One of the deepest realizations I came away with from my conversation with Kutter Callaway is that the Bible is far more horrifying than many of us have been trained to admit.
Not lurid. Not sensational for its own sake. But horrifying in the old, serious sense: it does not look away.
It does not look away from blood.
It does not look away from shame.
It does not look away from possession, plague, betrayal, massacre, torture, humiliation, empire, or death.
It does not look away from what happens when words are bent, desire is disordered, fear is misdirected, and whole peoples surrender themselves to lies.
And perhaps that is why such stories seized me so powerfully as a child.
They were raw because life was raw. They were terrifying because the world was terrifying. They were believable because they did not speak in the polished tones of people who are trying to keep religion respectable. They spoke like people who knew that evil is not a metaphor. It is an intrusion, a distortion, a devouring thing.
Kutter helped me see that more clearly.
He was speaking as a theologian of culture, as a reader of horror, as someone attentive to the way stories reveal what a civilization fears, denies, and desires. But what emerged in our exchange was not really an argument for horror as entertainment. It was something far more unsettling. It was an account of how horror works because Scripture already knows how horror works.
The pattern begins in a garden.
It ends with a dragon.
And the path between them is paved with words.
It begins with a voice that does not create, only twists
The serpent in Eden has no world of his own to offer.
That is the first thing to notice.
He does not create light. He does not create fruit. He does not create freedom. He does not create man or woman or garden or law or love. He has no original kingdom. He can only enter what God has made and begin to handle the Word of God falsely.
“Did God really say?”
That question is not curiosity. It is corruption.
The serpent’s power is not brute force at first. It is hermeneutical. He handles the word maliciously. He quotes by distortion. He frames by insinuation. He rearranges emphasis. He introduces suspicion. He does not deny reality outright. He bends it just enough that desire begins to drift and fear begins to turn.
That is how horror starts.
Not usually with the dragon.
With the whisper.
Not with chains.
With interpretation.
Not with open rebellion.
With spun language.
Kutter put this in terms of fear and desire. Human beings do not first fall because they suddenly become monstrous. They fall because fear is misdirected. Desire is misdirected. Trust is misdirected. The one thing they should fear rightly—God—they cease to trust. And all at once, other objects flood in to claim authority: the fruit, the promise, the self, the other voice.
Then comes the first unmistakable symptom of delusion:
“They knew they were naked.”
They had always been naked.
What changed was not their skin. It was their consciousness. Shame entered through false interpretation. The world had not become unsafe because of God. It had become unsafe because they believed the wrong word about God, themselves, and reality.
That is the first horror.
To become ashamed in a world once received as gift.
To begin hiding from the One who made you.
To distrust the source of life.
To feel exposed and enslaved where once you stood in freedom.
And all of it begins with manipulated speech.
The Bible is not sanitized because evil is not sanitized
One reason Kutter’s work on horror matters is that it helps recover something many religious people spend years avoiding: Scripture itself is full of scenes we would censor if they appeared anywhere else.
The crucifixion alone should end the pretense that biblical faith is built on genteel sentiment. Roman torture, public humiliation, nakedness, exposed flesh, blood, mockery, suffocation, abandonment. It is body horror, political horror, psychological horror, spiritual horror. And Christians dare to call the day Good Friday not because the horror is unreal, but because it is so real that redemption had to go through it rather than around it.
The same is true all through the text.
Passover is deliverance, yes—but by way of death moving through the night.
Judges is almost unbearable at points.
Revelation is not decorative symbolism but a torrent of beasts, bowls, plagues, wars, desecration, and cosmic judgment.
Even the nativity stands in the long shadow of Herod’s slaughter.
The Bible does not preserve these things because God delights in terror. It preserves them because God does not lie about what evil does.
And that may be one reason horror stories, when they are doing serious work, still grip modern people. They refuse denial. Kutter called horror a genre of non-denial. That phrase has stayed with me because it helps explain why polite religion so often loses its audience. If religion becomes too tidy, too euphemistic, too anxious to reassure, it begins to sound less true than the nightmares people carry in their bones.
Children are perceptive, and as they grow up they learn. People know more than they say.
They know adults are often confused.
They know institutions fail.
They know safety can vanish.
They know something is wrong long before they have doctrine for it.
Raw stories reach us all because raw stories acknowledge that knowledge.
The serpent grows by being believed
A serpent by itself is limited.
It whispers. It tempts. It deceives. But it does not yet rule.
Its scaling requires human cooperation.
This was one of the strongest currents beneath my conversation with Kutter, especially as we discussed Stranger Things and the way its horror is not simply an invasion from outside but an emergence from within a civilization. The monster is incubated by institutions. Governments, laboratories, schools, families, systems of secrecy and power—all are implicated. The children encounter the horror, but the adults have been feeding it.
That is not merely a clever plot device. It is a theological pattern.
The serpent becomes a dragon by being obeyed at scale.
A lie believed by one person wounds a life.
A lie believed by millions becomes an atmosphere.
A fear manipulated in one soul becomes, under the right incentives, a social order.
A twisted handling of the Word becomes ideology.
Ideology becomes institution.
Institution becomes principality.
And principality, if fed long enough, looks an awful lot like a dragon.
This is how evil metastasizes.
It begins as exegesis gone rotten. It passes through desire into allegiance. It organizes shame. It recruits fear. It teaches people to call bondage freedom and submission sovereignty. It convinces them that the very source of life is their oppressor, while the thing draining them is their liberator.
And then something terrible happens.
Confused people begin voluntarily abdicating their sovereignty.
They hand over judgment.
They hand over language.
They hand over conscience.
They hand over their power to name reality.
They become dependent on interpreters who speak with serpentine skill.
They repeat phrases they did not originate.
They fear what they are told to fear.
They desire what they are trained to desire.
They accuse whom they are instructed to accuse.
By then, the dragon scarcely needs chains.
Its subjects are doing the work themselves.
Today’s monsters are made by all of us
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein belongs to a world in which the monster can still be imagined as the product of one transgressive genius.
That is not our world anymore.
Kutter’s reading of Stranger Things is useful here because it points to something more contemporary and more chilling: today’s monsters are often not created by one man in a lab but by the whole fabric of civilization.
They arise out of complex systems.
They emerge from incentives.
They feed on secrecy, fear, prestige, appetite, tribalism, and the lust for control.
No single person may intend the full monstrosity.
Yet many participate in its birth.
That is why the biblical language of powers and principalities remains so potent. There are realities that exceed any one actor. Spirits of institutions. Emergent patterns of domination. Collective delusions with downward force. Organizations whose individuals seem ordinary enough in isolation, but whose assembled logic becomes cruel, coercive, and nearly self-protective.
The dragon is not only personal evil enlarged. It is social evil animated.
And because it is social, modern people are often more willing to trust it. It arrives clothed in process, expertise, urgency, consensus, safety, morality, progress, necessity. It asks not usually for worship in explicit terms, but for compliance, then for repetition, then for allegiance. Forehead and hand. Thought and action.
It does not always conquer by terror first.
Often it conquers by narration.
We are frightened because the monster is plausible
There is a reason some horrors endure and others do not.
The ones that stay with us are not merely grotesque. They are believable.
That is why I would sharpen one point this way: horror does not merely reveal the diseases of civilization as though standing outside them. Horror emerges from civilization because it is made of the material civilization itself has repressed. Its monsters are effective when they mirror back what the subconscious already knows.
We are scared because we suspect the thing could happen.
Or has happened.
Or is happening now under another name.
A civilization that breeds alienation imagines parasitic entities and empty doubles.
A civilization that worships technique imagines creations it cannot govern.
A civilization that no longer trusts family, school, government, or church begins telling stories in which the adults are compromised and the children see more clearly.
A civilization addicted to managed perception produces monsters who invade through mediation, language, and suggestion.
The Germans have a word for certain ailments of advanced society: Zivilisationskrankheiten—diseases of civilization. Usually the term points to bodily disorders shaped by modern life. But our age may be forcing a wider application. What if advanced civilizations also generate spiritual and psychological pathologies native to their own structure? Not merely private mental illness, but ambient distortion—anxiety systems, fear contagions, dependency on managed narratives, disintegrating trust, escalating shame, reflexive accusation, and the inability to tell the difference between authority and manipulation?
Then horror is not random. It is the subconscious sounding an alarm.
And the reason it frightens us is that we recognize the pattern before we can articulate it.
The naked crowd and the fed dragon
Every dragon has a diet.
What feeds it?
Words handled falsely.
Fear directed wrongly.
Shame unhealed.
Truth severed from trust.
Religious language weaponized for power.
Civilizational systems built on distortion.
And above all, people trained to surrender their God-given vocation to discern.
That is the great inversion.
Human beings were made to exercise dominion under God—to tend the garden, name what is before them, keep watch, resist disorder, remain in truthful relation to the Creator. But once they trust the serpent’s reading of reality over God’s own Word, they cease exercising dominion and begin surrendering it. Naked and ashamed, they seek coverings of their own manufacture. They fear one another. They hide. They blame. They gather into systems of mutual concealment. Eventually those systems harden into powers strong enough to dominate even those who made them.
The crowd becomes both victim and midwife.
This is horror in the deepest biblical sense: not merely that evil attacks us, but that we help nourish what devours us.
The antidote is nearer than the whisper
If this is the horror story, what is the antidote?
Not denial.
Not pretending the serpent is harmless or the dragon symbolic only.
Not polished religion that rushes past terror into cliché.
Not panic.
Not ceding interpretation to whichever voice speaks most confidently.
The antidote is nearer, older, and more demanding.
Trust the Word of God.
Not as slogan.
Not as manipulated fragment.
Not as tribal ammunition.
Not as sanctified spin.
But as Word rightly heard, rightly feared, rightly loved, and rightly obeyed.
That means learning again to fear God above all lesser terrors. Kutter made this point powerfully: perhaps fear itself is not the problem. Misdirected fear is. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because it restores proportion. It breaks enchantment. It exposes lesser powers by placing them beneath the only rightful authority.
To fear God rightly is to stop fearing the serpent’s interpretations as final.
It is to refuse dragon food.
It is to recover the capacity to name shame without submitting to it.
It is to resist powers that gain force by keeping neighbors at enmity.
It is to remember that the Word was not merely spoken but made flesh—and that the flesh was broken publicly, horribly, truthfully, without denial.
The Bible’s answer to horror is not that horror is unreal.
It is that horror does not get the last word.
But neither does false innocence.
The way out is through truth. Through discernment. Through submission that restores sovereignty rather than destroys it. Through the kind of trust that does not make us less human, but free.
Because this is the paradox at the heart of the whole story: when we submit to God, we do not lose ourselves. We recover ourselves. When we trust His Word, we do not become naked and ashamed. We become seen and covered. When we refuse the serpent’s spin, we do not become passive. We regain dominion.
And when enough people do that, dragons starve.
Closing thought
What Kutter Callaway helped me see more clearly is that horror is not alien to Scripture. Scripture is the oldest and truest horror story many of us have ever known—not because it glorifies darkness, but because it refuses to lie about it.
The serpent still speaks by twisting the word.
The dragon still feeds on fear, shame, and surrendered judgment.
Civilizations still breed monsters when enough people outsource their discernment and hand over their power to false interpreters.
But the antidote has not changed.
Trust the Word of God.
Fear rightly.
Name evil without worshiping it.
Refuse the lie before it becomes atmosphere.
And remember that the God who does not sanitize horror is also the God who enters it, endures it, and overcomes it.
That is not a child’s story cleaned up for church.
It is raw.
It is real.
And it is still our only hope.
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, the conversation continues in two directions that connect naturally with this question of formation, fear, and the stories that shape the soul.
On Sunday, September 27 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Chase Replogle—author, pastor, and host of the Pastor Writer Podcast—about discipleship, identity, and the instincts that shape the way we live. Drawing from scripture, history, and the stories that help us understand ourselves, we’ll explore masculinity, personal formation, and how wisdom, compassion, and a more faithful way of living are cultivated.
Then on Tuesday, September 29 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Greg Koukl—author, apologist, and founder of Stand to Reason—to discuss how Christians can engage difficult questions about faith and navigate conversations about truth, morality, and belief with confidence. From apologetics and clear thinking to communicating Christian convictions with clarity, wisdom, and grace, it should be a rich and timely exchange.
