology.
One of the most common patterns in slasher films is what Josh calls the “sex as death” motif:
- Teenagers fool around.
- The camera lingers pruriently.
- Then the killer appears, and judgment falls.
- The sexually active die; the “pure” final girl survives.
It’s a kind of inverted, secular Puritanism. Any sexual expression triggers punishment. Desire is always fatal.
That may look “moral,” but it’s actually a form of cheap legalism:
- No context.
- No nuance.
- No real understanding of covenant, love, or human weakness.
- Just “you did X, therefore you must die.”
Sadly, this mirrors some of the worst tendencies in Christian subcultures, where a handful of verses are ripped from context and wielded as blunt weapons, with no sense of the larger redemptive arc.
Contrast that kind of horror with the stories we mentioned earlier:
- The Babadook leading toward grace and containment rather than annihilation.
- The Sixth Sense (another film Josh highlights) leading toward recognition, reconciliation, and a kind of quiet redemption for multiple characters.
In The Sixth Sense:
- A boy who “sees dead people” lives in constant fear.
- A therapist (Bruce Willis) tries to help him, unaware of how much unfinished business he himself carries.
- The “twist”—famous enough not to spoil here—recasts everything you’ve seen in a new, poignant light.
What looked like a straightforward ghost story becomes a narrative about:
- Misperception.
- Failed vocation.
- The longing to make things right.
- The possibility of healing, even after death.
That is a very different moral universe from “sin, then slaughter.”
As Christians, we should be wary of both forms of cheapness:
- Cheap thrills: violence or shock for its own sake, with no attempt to grapple with truth.
- Cheap moralism: punishment without genuine engagement with the complexity of sin, repentance, and grace.
Our own Scriptures refuse both.
- They show us horror in unsparing detail.
- They also give us stories that flip the script of easy condemnation.
As I mentioned to Josh, I’m increasingly convinced that Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son is, in many ways, a retelling of the Cain and Abel story:
- Cain becomes the prodigal who leaves the Father and squanders his inheritance.
- Abel becomes the jealous “good son” standing outside the party.
- And the Father’s response is to go out to both sons—refusing vigilante justice and insisting: “Everything I have is yours.”
That kind of re-reading takes a horror-origin story and fills it with the possibility of redemption, even for the “bad brother.”
We need that same willingness to see beyond easy retribution in our engagement with horror—and with each other.
Not a Command, But an Invitation
None of this means every Christian “should” watch horror. Some should not. Trauma histories, personal sensitivities, and seasons of life all matter.
But for those who are already watching—and then feeling guilty, or hiding it, or afraid their interest is incompatible with faith—it’s important to say:
You do not have to be afraid of your desire to look honestly at fear, evil, and suffering.
And while I’m sure there is a real danger in seeing too much horror, perhaps there is an equal danger if we refuse to see it at all, and then try to preach a gospel of comfort that never goes down into the grave.
The Bible does not do that.
The cross does not do that.
The God who meets Cain in his exile, who hears Abel’s blood, who enters our flesh and hangs on a Roman cross, is not afraid of horror.
And if we are truly created in the image of that God, then we need not be, either.
We may still choose to avert our eyes at times, and that can be wise. But we need not live in terror of the genre itself, or of the questions it raises.
For some of us, in God’s providence, those questions may even become a path—strange, dark, and narrow—toward deeper honesty, deeper dependence, and a deeper awe at the grace that goes all the way down.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
If this exploration of fear, faith, and horror piqued your interest, next week we’ll turn to another contested frontier: religion and public life. I’ll be joined by historian and religion journalist Mark Silk, who has spent decades at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. We’ll talk about the rise of the religious right, our current “culture war on everything,” and whether America is moving toward greater openness to religious diversity—or quietly sliding back into older patterns of fear and exclusion. If you’ve ever wondered how people of faith can engage public life without succumbing to tribalism, you’ll want to be there.
