The Holiday Season is upon us.
I've started seeing Christmas trees mixed in with broomsticks and pilgrims. My current display, Move Over R.L.Stine, features the genre of horror and supernatural literature found in our library. The number of standard British and American authors all seem to have written and written well in this field. There is even a website devoted to Christians and Horror which takes a different approach from my interpretation
While I enjoy a well-written story even if the premise unsettling, I usually draw the line at the horror genre in whatever media it is found because it reflects a philosophy of chaos and uncertainty at odds with Christian beliefs.
God Knows, a post, in The Christian worldview of fiction, aptly summarizes this as well as Hopkins poem That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.
1 comment:
I draw the line before what gets classified as "Horror" today... but I can't ignore the genre completely...
After all - the novel The Phantom of the Opera was at least originally considered "Horror"... Sweeney Todd - yeah pretty gorey... and I like creepy childrens books by Neil Gaiman...
But there still is that line where I'm not sure you can so easily cross into in horror that I'm not sure Christians should cross...
(But I'll admit my personal line is drawn more by my own scaredy-cat nature - I don't mind historical fictional "horror" because its not likely for the events of The Phantom of the Opera or Sweeney Todd to happen today... and Neil Gaiman's creepy stuff for children is fantasy and not reality as well... but I will NOT watch or read something that has modern day criminals doing horrible evil things because that just absolutely freaks the daylights out of me because it COULD indeed happen)
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