The Horror of Belief
At the end of an interesting episode of the Hermitix podcast, Jesuit priest and professor of theology Ryan Duns says that he has been thinking about how to write his next book, one built partly from his course at Marquette University on “Evil, Horror, and Theology”, and that he has struggled with a focus for it as well as a title. His original idea for a title was The Dark Transcendent: The Metaphysics and Theology of Horror, but because that makes the topic so large, he is now inclined to call the book Horror: A Theology.
I would eagerly read a book with that title, especially one written by someone with as deep an understanding of theology as Duns, because most of what I’ve read on the topic of how horror intersects with theology feels superficial or reductive. Yet horror is the mode of storytelling most reliant on systems of belief and unbelief, both as subject of its stories and as tool for its effects — thus horror is the mode most inclined to exploration of how belief matters.
Of course, horror is not the only mode or genre where belief is important. Belief is essential to all fiction in some way or another. For instance, horror and science fiction link easily through questions of belief, metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. I wrote at some length about SF and theology in a 2012 review of three books for the online film journal Scope, and a lot of what I said there about SF’s portrayal of transcendence and the strengths and limitations of various interpretations of such transcendence could apply just as well to horror and to horror’s interpreters.
SF and horror have danced together for ages. I don't subscribe to the proposition that Mary Shelley "invented" either science fiction or horror, but, like many gothic novels, Frankenstein certainly displays elements of both. The first issue of the first English-language science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (which really did invent the concept of science fiction as we know it) included Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", a story most likely classified today as horror. Philip K. Dick’s best writing approaches the horrific in its revelation of tattered metaphysics — think of the ending of “The Electric Ant” or Ubik — and Dick was famously obsessed with religious questions. One of the greatest horror movies of this century is also one of the greatest science fiction movies: Aniara. What makes that movie so horrifying is how it confronts ideas of belief and meaning, providing a bleak counterpoint to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s like Thomas Ligotti in space.
Near Halloween this year, the horror writer and podcaster Conner Habib devoted an episode of his show to thinking about “The Spiritual Life of Horror”, and it pairs well with the Hermitix discussion with Duns. (As does the recent Weird Studies podcast episode with Victoria Nelson, author of the magnificent Secret Life of Puppets. I'll probably write more about that one later.) Habib comes at questions of spirituality and the occult from his perspective as something like a fellow traveler of anthroposophy and a devotée of the work of Rudolf Steiner, though his interests range widely and I enjoy his podcast because of that range, even though I do not share his idea of spirits and such, nor his skepticism of materialism and empiricism. In most ways, in fact, we’re almost the opposite of each other, which is perhaps what makes his show so compelling for me.
Like Duns, Habib laments the reductive thinking around horror, spirituality, and belief, and he digs down into the centrality of belief for horror. We find horrifying that which we in some way or another allow ourselves to believe, even if just for the moment of the story. I, for instance, find nothing in The Exorcist scary. Nothing from Christian, and especially Catholic, mythology seems particularly scary to me, because I just have no ability to believe in it. (I do find the idea of the eternal life of an individual consciousness terrifying, even repulsive. I think it’s almost certainly not true, so I don't actually worry about it, but eternal life does seem to me a horrendous fate. If I don’t get oblivion with death, I’m going to be pretty annoyed and ask for my money back). Other people, however — good people, smart people — find The Exorcist to be the most terrifying movie of all time.
We might be tempted to say that people who are devout Christians or who were raised Catholic are most likely to be terrified by The Exorcist. But I’m not sure that’s true. I know plenty of people who are terrified by The Exorcist who are not devout Christians, or Christians of any sort. But something in it gets under their skin, under their consciousness — something in its imagery and worldview is terribly upsetting for them, and it's upsetting in a way more profound and soul-chilling than the average horror movie. I’m not the person who can explain that, because I am indifferent to that same imagery and worldview, but I don’t want to trivialize or dismiss the response.
2.
Belief and disbelief in horror matter differently depending on whether we are talking about the audience or the characters within the story. Habib says the lesson of horror for its characters is that “incredulity is no defense.” Just because characters don’t believe in ghosts or vampires or werewolves or demonic dolls does not mean they will survive an attack by ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demonic dolls.
For us as readers, viewers, or listeners, however, incredulity is a defense. What we are horrified by as an audience depends on what we believe, how we understand reality, and what we are willing and able to suspend disbelief for. Once we find something unbelievable in a horror story, for whatever reason, it quickly rises to seeming silly, and silly seldom scares.
A pleasure offered by any story (except maybe the most kitchen-sink of realism) is the pleasure of negotiating this balance between what we ourselves are willing to believe and what the story asks us to believe. Even if it’s a slice-of-life story, we in the audience say to ourselves again and again, “Am I willing to believe someone would behave like this, or feel like this, or be like this?” When the story presents fantastical events, we may need to work more to suspend our disbelief, but it's a matter of degree more than kind.
What we are willing to believe and what we refuse to believe says a lot about us and our expectations of stories. People point this out all the time about things like Game of Thrones, where viewers are perfectly willing to believe in dragons but not in gender and sexual equality. Or think of Mark Fisher’s famous statement about the ways “capitalist realism” affects people’s sense of possibility: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
When considering the relationship between audiences, belief, and horror, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying people who believe in ghosts are more scared by ghost stories than people who don’t. That’s just obviously not true. Perhaps people who believe in ghosts — and believe ghosts can be malevolent and harmful — have less disbelief to suspend, but plenty of people enjoy entering the what-if situation that ghost stories offer and letting themselves be creeped out: "Let’s pretend ghosts are real and can hurt us and let’s enter into this story and see how scary it can be!"
At its most basic level, fiction is a game of “let’s pretend”. Fiction asks us not only what we believe but what we are willing to pretend to believe for the length of the story. Stories enact what the writer and scholar Peter Elbow calls the believing game. We will play the game unless and until something — whether in the story’s own construction or within our personal worldview and assumptions — makes the game impossible for us. We are willing to let things stretch within certain bounds (and some of those bounds are set by the story itself), but for most of us there is always some outer limit, some disbelief we resist suspending, some border beyond which we will not pass.
3.
Like comedy and pornography, horror relies not only on our conscious beliefs (and suspensions of belief) but also on our less conscious somatic responses. This is one reason why horror (like comedy and porn) is so effective and popular as a film genre: the cinematic ability to use sights and sounds together allows quicker, deeper access to the nervous system than art forms that rely on static images or the power of words. Horror in literature is, in many ways, distinctly different from horror in film and tv because horror in literature relies on the decoding of words into the imagination. Effects are possible via horror literature that are not possible via cinema, and vice versa. (Similarly, the best graphic novels are a different experience from either text-only novels or from cinema — Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell is one of the great works of horror for many reasons, and some of its most powerful effects would be qualitatively different in another medium.)
Horror helps us identify what we believe, what we unconsciously are willing to believe (at least enough to let it scare us), what we’re willing to pretend to believe, and what we don’t — won’t — believe no matter what.
Supernatural horror, then, must always raise questions of belief, which makes it a mode particularly ripe for theological approaches. But even nonsupernatural horror raises questions of morality and behavior that often are dealt within within religious systems, since religion provides most people’s understanding of morality, regardless of whether they are themselves religious or not.
(Can horror ever not be theological?)
Even a writer like Ligotti — basically a nihilist — has passionate readers whose own worldviews are avowedly religious. Ligotti’s highly philosophical fiction may be intended to spread ideas and sensations quite opposed to Christianity, for instance, but Christians seem to have little trouble connecting to the work. Or consider H.P. Lovecraft, definitely a materialist and (in his letters) a proselytizing atheist, but one of his most consequential disciples, August Derleth — founder of Arkham House — was a conservative Roman Catholic.
Whatever we say about it, belief is complex, and while many of us try hard to stick to reason and evidence, hardly anyone is an absolute rationalist who will only believe what they can prove to be true. Most of us believe in all sorts of weird, improbable, pseudoscientific, disproven, barmy things. Americans especially. We’ve been a nutty bunch of believers from the days when my ancestors were stealing land from native people because God told them to. Read the book Paranormal America if you want to see how credulous we are.
Plenty of people will say they don’t really believe in ghosts exactly but that thing that happened in the old house ten years ago, that was definitely freaky and it sure as heck felt real, so… (Hey, don’t walk under that ladder!) But even die-hard, self-proclaimed, self-satisfied rationalists believe all sorts of absurd things that they’ve never bothered to test and verify because none of us have the time or resources to research, test, and verify everything we believe. Scientism is not science. That so many loud and publicity-hungry "rationalists" are Islamophobes and/or dabblers in eugenics is proof of that.
4.
It is not surprising that the host of the Hermitix podcast, James Ellis, and his guest for the episode I mentioned above, Ryan Duns, are perplexed by the theology (or lack of it) of Hellraiser. Ellis is now an avowed Catholic and Duns is a Jesuit priest. Within Hellraiser’s world, sadistic hedonism becomes the bedrock, the entire organizing principle of the cosmology. And Ellis and Duns, confirming each other’s biases, don’t understand a worldview where suffering doesn’t add up to a transcendant love. “To whom — for whom — does Pinhead suffer?” Duns asks. They talk about it for a couple minutes, trying to grapple with what Ellis calls “a physical representation of nihilism”. That, for them as believers (and believers in a particular doctrine), is the great horror.
Or is it horror? Are Duns and Ellis horrified … or dismissive, disbelieving the Hellraiser stories’ premise because it is so in conflict with their own beliefs? Ellis’s voice sounds contemptuous. He says: “Pinhead’s almost saying, ‘We haven’t really got anything more than pain and pleasure, where pain is broached to such a degree that it becomes pleasure.’ But then you go, 'Okay, but where then?' And all he’s got is suffering, because that’s the limit of material existence, is suffering. But where then? They haven’t got anything. So their eternity is just, ‘We’ll just keep torturing you and finding new ways to cause suffering.’ Which is just an odd disappointment.”
A disappointment to a reader expecting a transcendent vision of the afterlife, maybe, but Ellis's summary of the Hellraiser theology sounds an awful lot like popular conceptions of Hell, the place where souls suffer for eternity. Theologians will want more complexity than that, will point to the idea that Hell isn’t primarily physical suffering but spiritual — that the suffering of the damned is created not by hooks in flesh but by distance from God — but still, if it’s an unchanging eternity then by definition there is no progress or development. Hell and paradise aren’t much different in that case.
A Buddhist might respond that the desire for a purpose for suffering is itself a cause of suffering. Attachment creates suffering not only through attachment to bad desires and bad emotions but through attachment to anything, because attachment itself is suffering. But Hellraiser is not a Buddhist horror story. (In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible to have a truly Buddhist horror story. Because its core focus is how to deal with — not alleviate, but deal with — suffering, Buddhism is the antithesis to horror’s emotional content.) The hedonism of the Cenobites’ realm is not nihilism. The pleasure of pain (and the pleasure of power) is that place’s purpose. Frank and all the others are seekers after that kind of pleasure, but the Cenobites don’t exist to serve Frank’s will — Frank is a peasant serving the hellbound royalty. If he can endure long enough, he might just become a Cenobite himself.
(But certainly it is right to see a religious element to the Hellraiser mythos — cenobite is a term for a member of a monastic community [in The Hellbound Heart it’s The Order of the Gash], and Clive Barker’s 2015 novel The Scarlet Gospels, wherein Pinhead is dubbed The Hell Priest, particularly develops the theology of it all, including even the suicide and resurrection of Lucifer. But Barker’s Hell, while drawing on Christian concepts and symbolism, isn’t quite what we get in, say, Milton's Paradise Lost. Simon Marshall-Jones described it well in a review of the book: “His vision of Hell is one that is far more real than any depiction documented by the spiritual fathers of whatever religion: the true nature of the place isn’t about everlasting fire and pain – it’s in the sheer oppression and banality, where casual and studied violence and fleshly violation is mired in the mundane and everyday. Cruelty is commonplace, part of the narrative of Hell itself. Moreover, it resonates strongly because it’s … the narrative of our world too.”)
Belief is tricky because it is so difficult (perhaps even possible) to suspend the beliefs we hold dearest, and the gravity of those beliefs warps our perception of others.
5.
I’ve been enjoying reading around in a couple of collections of short stories recently, Alan Moore’s Illuminations and The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, and I was struck by a brief passage in each as I thought about these notes I am writing here.
In Kiernan’s story “Houses Under the Sea”, the narrator, a burnt-out reporter, says of a former academic who became a cult leader (and his lover),
...I tracked down an article on Inuit archaeology that she’d written for Fate and wondered at what point Jacova Angevine had decided that there was no going back, nothing left to lose and so no reason not to allow herself to become part of the murky, strident world of fringe believers and UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists and paranormal “investigators” that seemed so eager to embrace her as one of its own.
And I wondered, too, if perhaps she might have been one of them from the start.
A terrifying second sentence there if you are one of us who clings to some last shreds of rationality in an irrational world! Might any of us, despite the strength of our convictions about who we are, slide into being ... a person of different beliefs? And might that slide reveal itself to be not a slide so much as a revelation of who we actually have always been?
This is a key technique for horror fiction, the tearing away of identity to reveal people to be other than what either others or they themselves believed they were. What happens if you play the believing game … and it’s no longer a game?
I would bet that such an experience is common to all but the most dogmatic and rigid person. We may cling to an idea of ourselves as basically unchanging, but how many of us who have more than a couple decades of life behind us still embrace the values and belief systems of our youth? (I actually feel weirdly consistent with my younger self. I can go back to journals I wrote when I was in my first years of college and still see a lot of the same basic values, though the objects of those values, and the strategies and tactics for bringing the values into life, have certainly changed.) The statement about Jacova Angevine in Kiernan’s story, the idea of her moving from a respected and privileged position to the fringe, is one I can sympathize with as someone whose scholarly life has been attracted both to the most respectable of respectable objects of study (Virginia Woolf! J.M. Coetzee!) and to the less (popular fiction! Samuel Delany’s pornography!). Recently, as I work on writing a series of fictional stories about occultism, I have become fascinated by the ways occult and esoteric studies overlap with my other interests — the many Modernist writers and artists attracted to occultism, the queer areas of the esoteric, the ways writers like Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath used tarot, etc. — and it’s hard to delve deep into these realms without feeling their pull, an attraction a bit like a hook or two from a Cenobite — hard not to wonder about one’s own beliefs.
In the acknowledgments section of Illuminations, Alan Moore notes of his story “Cold Reading” that “I made the central character a fraudulent psychic so that my many atheist and rationalist friends could enjoy a tale of terrible supernatural revenge, despite their cheerless and depressingly evidence-based philosophy.” Touché! Point to the old magus.
“Cold Reading” is a bit obvious in its reversals, but enjoyable nonetheless, and I expect it appeals both to readers who think fraudulent psychic is a repetitive term and readers who consider the adjective informative. Moore does a fine job of allowing both such philosophies into the tale. Believers are not offended, because the story is premised on a supernatural realm being an actuality (that’s what allows the revenge), while readers who in everyday life are mired in the cheerless depression of empiricism can let imagination fly without feeling that their actual worldview is much attacked. It’s an entertaining story, but it doesn’t unsettle me as much as Moore’s note does, because I realized on reading that note that I am terribly torn by what it says. On the one hand, I do think a rationalist and empiricist philosophy is the only way to ascertain anything like reality, and on the other hand … sometimes I enjoy the believing game.
Consider, for instance, psychics. On the one hand, I have studied the techniques of cold reading and of mentalist performance (since my early 20s, I’ve been mildly obsessed with the history and techniques of stage magic, sleight-of-hand, and mentalism, though I’m mostly a terrible performer of it all myself; I have no talent for being devious, despite years of trying!). I do not believe there is a spiritual realm that sensitive people have access to. And yet, I have experienced too much to be able to think there is nothing but indifferent material in the universe.
Some clues to new ways to think about these things appear in Annie Murphy Paul’s extraordinary book The Extended Mind (which I wrote about at length on my academic blog). There’s a myth that we only use 10% of our brains, which is a silly idea, but it is not a myth that nurturing our conscious mind is only one part of our brain’s work, and maybe not even that big a part of the work. There’s all sorts of other stuff going on in our skulls, stuff we have basically zero conscious access to — all the stuff of our nervous system, for example. What the neuroscience of the last couple decades has shown is something that ought to be obvious but often isn’t: our bodies and brains are not at all separate. As much as I might dream of being a brain in a jar (and I do; being embodied is a burden), I know that the ever-changing being I refer to as me only exists as an expression of my body, including its brain.
Since our bodies and brains are not at all separate, our bodies can convey information to our brains that our conscious mind may not get till later, if ever. The book details some remarkable experiments that pretty conclusively (as far as I, a nonspecialist, can tell) demonstrate that there is a lot we can legitimately call “knowledge” that lives more in our bodies as a whole than our brains as a separate piece of that body.
Non-fraudulent psychics, if we can imagine such things (I can), might then be people who are particularly sensitive to certain kinds of embodied information that most other people are less aware of. Intuition, for instance — under the theory of the embodied mind, intuition makes perfectly good sense. It’s our body understanding things before those things enter our consciousness. Combine the techniques of cold reading with particularly good intuition and you get a psychic who’s going to be pretty good in the right circumstances. That’s a weird thing to consider. The psychic may even believe they have supernatural abilities, when really (or is it “really”?) what they have is an innate understanding of the principles of cold reading and a heightened link of conscious mind to nervous system.
In a couple stories in Illuminations, Alan Moore has characters say more or less what a god-being in the delightfully heretical tale “Location, Location, Location” says:
Mankind’s developing perceptual apparatus has consistently selected, sensibly enough, for practical survival over accuracy. A true, comprehensive understanding of, say, a ferocious jaguar might well diminish a human’s ability to run away at the first glimpse, effectively eliminating such complete perceptions from the gene pool. How you see and hear things is a bit like simplified computer icons, or the way you read that map of London’s tube stations — you know the map bears no resemblance to any geographical reality, but if you follow the convenient fiction of its coloured lines, you’ll reach your destination. That’s much like how you perceive me. How your species perceives everything.
One part neoplatonism, one part neuroscience. I find it terribly convincing. But that may just be a result of the limits of my own conscious mind.
(A favorite quotation: W. G. Sebald in Newsweek, October 2001: “We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.” Less bleakly, I have more than once said that if I believe anything about The Universe, I believe what we can know of it is little better than what a mosquito can.)
One kind of horror story I most appreciate is the kind that unsettles belief, the kind more like Alan Moore’s statement about “Cold Reading” in the acknowledgments of his book than like “Cold Reading” itself. This may be why Moore’s From Hell is among my favorite books of any type. It is a relentless, gargantuan assault on a whole variety of epistemologies, histories, and certainties. I would never for a minute want to defend its speculations as responsible hypotheses to explain the Jack the Ripper murders — and yet, while in its pages, I cannot not believe. It is a disturbing book because of its violence, but it is a truly great and unsettling book because of what it does to my own sense of certainty about so much of how the world works.
6.
I can watch the goriest of horror movies with utter delight, but I get light-headed and sometimes actually faint at the sight — or even imagining — of what my brain decides is real blood. It’s vasovagal syncope. I have zero ability to control it or to tell my brain that what it has decided is actual blood is not.
Here’s an example, one of the most extreme moments of the condition that I have experienced: A few years ago, I was visiting friends, one of whom was, at the time, a nurse in a hospital working with serious cases. My other friends and I enjoyed her stories of some of the extreme things she encountered each day. On the night in question, I was overtired and I hadn’t paid enough attention to eating, so was a bit underfed. (My own fault.) We were standing around, and as my friend told a story of a patient who had to have an emergency amputation of her leg, I began to envision the leg. And its blood.
Quickly, the world was swirling around me. Within moments, I was on the ground.
My deeply concerned friends helped me to a chair, gave me water, and my friend the nurse gave me a good check-up before I went home. (Luckily, I also had an annual physical exam already scheduled for a week later, and so was able to get another check-up.) The cause was obvious — tired, not having eaten enough, my body was not prepared to deal with the sudden drop in blood pressure — and I was not scared so much as fascinated that a merely imagined bit of blood could have such an effect.
I’ve had less serious experiences of vasovagal syncope (light-headedness, mostly) in all sorts of other times when my brain has thought it was perceiving real blood. Sometimes, it was perceiving real blood. But sometimes it was just a documentary on tv. Isn’t that bizarre? I can enjoy the realistic make-up effects of gory movies, which plenty of people I know are utterly repulsed by, and yet a scene on a tv or movie screen that my brain decides is (or was) real knocks me sideways.
This is a kind of unintentional, involuntary belief. My brain does the believing, separate from my conscious mind. I can think, “The blood I’m seeing is on a 30-year-old news report, there is no threat whatsoever, it’s fine,” and my brain will basically respond, “Shut up! We’re dealing with an emergency here!”
How much else of what I believe is outside my conscious control?
7.
One last story.
For a while, the British magician, mentalist, and skeptic Derren Brown was doing a lot of work around faith healing. It began with his tv show Miracles for Sale, which is entertaining but fairly standard debunking. What's more interesting is that after immersing himself in the world of faith healers, he began trying out some of their techniques. This eventually led to his stage show Miracle, where he flat-out told his audience he was doing nothing supernatural, nothing that should have any effect … and yet some of it worked. In an interview he said:
Some shows are better than others, but essentially it’s working as a mechanism even with a sceptical audience. It’s difficult to quantify the effect. But I’ve had a couple of tweets, people jokingly saying ‘well, my condition is back again, so much for that haha’. I tell people, this will stick with some of you, and for others it won’t. But also I’ve had letters from people saying ‘I don’t know what you did, I understand it isn’t faith-healing, but this condition is still gone and I feel amazing’. Someone on stage had a series of strokes when she was very young and had never been able to feel the left-side of her body. And now she could. One guy said he had terrible psoriasis, his arm was covered with it, and within five minutes, that was gone. One of the stage-crew has a teenage daughter who suffered from depression, and she's been really helped by it. So sometimes it's been quite transformative.
He ventures some guesses about why these things happen, and I expect he’s more or less right: a mix of the energy of being on stage with a bit of self-hypnotism for highly suggestible people and something like the placebo effect. But whatever the reason, what’s amazing is it works. Not reliably, not in any scientific way, maybe not with lasting effects very often, but it works enough to be at least a little bit astonishing.
And it works regardless of belief.
I wonder what this all might say about horror and belief? It makes me want to seek out effects in stories that, like Derren Brown’s faith healing, don’t require anybody to believe in x, y, or z but nonetheless they get the desired effect. I suppose that’s what the old willing suspension of disbelief is, but as a writer I’m greedy about wanting an effect on people, and I can’t help but dream of something a bit more, something surprising, something that would do to readers what Derren Brown’s Miracle shows did to his audiences.
At this point, I don’t even know what that would look like, but I know what it would do: transform the raw materials of horror into the sublime effect of awe.
The alchemy of story.
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image sources: The X-Files, The Exorcist, Clive Barker's Hellraiser Omnibus vol. 1, Inspirobot
