Do slasher flicks have anything to offer Christian moviegoers?
I believe that movies, even secular ones, are often holy experiences – God-directed expressions of the human experience, much like prayer. But where do bloody, exploitative horror films fit within this philosophy?
I ask because this weekend marks a new era in the “Friday the 13th” horror franchise. On Friday – yes, the 13th – Warner Bros. Pictures delivers a remake of the original 1980 fright fest (which has already spawned 10 sequels).
The irony is that these movies have a puritanical sense of morality. In the “Friday the 13th” pictures - and also in “Halloween,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and other movies of the era - the victims are almost always promiscuous, pot-smoking teens who are punished for their partying ways by a deranged madman. Put together, the films comprise a demented scare campaign that demonizes drugs and promotes abstinence.
That tradition continues with the new “Friday the 13th,” which purports to be a remake of the original film but is really just another exercise in sex and death. The picture opens with a bunch of campers who are hiking near Crystal Lake, ground zero for the horror series. After stumbling across a field of marijuana plants and celebrating with some extramarital hanky panky, good old Jason Voorhees arrives on the scene with a machete to punish them for their debauchery.
Even if you buy into such movies as moral parables – and considering all the nudity going on I’d say they’re more hypocritical than moral – I don’t think you could honestly argue that this makes them, in any sense of the word, holy.
When I was a full-time movie critic – meaning I had to see every new release, no matter how soulless – I often struggled with how to handle slasher flicks, especially the new generation of torture-themed pictures such as “Saw” and “Hostel.” As a Christian, how should I respond to them?
I suppose some might say that these pictures depict the darkest side of humanity – what a soul is capable of when he or she has completely rejected God. But what is the virtue of recognizing such a thing? That this sort of awareness can send us running into His arms in fear?
More valuable, I’d argue, is the way some horror movies work as effective allegories. They depict an extreme, exaggerated situation to make us recognize the horrors we’ve come to accept in real life. For some reason, zombie flicks often work this way, from the segregation subtext of 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead” to the Iraq war parallels of 2007’s “28 Weeks Later.”
But do these allegories justify the cruelty and violence that is the genre’s bread and butter? Is viewing the movies this way a case of trying to make the end justify the means?
These are questions I still haven’t answered, even though I continue to dabble in horror films here and there. (“Let the Right One in,” a Swedish vampire flick, nearly made my 2008 top ten list.)
For anyone else who watches these movies – and I know you’re out there – can you help me out with a reasonable defense?
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Comments (13)
"You will not be afraid of the terror by night...." Isaiah 54:14 states:
"In righteousness you will be established; You will be far from oppression, for you will not fear; And from terror, for it will not come near you. For me, terror and horror runs contradictory to the fruit of the Spirit I'm trying to allow to mature in me; namely joy, peace, and gentleness, so these kinds of slasher/sexual/terrorizing horror flicks are out for me. Blessings on all your readers!
In the cases of "Hostel" and "Saw," I see no redeeming value. That value is stretched to the limit in Romero's zombie films, or any other for that matter. As allegory, the horror genre gets bogged down in the gore to be sure. Science Fiction has always cornered the market on morality tales, political and social commentary, and theological discover. What Horror does, and has done over time, is escalate itself because it thinks it's going to lose the audience. Looking at films like "Saw," you had a pretty self contained sequence of events in the first film and now you find a world in which nothing is safe and anyone can build a machine to "teach" someone a lesson. The world portrayed in these movies is Hell itself, a nightmare from which there is no escape. I find no redemption in horror films due to the plain fact that even the survivors don't get away anymore. The virginal female character, the "hero" in the old-school horror films, always seems to escape until the once dead killer jumps out at the last second. I used to love these movies, but the older I get and the further my walk with God takes me, I feel like if I can't find even a glimmer of a higher layer of thought I'm walking away.
There does seem to be a morbid fascination with horror films. Kind of like a car wreck, where you know you're not doing any favours (NZ spelling) to look, but you do anyway.
I watch the odd horror, but I don't really consider myself a fan so much.
Maybe it's just the suspense that is so addictive, the adrenalin rush being like a drug?
Try Philippians 4:8
While watching a movie, and for quite a while after that, if it had any impact at all (and a 'good' horror movie certainly would), you are meditating on, and thinking on, things that are not at all holy, just, good and pure.
Slasher films, for example, have little value and are basically violence porn. And I would judge the 'naughty teens get punished' thesis as what the films argue against. The evil is not in the promiscuity, but in those who oppose it. Those who enforce moral codes are puritanical perversions of humanity. And even that thesis, such as it is, is a tissue-thin excuse for voyeurism.
Monster films, OTOH, often tell a much different story. Take Frankenstein, the classic tale of humanity's effort to play God. Scientific hubris has disastorous results--this is a story retold many times over, Godzilla, King Kong, even the recent Zombie films. (And this whole category is an antithesis to the Enlightenment myth of human perfection through knowledge and technology, as seen on, say, Star Trek).
Fantasy films, usually less violent, are often more all over the map on their world-views. From Aslan's Narnia, to the savior in the Matrix, to The-Wizard-is-a-fake Oz, to Pullman's The-church-is-evil Golden Compass. But that's another conversation.