Courtesy Eve Tushnet comes this Christianity Today essay on horror films by W. David O. Taylor. Wait, it’s not what you think! Taylor makes a thoroughgoing attempt to analyze what horror tells us about the world and what constitutes “good” horror, with both a lowercase and capital “G.” Obviously it’s the capital-G part that speaks to a sensibility which at this point is almost completely alien to me. (I didn’t realize how alien until I was forced to attend Mass during my sister’s graduation from a Catholic university last weekend.) This is not to say that I will never object to a film on the grounds that it is immoral–google search this site for Grosse Pointe Blank or Lars Von Trier if you don’t believe me–just that much of this:
In [some] cases you’ll want to be careful. Saint Patrick’s phrase, “the knowledge that defiles,” applies equally to the movies that we watch as to the rest of our lives.[…]some of it is dangerous. Evil is real, and the extent to which horror movies deal with evil, whether supernatural or natural, we want to be careful not to treat it lightly