Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen

by Douglas E. Cowan

Sacred Terror examines the religious elements lurking in horror films. It answers a simple but profound When there are so many other scary things around, why is religion so often used to tell a scary story? In this lucid, provocative book, Douglas Cowan argues that horror films are opportune vehicles for externalizing the fears that lie inside our religious of evil; of the flesh; of sacred places; of a change in the sacred order; of the supernatural gone out of control; of death, dying badly, or not remaining dead; of fanaticism; and of the power--and the powerlessness--of religion.

Genres: Film, Horror, Nonfiction, Pop Culture, Religion

325 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn to this because of the cover art! I think it's interesting to explore how horror movies reflect the fears of a given culture and, also, that culture's feelings toward religion; the author's conclusion is that there's ambivalence regarding the power of religion to mitigate our fears. Downside is the academic prose that can be a bit much at times.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I actually read the year that it came out, but before I'd started a Goodreads account. I liked it so much the first time around I thought that I would read it again. In the intervening years I've read quite a few books on horror movies, so Cowan's treatment seemed less fresh this time around, but it was still well worth a second reading.

Covering a variety of fears (sociophobias) Cowan, as a sociologist, looks at the needs such movies meet on a social level. He relates these fears to religious developments and theological positions. There is some room for disagreement here, but overall he manages to handle interesting movies in a thoughtful way. As I've noted before, anyone who watches horror movies will have her or his own list of favorites. Both times I read this book I came away with a list of films that I wanted to see. That's a sign of a pretty successful monograph, I think.

This book is highly recommended by me. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it. Most recently: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Jaybird Rex]

While a horror connoisseur can appreciate the theories in a book like this, watching the movies themselves is infinitely more enjoyable. Unfortunately, I found little here that I hadn't already considered on my own. Also sad, the name-dropping of titles (as examples for every point made) didn’t expose me to any new horrors -- I've seen every bloody title the book mentioned! Maybe I've just been watching this filthy genre for too long, but I would really have appreciated more foreign titles and some deeper digging. As far as religion in horror, this is fine for an introduction, but you need to get into the video store dust and bones for a lot of other takes on the subject. Guess that's up to you, lucky explorer.

All of the above said, Cowan's book is more readable than some of the other horror "explanation" books out there. I'd recommend it particularly to Christians seeking a fresh angle on their faith.

[Mike Duran · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only real gripe is the author's deconstruction of the "sacred" throughout this work. Fear is portrayed as more of a social phenomenon (sociaphobia) and religious fear is less the response to Someone truly holy or something Absolutely Moral or Evil, and more a byproduct of cultural mores and folkish whimsy. Other than that, there's lots of interesting insights into horror cinema and its colorful, often freaky, intersections with religion. Four out of five stars.

[Robert Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It should be obvious to anyone who has paid any attention to horror stories--whether written or filmed--that horror is a good vehicle for religious symbolism (or, perhaps, that religion is a good vehicle for horror). Indeed, the central thesis of this book is that religion underlies more of the horror genre than we often give it credit for. The author builds that case through an extensive survey of the use of religious symbolism (sometimes more overt than others) in both better- and lesser-known horror films.

The reader interested in the intersection between religion and horror would do well to add this to his or her library. However, the reader should also be forewarned that the author's treatment of his subject is rather dense. He spends so much time documenting the evidence for his thesis that he occasionally forgets to remind the reader where his argument is going. The result is a book that feels more like disconnected documentary explorations of religious iconography in the horror genre than a single coherent argument.

Further, much of the information the author presents will come as no particular surprise to anyone. For example, he spends quite a few pages discussing the critical and popular response to classic films like The Exorcist--a fascinating tale, to be sure, but one likely familiar to students of both horror and religion. That's not to say the author is wrong to include such case studies. They are absolutely relevant to his point. But readers looking for new information will occasionally feel like the book is telling them--however eloquently--something they already know.

On the other hand, when the author does break some new ground, it's fascinating ground indeed. The astute reader will learn not only of a few new films to watch and a few interesting points of theological argument, but indeed, of some novel connections between even familiar films and religious thought. Are all of the arguments convincing? Far from it, but they're something perhaps more important when it comes to artistic criticism: they're interesting.

While the book doesn't quite go far enough into explaining what aspects of the psychology of religion *really* make it so suitable to exploration (or perhaps exploitation) in the horror genre, the book does an excellent job of at least laying out what we already know of the psychology of religion within the genre's context. The end result is a book that's fascinating to people interested in both horror and religion, and perhaps even those interested only in one or the other but curious about why they seem to have such a connection.

[Carlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cowan posits that only what a culture finds significant can inspire the fear at the heart of any horror movie. He thus seeks to use the large collection of horror films made since the beginning of cinema to analyze what it says about the religious beliefs of the American society. He breaks the films in broad categories based on how they deal with subjects such as sacred spaces, death, the unseen order of the universe and evil. In each category he explores films, both popular and niche, for the commonalities that can be extracted from them. Although clearly well research, and certainly interesting in parts, the book too often felt unnecessarily wordy and intermittently dwelling on less relevant aspects such as how the film was received by movie critics.

[Andrew Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cowan's book is an analysis of the cultural power exerted by horror films as they're received in a society markedly ambivalent about the religious elements that these films seek to exploit. In other words, how does our fear of the Other and the unknown exploited by religion in turn become exploited by horror cinema? Cowan examines most of the high points of horror cinema to find the thematic correspondences that unite fear of God and fear of the darkness. He argues his thesis very well and with any number of relevant examples from horror film history. The majority of his examples are very well-known and there's a delight in recognizing the deeper themes of films that are seen as nothing more than supernatural thrillers. Cowan takes each film and related theme seriously enough to show the religious fear of the unknown that each film exploits. He restricts his approach to the realm of psychology and leaves the deeper historical and religious analyses to the many excellent books cited in his well-researched bibliography. While this is more like an intermediate text for the initiated, Cowan is very accessible and I would offer few hesitations for offering the book as an introduction. If anything, Cowan asks enough questions and provides deep enough analysis to set one on the way to further thinking and viewing.

[Kate Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full critical review in the Anglican Theological Review. But a summary review (from someone who is not a fan of horror but is a huge fan of theology & culture):

Cowan recognizes that horror films draw on our deepest fears, and pairs this fact with the observation that religious imagery is often used, leading to his question: Why do horror and religion intersect?

He argues that horror films reveal USAmericans deep ambivalence around religion: on the one hand, we are compelled by the mysteries; on the other, we are fearful that there may be more going on than we understand. This is equally true for Christianity (graveyards, vampires fought with crosses, and Catholic exorcisms) as Voodou (zombies) and Egyptian religion (mummies). Cowan offers six primal fears, then selects exemplary films to discuss each one.

I'd recommend to academic audiences, especially to those interested in theology and culture, broader culture studies, movements of secularization and rationalization, film studies, and social psychology.

The question I was left with that Cowan doesn't address: How does horror resolve our anxieties or transform our fears? Perhaps they don't. Films often re-provoke anxieties in the final scenes to establish room for a sequel, and to continue the play on our collective fears. Resolving those anxieties, I suspect, is the work of engaging true religion.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cowan's overview of horror and religion is interesting, if banal. He has an interesting concept in the "sociophobics of horror" and its application to looking at how filmmakers and viewers alike engage the religious and supernatural as a way of dealing with our complicated feelings about both society and religion. But the book is also a a lot of description before succinct analysis, and the examples that Cowan uses are not employed systematically at all. The films that he looks at are basically so wide-ranging, and are often B-movies or cult classics, that they feel cherry-picked and obvious to support his cause rather than trying to use a specific net or qualified category of films to examine certain ideas. I recognize that it's hard to do anything like what he's attempting in this book with any kind of specificity without having to cover almost everything in a genre, but since he doesn't discuss this difficulty at any point in the book it ends up feeling like a bizarre omission or lack to the text rather than an acknowledged deficiency that can be accounted and adjusted for. There are some glimmers of interest and insight, and the book is certainly fun all the way through, but with some problems.

[Nolan Croce]

Anyone interested in the intersection of horror movies and Christianity need to read this book.