Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen

Douglas E. Cowan’s “Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen” was quite a fascinating read, full of information and examples of cinema horror. The book, overall, is a discussion of a strong presence of religion in horror films. It presents demonic creatures, the undead and evil, which are religious concepts. I was fortunate enough to have seen many of the Hellraiser movies when I was younger. All the theories discussed in the book, made me think twice about the connection between horror and religion. Thus, “Sacred Terror” is a key volume of better understanding horror and why it is so frightening.

I really didn’t get it at first, even the title; “Sacred Terror” was a complete turn off. How can terror be sacred, I thought? But then I quickly began to understand that it is fear of the unknown which lead us to develop “the opiate for the masses.” Then I began to remember the messiah like presence of Pinhead himself. As he calls out to the consciousness and romances people into the depths of Hell. Hell, which he calls home, is like a paradise for him. It was so strange to quickly see how this was a religion, one more resembling “Satanism” but none the less, full of ritual. Each time Pinhead mutilated and created another demon in Hellraiser III, it was a rite of passage into the heaven that is servitude to pain. All of that was derived without even reading a single line from the book, but by studying Kafka, and remembering the gruesome films.

Then I began to read the book, and saw that “Sacred Terror” combines
multiple levels of cinema horror and religious beliefs. Enlightening us
to the “inextricable relationship between religion and horror,” what the
book does is show us how Hollywood writers take advantage what Freud or
Jung would call “Subconscious Archetypes.” In so doing, Cowan gives
emphasis to a distinctive way of understanding horror, and helps explain
our fascination with it. Have you ever thought why you sit and watch
such gruesome scenes? Do we truly derive pleasure from being scared
witless? He offers a new approach, arguing that horror films present the
age-old “problem of evil” and they are the “opportune vehicles for
externalizing the fears that lie inside our religious selves: fear 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.” Fears which all of us want to conquer or understand on at
some level, conscious or on unconscious, as part of the human experience.