The religious horror film is often plays upon binary morality stories: the struggle of good against evil, innocence against experience, and aesthetically - light vs. dark. These films are related to the ghost films in their obsession with the metaphysical realm, but differ in that morality plays a decisive role, generally.
How is a dialectical materialist to approach such films? William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist and avowed agnostic, offers a relevant answer in an interview with London's Time Out Magazine:
Even those of us who call ourselves atheists, or think that the whole thing is rubbish, are curious about the mystery of faith. Is there anything to this stuff? “The Exorcist” offers one possible position. While I’m not Catholic, I’m overwhelmed by the idea that a 32-year-old man in a very small part of the world, who never left one word written in his own hand, has affected the lives of trillions of people. I look at the Catholic Church and I see these guys in these far-out costumes with all this gold, and I wonder what it has to do with this young man who went among the people, wore a simple robe and sandals, and healed the sick. But I also wonder how millions of people were willing to give their lives for their belief. And because I wonder, I’m curious about something like “The Exorcist”, which attributes that power to a true belief.’
Additionally, a scientific approach to religiosity has often been the subject of anthropological inquiry. In the 2013 film the Borderlands an a/v technician, known as Gray, assigned to debunk a supposed miracle asks a priest, known only as Deacon, assigned to the same task about paganism vs. Christianity. The conversation proceeds thusly:
Gray: The people that came before your lot, right...
Deacon: The pagans.
Gray: Yeah, the pagans or Druids or whatever, the Aztecs. The believed in stuff that was real. You know, they had the moon, the sea, the stars the sun. They had stuff, they worshiped stuff.
Deacon: They didn't know any better. They were just worshiping what was in front of them.
Gray: No they worshiped what was there, physically there. Whereas you are choosing to believe and worship the great 'what if.'
Deacon: And your point is...?
Gray: My point is, if there was going to be a fight between something that was there and something that wasn't there, I know what side I'd bet on.
Many religious horror films play upon the antagonism between the brutal survivalism of nature and the civilized morality of humanity. The Lars von Trier film Antichrist certainly plays upon these traditional concepts of the vulnerable nature of women, animals and nature to the base amorality of Satan.
Additionally, one can see such themes manifest when Werner Herzog discusses his departure from the philosophy of peace and harmony in nature of his subject, Timothy Treadwell, in Grizzly Man. There he describes nature as violence and chaos and points to the evidence of grizzlies eating their young for sustenance, out of desperation, as proof of this paradigm.
Anarchist zoologist Peotyr Kropotkin, however, offers an alternative view of the Darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" in his magnum opus Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. There he exclaims:
Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual Support. In the great struggle for life for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.
In order to for a materialist to exclaim a set of universal ethics, the Judeo-Christian dualism of flesh vs. spirit, or to put it non-theisticly, civilization vs. nature, must be rejected. Additionally, the doctrine of individualism vs. collectivism plays into this binary.
The lesson of religious horror is that the good are punished, despite doing no wrong. In this sense, even fundamentalist torture-films like Mel Gibson's evangelical, sycophantic film the Passion of the Christ, can be watched with a subversive, Christian-atheist lens. That god had forsaken Christ (Matt. 27:46) in his hour of torment is proof either that he does not exist, or that he is not all loving.
The Paranormal Activity series, for example, focuses on the descendants of witches who were tortured by a demon, known only as Toby, which their matriarchal ancestor had promised the first-born male child in their lineage to. The films do examine the non-nuclear/traditional aspects of the successive generations' families, but it is clear that they are not intentional evil-doers. Apart from innocent fornication and divorce, they are without sin. They are middle class and live relatively comfortable lives, until Toby comes into the picture. Perhaps this too harkens back to Marx and Engle's "spectre of communism", from the Manifesto. The female descendants are able to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life only at the price of selling their first male progeny to Toby. The prophetic predictions of Marx and Engle's regarding "the spectre of communism" wreaking revenge upon the petite bourgeoisie who had betrayed the proletariat during the French Revolution and thus coming true, one way or another.
Finally, religious horror fascinates us because religiosity is one of the greatest examples of the human imagination at work. We can invent gods and angels to protect us, but we can also invent demons and witches to betray and torture us. Freud had this to say about how the demonology of the Puritans served the interests of the moralistic culture in his time and space:
Its insistence on the evil in man’s nature, and in particular on the sexual root of that evil, suited the New England temperament well which had been shaped by a similar Puritan emphasis. In fact, to hear Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the one and two-year-old is to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons on infant damnation.
Interestingly enough, Freud was heavily influenced by fellow German writer Goethe, and especially Faust in which the title character makes a pact with the demon Mephistophiles, in order to woo his loved one. Freud would have insisted that so-called Satanic impulses result from the Id - the infantile aspect of consciousness. He thus explained the infantile nature of what theists know as evil:
This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any high ethical standard from children.
Freud wrote of the ultimate, real-life ghoul, Adolf Hitler:
The dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was infantilism. It explains the most prominent as well as the strangest of his characteristics and actions. The frequently awesome consistency of his thoughts and behaviour must be seen in conjunction with the stupendous force of his rage, which reduced field marshals to trembling nonentities. If at the age of fifty he built the Danube bridge in Linz down to the last detail exactly as he had designed it at the age of fifteen before the eyes of his astonished boyhood friend, this was not a mark of consistency in a mature man, one who has learned and pondered, criticized and been criticized, but the stubbornness of the child who is aware of nothing except himself and his mental image and to whom time means nothing because childishness has not been broken and forced into the sober give-and-take of the adult world. Hitler’s rage was the uncontrollable fury of the child who bangs the chair because the chair refuses to do as it is told; his dreaded harshness, which nonchalantly sent millions of people to their death, was much closer to the rambling imaginings of a boy than to the iron grasp of a man ..
Here Freud explains how the concept of sin resulted in the creation of the super-ego:
Here too is found the explanation of Original Sin ... It is not our concern to discuss the theological conception here, but psychoanalysis has thrown considerable light on what underlies the conception, The sense of sin comes, we have seen, from the personalisation of the Super-ego at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, by which the wish to destroy the father and possess the mother are mastered in the developing infant. If these wishes had not existed there would have been no need to form the Super-ego and so develop a moral conscience. Thus the precondition of getting a knowledge of good and evil at all is that we have sinned psychologically. A sense of guilt is inherent in our make-up. The original sin is the complex of wishes in the Oedipus Complex which we develop before we have a moral sense, but which remain, in varying degrees of fixation after we have developed that moral sense in dealing with them as dangerous wishes.
Certainly, the fear invoked by demonic stories and paradoxically the adrenergic elation from viewing such Satanic horror films can be said to be, in the case of the latter, an activation of the ethical super-ego and in the case of the former, the cognitive dissonance that arises from the activation of our infantile id, which enjoys the macabre, the evil, the sadistic and the taboo.
How is a dialectical materialist to approach such films? William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist and avowed agnostic, offers a relevant answer in an interview with London's Time Out Magazine:
Even those of us who call ourselves atheists, or think that the whole thing is rubbish, are curious about the mystery of faith. Is there anything to this stuff? “The Exorcist” offers one possible position. While I’m not Catholic, I’m overwhelmed by the idea that a 32-year-old man in a very small part of the world, who never left one word written in his own hand, has affected the lives of trillions of people. I look at the Catholic Church and I see these guys in these far-out costumes with all this gold, and I wonder what it has to do with this young man who went among the people, wore a simple robe and sandals, and healed the sick. But I also wonder how millions of people were willing to give their lives for their belief. And because I wonder, I’m curious about something like “The Exorcist”, which attributes that power to a true belief.’
Additionally, a scientific approach to religiosity has often been the subject of anthropological inquiry. In the 2013 film the Borderlands an a/v technician, known as Gray, assigned to debunk a supposed miracle asks a priest, known only as Deacon, assigned to the same task about paganism vs. Christianity. The conversation proceeds thusly:
Gray: The people that came before your lot, right...
Deacon: The pagans.
Gray: Yeah, the pagans or Druids or whatever, the Aztecs. The believed in stuff that was real. You know, they had the moon, the sea, the stars the sun. They had stuff, they worshiped stuff.
Deacon: They didn't know any better. They were just worshiping what was in front of them.
Gray: No they worshiped what was there, physically there. Whereas you are choosing to believe and worship the great 'what if.'
Deacon: And your point is...?
Gray: My point is, if there was going to be a fight between something that was there and something that wasn't there, I know what side I'd bet on.
Many religious horror films play upon the antagonism between the brutal survivalism of nature and the civilized morality of humanity. The Lars von Trier film Antichrist certainly plays upon these traditional concepts of the vulnerable nature of women, animals and nature to the base amorality of Satan.
Additionally, one can see such themes manifest when Werner Herzog discusses his departure from the philosophy of peace and harmony in nature of his subject, Timothy Treadwell, in Grizzly Man. There he describes nature as violence and chaos and points to the evidence of grizzlies eating their young for sustenance, out of desperation, as proof of this paradigm.
Anarchist zoologist Peotyr Kropotkin, however, offers an alternative view of the Darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" in his magnum opus Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. There he exclaims:
Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual Support. In the great struggle for life for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.
In order to for a materialist to exclaim a set of universal ethics, the Judeo-Christian dualism of flesh vs. spirit, or to put it non-theisticly, civilization vs. nature, must be rejected. Additionally, the doctrine of individualism vs. collectivism plays into this binary.
The lesson of religious horror is that the good are punished, despite doing no wrong. In this sense, even fundamentalist torture-films like Mel Gibson's evangelical, sycophantic film the Passion of the Christ, can be watched with a subversive, Christian-atheist lens. That god had forsaken Christ (Matt. 27:46) in his hour of torment is proof either that he does not exist, or that he is not all loving.
The Paranormal Activity series, for example, focuses on the descendants of witches who were tortured by a demon, known only as Toby, which their matriarchal ancestor had promised the first-born male child in their lineage to. The films do examine the non-nuclear/traditional aspects of the successive generations' families, but it is clear that they are not intentional evil-doers. Apart from innocent fornication and divorce, they are without sin. They are middle class and live relatively comfortable lives, until Toby comes into the picture. Perhaps this too harkens back to Marx and Engle's "spectre of communism", from the Manifesto. The female descendants are able to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life only at the price of selling their first male progeny to Toby. The prophetic predictions of Marx and Engle's regarding "the spectre of communism" wreaking revenge upon the petite bourgeoisie who had betrayed the proletariat during the French Revolution and thus coming true, one way or another.
Finally, religious horror fascinates us because religiosity is one of the greatest examples of the human imagination at work. We can invent gods and angels to protect us, but we can also invent demons and witches to betray and torture us. Freud had this to say about how the demonology of the Puritans served the interests of the moralistic culture in his time and space:
Its insistence on the evil in man’s nature, and in particular on the sexual root of that evil, suited the New England temperament well which had been shaped by a similar Puritan emphasis. In fact, to hear Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the one and two-year-old is to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons on infant damnation.
Interestingly enough, Freud was heavily influenced by fellow German writer Goethe, and especially Faust in which the title character makes a pact with the demon Mephistophiles, in order to woo his loved one. Freud would have insisted that so-called Satanic impulses result from the Id - the infantile aspect of consciousness. He thus explained the infantile nature of what theists know as evil:
This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any high ethical standard from children.
Freud wrote of the ultimate, real-life ghoul, Adolf Hitler:
The dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was infantilism. It explains the most prominent as well as the strangest of his characteristics and actions. The frequently awesome consistency of his thoughts and behaviour must be seen in conjunction with the stupendous force of his rage, which reduced field marshals to trembling nonentities. If at the age of fifty he built the Danube bridge in Linz down to the last detail exactly as he had designed it at the age of fifteen before the eyes of his astonished boyhood friend, this was not a mark of consistency in a mature man, one who has learned and pondered, criticized and been criticized, but the stubbornness of the child who is aware of nothing except himself and his mental image and to whom time means nothing because childishness has not been broken and forced into the sober give-and-take of the adult world. Hitler’s rage was the uncontrollable fury of the child who bangs the chair because the chair refuses to do as it is told; his dreaded harshness, which nonchalantly sent millions of people to their death, was much closer to the rambling imaginings of a boy than to the iron grasp of a man ..
Here Freud explains how the concept of sin resulted in the creation of the super-ego:
Here too is found the explanation of Original Sin ... It is not our concern to discuss the theological conception here, but psychoanalysis has thrown considerable light on what underlies the conception, The sense of sin comes, we have seen, from the personalisation of the Super-ego at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, by which the wish to destroy the father and possess the mother are mastered in the developing infant. If these wishes had not existed there would have been no need to form the Super-ego and so develop a moral conscience. Thus the precondition of getting a knowledge of good and evil at all is that we have sinned psychologically. A sense of guilt is inherent in our make-up. The original sin is the complex of wishes in the Oedipus Complex which we develop before we have a moral sense, but which remain, in varying degrees of fixation after we have developed that moral sense in dealing with them as dangerous wishes.
Certainly, the fear invoked by demonic stories and paradoxically the adrenergic elation from viewing such Satanic horror films can be said to be, in the case of the latter, an activation of the ethical super-ego and in the case of the former, the cognitive dissonance that arises from the activation of our infantile id, which enjoys the macabre, the evil, the sadistic and the taboo.
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