Why do we like horror films? What draws us to the shadows? All the more poignant for the Christian who shouldn’t watch the bad movies. But let’s take the point seriously: How might we watch horror films Christianly? Which is to say: How do we watch them well? Theologian and film critic Kutter Callaway (Fuller Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of some truly frightening horror films. His new podcast “Be Afraid” is produced by Christianity Today, and explores horror films and the theology and psychology of fearing rightly. In addition to discussing some of our favorite scary movies Kutter Callaway and Evan Rosa discuss: The psychology of fear and why people might willingly rehearse their fears; the radical vulnerability of human life that makes us susceptible to horrors; the Bible as horror genre; the human inclination toward the numinous, unknown, mysterious, and uncanny; managing our terror about death; and ultimately, how to fear rightly. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Why do we like horror films? Why do we gravitate to the theatre for a collective catharsis—living out our nightmares vicariously through the unwitting victim on the screen? What draws us to the shadows? All the more poignant for the Christian who shouldn’t watch the bad movies. But let’s take the point seriously: How might we watch horror films Christianly? Which is to say: How do we watch them well?
Theologian and film critic Kutter Callaway (Fuller Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of some truly frightening horror films. His new podcast “Be Afraid” is produced by Christianity Today, and explores horror films and the theology and psychology of fearing rightly.
In addition to discussing some of our favorite scary movies Kutter Callaway and Evan Rosa discuss: The psychology of fear and why people might willingly rehearse their fears; the radical vulnerability of human life that makes us susceptible to horrors; the Bible as horror genre; the human inclination toward the numinous, unknown, mysterious, and uncanny; managing our terror about death; and ultimately, how to fear rightly.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Show Notes
About Kutter Callaway
Kutter Callaway is the William K. Brehm Chair of Worship, Theology, and the Arts, as well as associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies, and associate professor of theology and culture. He is actively engaged in writing and speaking on the interaction between theology and culture—particularly film, television, and online media—in both academic and popular forums.
Dr. Callaway holds two PhDs, one in theology and the second in psychological science, both from Fuller. His most recent book is Theology for Psychology and Counseling: An Invitation to Holistic Christian Practice (2022). Past books include Techno-Sapiens in a Networked Era: Becoming Digital Neighbors (2020), which he coauthored with Fuller’s Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture Ryan Bolger; The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture (2019); and Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue (2019). Past books include Breaking the Marriage Idol: Reconstructing our Cultural and Spiritual Norms (2018), Watching TV Religiously: Television and Theology in Dialogue (2016) and Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013). In addition, he contributed to God in the Movies (2017); Halos and Avatars (2010), the first book on theology and video games; and Don’t Stop Believin’ (2012), a dictionary of religion and popular culture.
Callaway cochairs the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture group at the American Academy of Religion. He also partnered with Paulist Productions to produce the YouTube series Should Christians Watch? His professional memberships include the American Academy of Religion, American Psychological Association, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He is ordained as a Baptist minister.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: This episode contains content that some listeners might find frightening, disturbing, or maybe traumatizing. It's a podcast about the theology, aesthetics, ethics, and cultural significance of horror films and fear, so discretion is advised. For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Kutter Callaway: There's something about being in the presence of the unknown and unknowable that we have this morbid curiosity, right? We have this desire to look, even though we're looking like this, through our fingers, we can't help but look. And at the same time, it's really disturbing to us.
If we actually read honestly our own sacred texts, what we encounter over and over and over are really horrifying stories. They're either brutally violent or graphic. They're filled with fear and anxiety and terror. And often, it's in the face of this God we claim to worship. And so every time either God or the Angel of the Lord appears to people, the first response is terror.
The command, "Don't be afraid." is there because people are afraid. There's something terrifying, that's scary, about this God who became human who came back to life. Not to mention the crux of the matter--the thing around which Christians claim all of reality hinges--is the epitome of horror.
If we think there's any chance that Christianity can speak to the horrors and the traumas of society, why would we not draw upon the very resources that our tradition has handed us to go, "If you want a God who knows the trauma and horror that you're encountering, here he is."
And I find that a really compelling place to start--is to say, God sees you in your horror just as well as in the light and in the goodness.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
The full moon is overtaken by dark clouds. A cold wind sweeps through the barren gray trees, and things are just a little too quiet.
The door creaks open, a shadow rises from behind, and you anxiously gnaw another handful of popcorn, which goes flying as you jump out of your seat.
Another one of your favorite characters meets their end.
Why do we like horror films? Why do we gravitate to the theater for a collective catharsis, living out our nightmares vicariously through the unwitting victims on the screen? What draws us to those shadows? All the more poignant for the Christian who shouldn't watch the bad movies. But let's take the point seriously.
How might we watch horror films Christianly? Which is to say, how do we watch them well? My guest today is Kutter Calloway. Theologian and film critic, podcaster, a person with two PhDs and several books. He's Associate Professor of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, and his most recent project is called Be Afraid.
It's a new podcast produced by Christianity Today that explores the genre of horror films through theology, or theology through horror films. Either way you look at that, I got excited when I heard he was doing this show because I love a lot of movies, definitely including horror films, but I have to admit, some of them shake me to the core, and I know I'm not alone there.
Now, if that's not you, and you're like, nope, or maybe you're sensitive even to descriptions of horror films, that's totally understandable. But please be warned, this episode is about horror, and being scared, and we talk about it, and listen to some clips. So discretion is advised, and this is also your spoiler alert.
But if you're someone who does like horror films, then listen on. In addition to discussing some of our favorite scary movies, Kutter and I talk about the psychology of fear and why people might willingly rehearse their fears at the movies, the radical vulnerability of human life that makes us susceptible to horrors, the Bible as horror genre, the human inclination toward the numinous, the unknown, the mysterious, and the uncanny, managing our terror about death, and ultimately, how to fear rightly.
But I had to start with the scariest of the scary. Clowns, dolls, and humanoid toys. Kutter, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Kutter Callaway: Hey, thanks for having me.
Evan Rosa: You're doing something really exciting. You're starting a podcast about horror films and theology. You've outed yourself as terrified of clowns and dolls.
And we just have to start there.
Kutter Callaway: Oh, uh, so is the question why, or...
Evan Rosa: I'm just trying to trigger you.
Kutter Callaway: So just yesterday, actually, I went to, we did an interview with Chad and Carrie Hayes, who wrote The Conjuring and then the whole Conjuring universe that came from there, so they've written a bunch. And if anyone's seen that, Annabelle the doll is one of the key sort of things.
And so I asked them the same thing, I'm like, what is up with dolls? Why are they so creepy? Like, what, what is it? And it's funny, we, in the podcast, we also have some other people that aren't even in the ballpark of horror, David, and I asked him the same question. I was like, listen, you know, Toy Story and all these others have all these animated dolls and I like, they're super creepy.
And he was like, oh, I don't, I've always thought it was fun to imagine my toys coming alive. And I'm like, you are a strange person, Pete Doctor, because that is super scary. And Pixar, for example, uses the sort of creepiness of it to its advantage at times and in various places. My kids, for example, just will not watch the scenes in Toy Story 4 with those, what are they called?
I can't remember what their names are but they're like the ventriloquist dummies that are Gabby's like henchmen. Um, the Bensons I think is their name. And my kids just straight up are like no dad we will not watch that. So maybe it's in my genes I don't know but three ideas, theories that I'm that I'm working with of like why I personally find specifically dolls, maybe a little bit clowns. On the one hand, it's like a modern day kind of surveillance, you have all these nanny cams and stuff that are in dolls. And so I think having something that has eyes in your room, psychologically, we're thinking, am I being watched? Is someone being surveilled? So that's creepy.
Someone that I didn't allow to get into my sort of intimate private spaces is here. The other thought I had was just the oddity of an inanimate thing being animate, like having agency and doing something. And often we're going to go, I'm going to skew towards it's nefarious, right? Like it's not, doesn't have my best interests in mind.
Evan Rosa: It's not good.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah. Yeah. Rarely is that the case. And so that's creepy. And then the third thing though, and I think this is probably closer to a common thing of horror and how horror actually does this in a lot of different places is that a toy or a doll is actually most often the source or the place where we go for comfort when we are scared when we are uneasy and uncertain And so what horror films do, or what films that feature scary dolls do, is they not only threaten that source of comfort, but they actually turn that into the very thing that terrorizes us.
So it's like a double whammy. Not only are you not safe, but the things you thought were safe cannot be trusted. And I think that for me is like equally okay, I do not trust dolls. I do not trust toys. So clowns, I think have more to similar kind of thing, here's something that's supposed to be fun and safe and entertaining, but then clowns in particular, it's two things: one, so like we read people's emotions and we, we infer things in terms of what their intentions are, what their motivations are through their face and a clown has a permanent smile. Like it's actually hiding our ability to read what they're doing. And so I think anything, and you see a lot of this in any horror film, like that's why masks are so prominent.
It's like, I'm not able to read your mind. And then that makes it even more, and that might be similar to dolls. Like they often, the face actually doesn't move. Maybe the lips do, but-
Evan Rosa: Oh, sure. Or it feels as if you said like a camera inside or agency inside something that shouldn't. And then the feeling that something's in there, but you don't know, you can't connect to it.
So like the thing that I was reflecting on is there- clowns and dolls represent the uncanny valley where as things get closer in approximation to the human, the recognizably human, when they get just close enough, but not actually, that is scary. Super scary. It's frightening. It's weird, or it's grotesque, or there's something just off about it so that you see that humanoid shape or that perma smile of a clown, or whatever, and it's uncanny, and it's frightening, and it's, it's disturbing.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, Pete Docter talks a bit about the Uncanny Valley because, because they, when technology was advancing early on, you'll notice in their films, they don't do a lot of humans. Right, because they couldn't quite render them well enough, you know, so they were doing exactly what you're describing instead of being interesting, they were creepy, but then as their technology advanced, they could do humans really well, and then his struggle was now everything is basically photorealism, and he's like, I don't, how do we get away from the photorealistic and get back to some of that imaginative, but they were all often, it was really interesting, often balancing, oh wait, this is just creeping people out and so they'd have to go back and rework it.
So again, that's one on the podcast that's fun because no one's thinking in a horror podcast you're going to be talking about Pixar movies. But the tension is there, I think, in terms of what disturbs us and what we see and what signals to us safety and comfort.
Evan Rosa: No, there's that classic scene from the first Toy Story where Woody turns on Sid, right?
And it's the thought that the toys are coming to life. And it drives Sid bonkers.
Kutter Callaway: Oh yeah. That scene is like pure horror tropes, so Woody's head turns, it's 360 exorcist, it's night of the living dead. Um, the, like the dolls come out of the sand. Soldiers that are decapitated walking along. It is all the horror tropes thrown into that one scene to freak out the kid.
Evan Rosa: Which is amazing. And I feel like you have to start there because Toy Story is an emblem of safe, cozy, friendship, love, forgiveness, and yet it's finding a place for the horror genre, in that classic film. [audio clip from movie plays]
Kutter Callaway: So we were talking about fear and what generates fear and that's really what the podcast is about more than anything else. And I asked Pete, I was like, can you actually tell a story that we would call a story, without something like that, without fear, without darkness, without something. And he said, actually, our team asked that a lot.
Could you tell a story where nothing bad ever happens? I don't think you really can. And so even in a kid's movie, because transformation, change, character arcs, all that depends usually on, there's some motive, some instigating or inciting incident, and that's usually, in some ways, potentially threatens something, and even that, I'm like, okay, regardless of the genre, what we're dealing with is, there is a threat to something about our life in the world, this character, and they have to overcome it or interact with it or engage it.
And it's really difficult to tell a story without something there. And so now the degree to which that threatens us, they said, let's talk about, but so I, you and I talked and you'd said the Shining is one that just really troubled you. And for some reason it's one that I found not incredibly disturbing.
Evan Rosa: It's interesting. We should talk about this.
Kutter Callaway: But I like it. I like it as a movie. So what are the things in there that you're like, oh no, thanks...
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I think it will quickly get to trying to name the psychological element of horror, which is what it does for me there. The way that the film progresses and also the way it's shot, so Kubrick's cinematography just gets me in each of his films, really, but particularly in that film. I think it's the dissonance of beauty and like grandeur with basically that house becoming a prison and, and yet also the mind becoming a prison. It's the psychological, it's where your mind can wander, uh, whether it's through a labyrinth or through the halls of that giant hotel on a tricycle.
But I do need to say also that anytime one of these horror films really gets me, a kid is involved. And so, and so here's an opportunity also to kind of like bring back the toy story and dolls and clowns and what you said, right? Like those things that are supposed to bring us comfort, joy, happiness, or peace.
When that gets flipped in some way, um, when the dissonance has to do with something that is, that feels core to our childhood. Core to what a comfort of home or peace, or just like what you would imagine as a flourishing childhood that we all would have wanted to have and want to provide for our own kids and hope for others.
And when that gets flipped around, then, oh, that's what really gets me. So that's to say that there's those psychological, it's the psychological elements of The Shining, you know, the vacant father image of Jack Nicholson. Um, the typewriter scene, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and just hitting a wall there.
And the only response is either nothing or it's violent. And it's, wow, that's like shocking.
Kutter Callaway: That's interesting. So as you're talking, I think this is helpful even for me of going, huh. So, I think there's a couple, I think you're absolutely right. Like, when children are involved, and often they are, my ongoing sort of theory is that what horror filmmakers are trying to do is to place characters and then the audience in places where they feel vulnerable.
And so, what better way to make a character or us feel vulnerable than to include a child who is ultimately vulnerable, when you become adolescent, you're on that verge of independence and stuff, different things happen, but when it's children, it's like, they have no other choice but to trust their parents and institutions and other things, and so, particularly vulnerable to the chaos and the craziness, so I think that's definitely one of the reasons why it evokes so much fear is because either one, it recalls our childhood that when we remember being vulnerable and going, I need help, I can't help myself. Where do I go? Uh, the thing I've been asking people is what's your earliest memory of being afraid? And then the follow-up is what's your earliest memory of being afraid in a movie? Often it's the same memory and often it's, oh, I was with some friends or some older cousins and the parents were like doing something, and we were downstairs, and we watched The Exorcist.
And I remember that once being a kid at a friend's house, I can't remember what happened, but I was up and I was terrified and I just stayed up the whole night frozen. But that's how vulnerable we are as kids. And so all those moments I think are called back. Now, with The Shining, for me, I think there's two things going on. One, the setting is really foreign to me. I've actually been to that place, up in Estes Park, but it's not a location that is familiar to me. Like, I'm not walking around a place like the Overlook Hotel, I'm not out, it's not creating a space that I personally experience day to day. Most of the times that films really haunt me, the one movie that sort of was the end of my horror watching for a while was the Blair Witch Project.
Evan Rosa: Oh my goodness, completely agree.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, it just messed me up. And it's because of stupid things. I live in Colorado, right? Yeah, I go to the woods, the woods and basements, like the ending.
Evan Rosa: You had to ruin camping. Camping was nice.
Kutter Callaway: Exactly. Exactly. So those are the places where I know and I see. And so the movie made those places scary and that stuck with me. Overlook Hotel, I'm not going there most of the time, but the other thing as you're talking is, I, so, I personally, like many people, have depression and anxiety, and I'm a workaholic. So, when I look at The Shining, I think my first instinct with him is empathy. I think that when I watch that movie, I go, oh, this is describing some of my lived experience.
And so I'm more like, oh, I could see it going that way than I am identifying with the kid with the terrifying dad. But now that you're saying it, I'm really worried about my children because they're like, dad's just like Jack from The Shining when they go to their therapist or whatever. Of course, not everyone's going to identify with the crazy person in the end of the book.
Evan Rosa: So that's interesting though, that it, so much of this has to be about emotion. And it's- I find it interesting that we're thinking like, where does empathy go in a horror film and to whom, and I'm, I'm in the same boat with you on depression and anxiety, but I don't feel empathy for him. It's just such a cold threat in those empty eyes that Jack Nicholson does so well, but The Shining itself is this sort of ability of Danny, the kid, to hear what's going on, but the audience can't hear it. So you are putting the audience in a vulnerable place, not knowing what Danny's hearing, but in poor Danny's alone, he's this innocent, sweet little kid. Can't pick his parents. Can't pick his life. Just is riding his tricycle through a mansion. [audio clip from movie plays] It's that threat to innocence and that threat to purity and a threat to, to promise or hope and the worries that come along with that. And for me, I just know that, look, I can be scared in all sorts of ways, but when it comes to The Shining, it lets my mind wander, and I think it's interesting for that reason. It's always the psychological having to do with the uncanny, with the mysterious, with the unknown. And horror does an amazing job of exploiting that.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah. And it is excellent. And that's, I don't want anyone to walk by thinking Kutter doesn't like The Shining.
I quite appreciate it. It unsettled me and disturbed me and affected me, but I would say didn't terrorize me or haunt me. That I think is slightly different than some other films where I'm like, like The Blair Witch, I'm like, that just, I saw that for days.
Evan Rosa: I kicked it in the river. Oh my gosh. [audio clip from movie plays]
One of the things that comes to mind for me in thinking about horror, the dealing with mystery, unknown, the unseen, the uncanny, it easily has lent itself to religious and spiritual themes. And I find that so fascinating and I think really captured me when I heard you were doing Be Afraid, because... They do go together incredibly well, horror and theology is, it's a thing.
So I'm hoping to get a little bit from you about what, where's the inspiration there for you and looking into fear in the way that you have, through the lens of theological reflection and Christian theological perspective in particular.
Kutter Callaway: I wrote a book called The Aesthetics of Atheism a few years ago, and actually the whole first section is on horror.
And so the book was both about atheism and not in the sense of like new atheists, but this emerging sort of post secular sensibility embodied in these artifacts like uh, Stranger Things. And I was going, what do we make of this? What's happening here spiritually, religiously, in society? Because my approach as a theologian is I start with the assumption that God is up to something in the world.
Before I get there and after I leave, God is at work. If that's the case, then my main question is, well, what is God up to here in this phenomenon or this thing? Because God's up to something. And now my job is to discern, like, well, what is that? And how do I participate in that movement? And I was going, man, there are a lot of people watching a lot of horror and increasingly, right, like it's just as a theologian going, what is God up to?
But then also as a cultural anthropologist, so a lot of the stuff I do in culture is really from the anthropological stake. If I teach this, if I'm an expert specifically in TV and film and its theological applications, I don't really have a choice but to investigate this. What's going on? What are the underlying motivations and sensibilities given this phenomenon?
That's where I go, okay, let's look into it and ask, what might God be up to in a kind of open ended way? Not, ah, and that's the other thing. The key is not to go in and say, horror equals bad. So I'm going to go in and find out how to condemn or judge it. This is one particular manifestation.
Evan Rosa: So getting curious about it really.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah. And being curious instead of condemning. And in that curiosity, sometimes you do run into things where you go, okay, yeah, that's just no good. Nobody needs to watch that. Nobody, that was absurd. But even then, it's generally for me, first and foremost, an aesthetic critique. As opposed to a theological one, almost all of the films and television shows in horror genre or otherwise that I get, and I go, you know what, I think the Christian might do well to avoid that or whatever, critique it.
It's because it's a bad movie. It's bad art. Almost always. Anything else, I'm like, hey, it's open season for conversation, dialogue, etc. Okay. I think how we interact with it theologically, you can go a few directions. One. If you situate ourselves in 2023 North America, we're like post, post, post secularity.
It's the religion, and we see all the polls of everybody leaving church, etc. And that's true, but it's also true that spirituality, religion has not... It's not decreasing, it's just moved, it's shifted into other places, and I think one of those places is the theater, the couch where we're streaming things, and so part of the appeal of horror to, I think, people is they really don't have a space, in part because they're not going to the traditional places where you would do this, they don't have a space where they're grappling with mystery, with the inexplicable, with the things that happen in their life that just break all of their categories, and they don't really have any answers for it.
Now. You would think, oh, back when people used to go to traditional forms of organized religious practice, that they were doing that there, but not always, right? So even those that do go, you don't, you're not given the tools to wrestle with the inexplicable, you're usually, now this is overgeneralization, you're usually handed ways to answer and tidy up as opposed to really like lean into the, to the mystery and go, what do I make of that?
And, and sometimes the answers are unsettling, right? So I think that's one thing to go, Hey, this is an interesting phenomenon. I think in part as a reflection of sort of the collapse of organized religious adherence. But people still yearning for a place and a space for them to wrestle through these unknowns and unknowables.
Yeah. So I do both psychology and theology and there's some really interesting stuff that- William James is a guy that was the father of basically American psychology. And his earliest research was really on conversions and in and through the arts. He was like really interested in the aesthetic components of conversion stories, and they were often mystical experiences. And so some of our notions of psychology and, and how the human mind works, especially in the U. S., are rooted in what we would otherwise call maybe mysterious or not even necessarily supernatural, but paranormal. These paranormal inexplicable kind of experiences.
Preceding James, another guy named Rudolf Otto, a German, if any of you ask, theologian or, or sociologist. And you have some of these overlapping sensibilities where you go, when we talk about religious experience generically, we are often talking about something that now we call the numinous, or Otto terms it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and that's Latin for basically this overwhelming mystery that's equal parts compelling and terrifying.
And I go, ooh, that's interesting. So, you look at multiple different societies with different religious or cultural backgrounds or scaffolding, but routinely, when people are describing this encounter, it's this, it's an encounter with a presence that is overwhelming. It's like, it induces awe and we're like, ah, it's bigger than me.
But, and it's- I can't help but be drawn to it. And at the same time, it's terrifying. Like the terror is a fundamental part of that experience in part because it's so big and overwhelming and unknown. And so from that perspective, I go, huh. There's also, before we get, we land to, it's a Christian religious experience or a Muslim or a Buddhist or Zoroastrian, I don't know why I said Zoroastrian like that, but before it gets particular, there's this sort of commonality of humans experiencing and describing this kind of thing.
And so I think horror is tapping into that. There's something about being in the presence of the unknown and unknowable that we have this morbid curiosity, right? We have this desire to look, even though we're looking like this through our fingers, we can't help but look, and at the same time, it's really disturbing to us, right?
So that's another sort of inroad as to why horror, I think, maps onto theology. But then you get even more narrow, and now just specifically talking about Christianity, and I go, if we actually read honestly, our own sacred text. What we encounter over and over and over are really horrifying stories.
They're either brutally violent or graphic. They're filled with fear and anxiety and terror. And often, it's in the face of this God we claim to worship. And it's because we should be afraid of this God. If God is who God says, or we claim God to be, there's a sense in which it's like, Oh, take your sandals off, this is holy ground. And so every time either God or the angel of the Lord appears to people, the first response is terror, right? So the command. Don't be afraid is there because people are afraid. Then you get the end of Mark and this is what I did in that atheism book. I read the gospel of Mark as horror fiction and I go look at the end of the book.
The end of the book actually concludes with the women leaving the tomb terrified. Fade to black, right? There's something that is uh, terrifying, that's scary about this God who became human, who came back to life, right? There's something there, not to mention thinking, and now I'm getting super narrow, to the crux of the matter.
The thing around which Christians claim all of reality hinges is the epitome of horror. You have a, like, a brutalized body who is executed at the hands of a totalitarian state, put up for everybody to see, ultimately vulnerable, and then denounced or denied or rejected by the very God, his dad, right? Boom.
That's apparently the moment. Now, Christians say, then he resurrected, that's all true, but you don't get to any of that unless you go through what I would describe as like just extreme body horror, right? Like you're going, you got super, you got, we got all of you got the supernatural horror there. You've got body horror, you've got slashers, you've got basically, you could even say monsters if you will.
Like there's different kinds of monstrosity.
Evan Rosa: I want to talk about monsters for sure, but yeah, but psychological thriller is also...
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, it's all there. So there's two things. For us to go- for us to deny that, to ignore it and not treat it as really the horror that it is, I think does an injustice and actually mutes the light that is to come.
It like, it dulls that thing. At the same time, I go, we're in a cultural context where people are dealing day to day with just horrific stuff. This day that we're recording this, hopefully, I don't know when it will end, but we're in the midst of a renewed actual war between Hamas and Israel, and it's just, the images are horrific.
And if we think there's any chance that Christianity can speak to the horrors and the traumas of society, why would we not draw upon the very resources that our tradition has handed us to go, if you want a God who knows the trauma and horror that you're encountering, here he is. And I find that a really compelling place to start is to say, hey, God sees you in your horror, just as well as in the light and in the goodness.
Evan Rosa: I think it's interesting to think about. And this is not going to be a conversation about suffering and the problem of evil, although it's worth pointing out what is so very motivating about the problem of evil for any individual person who's asking questions about theism and atheism and God's goodness and knowledge and power is that horrors, and here I'm borrowing from a philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, who wrote a book called Christ and Horrors.
That radical vulnerability creates conditions where certain horrors threaten to utterly annihilate meaning in life.
Kutter Callaway: And then Christians say Jesus, the God who created all of that, became that. So God became, inhabited that same vulnerability.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. It's just that even sometimes silent, uh, presence of Christ that does that answer.
It's the only answer sometimes, but then it's that discovery and exploration of the horrors themselves that we can get curious about.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, what you're saying makes me think of a couple of things. One, I find really interesting in the horror genre. What I didn't answer with your earlier question was, there's also a lot of horror films, like you said, that just are explicitly religious and my goodness, if you watch any of The Conjuring.
The end of the first Conjuring ends with a quote from the guy, Ed Warren, who was a demonologist. That's basically, God is real, evil is real, full stop, right? And the Conjuring universe is the most successful horror film franchise ever. It's like over two billion dollars. So everyone's watching it and they're explicitly endorsing the God of Christianity as a response to the evil we encounter.
It's fascinating, but in the ones that I think do it best, and you see this a lot, even in the ones that aren't great. You often get characters, whether they're religious representatives or not in the films, getting to a point where essentially their only option is surrender and it often comes in the form of a kind of prayer.
Sometimes if they're religious, it's an actual prayer. Other times it's just they just start- and sometimes even riffing on like, oh wait, I feel like I saw a rite of exorcism somewhere. Should I do that? Or should I use the-? And so it's almost horror puts forth because of that, it's putting us in vulnerable situations, presses us into places where the character protagonist, whatever, and then us go, okay. It's a human thing to get to the, it basically brings us to the end of ourself. And there I, it is now undeniable that I have no other resources here to deal with it. I have to call upon something else.
Now what that something is isn't always clearly stated, but I find that really interesting because, back to the vulnerability of kids, right? Like, one of the things we do as adults, if we really walked around consciously thinking about the fact that we're going to die, and then the odds of that it's going to be sometime soon, we'd be paralyzed, right? We'd be crippled. We couldn't do anything. We come up with these tricks to basically ignore the fact that we're gonna die. And we don't really reckon with that very often. And I think it comes in the form of the kind of scripts we tell ourselves and then even our kids. And so they're coming into the bedroom or something like, I've had a nightmare, I'm scared, something. And the tendency is to go, don't worry, there's nothing to be afraid of. Ghosts aren't real. And I hear myself telling them what I actually try to tell myself, which is there's nothing to be afraid of. And I, this will come up in the pod, I can't remember which one, but I just scripted it in and I said, the problem is that's a lie.
There is something to be afraid of. They're right to be afraid. They are vulnerable. Now, the very thing that they're afraid of, that proximate thing may not be real, but they're right to be afraid. And what I'm telling them is actually what... I, as an adult, tell myself, I go around telling myself, it's not real, right?
And horror forces you to confront that, to go like, when I'm watching The Shining or I'm watching Blair Witch, I have to stop and really go, what do I actually think? What is real? What are the terrors out there that threaten my life? And am I just deluded and ignoring them? Should I be afraid? And that's a bit of where the podcast is going.
And my early ongoing, I was thinking like, oh, this passage of perfect love casts out fear, right? So like, a Christian response to fear should be something where we're eliminating fear from our lives, or eradicating it. We overcome it.
Evan Rosa: Cast it out like a demon, even.
Kutter Callaway: Exactly. We cast it out, right? But then I kept getting into all these, it's, but the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
And I was like, so maybe it's not eliminating all of this thing called fear. Because a lot of times fear is very helpful psychologically, et cetera. But maybe the problem is our fear has become misdirected. Maybe we fear the wrong things, and part of, sort of, discipleship, or the Christian life and maturity, is learning how to fear rightly.
So that our fears are not misplaced, but they're directed in ways that are life giving. And so that's my working thesis of rather than tell my kid there's nothing to be afraid of, it's what are you afraid of and how might we think differently about where we point that, what we do with it, how we leverage it.
Evan Rosa: Where I go there is, I think, very fitting for the horror genre, which is fear not him who can destroy the body, but him who can destroy the soul.
Kutter Callaway: I just, the next episode two launches, I don't know when this will come out, but there's a lot of pushback among Christians about the horror genre. And I take a quick side note and I go, but come on, let's be honest, Christians leverage fear all the time, but it's okay if it's toward like conversion.
So I go, what about the hell houses that are super popular, that are just these grotesque things that, you know, and then not only that, but there's a early 90s film, there's a bunch of different kinds, but the one that I remember and I found is called M10:28. I don't know if you've seen this, and it makes the Stranger Things look like a Disneyland.
And it's classic young girl, she might be, she's thinking about doing drugs, she might have sex, she might drink, and on the way to this party, she gets in a wreck, she goes into, uh, she basically goes to hell. And they resuscitate her, she comes back, she becomes a Christian, yay! But it's a horror movie, and it's M10:28, stands for Matthew 10:28, which is fear not, the one who can destroy the body, but the one who can destroy the body and soul.
And the point I make in the podcast is, what's tragic about that movie is not only that it's comically bad, and it's so overtly heavy handed and agenda driven, but it's also graphically violent and doing all the things that most Christians would say, yeah, I don't watch horror for. But it's also theologically backwards because the, I read that passage, not about the demonic and hell, but about God, um, fear the one who can actually destroy the only one who actually has authority to do that isn't Satan or his demons, it's God.
So back to who ought we to fear and we often misplace it. And then even our media products reflect the ways in which we've misdirected our fear. Where that whole movie is about fearing hell and Satan, as opposed to saying, we actually should place our fear to the origin of the one who can actually destroy both body and soul.
Evan Rosa: Which, and that's the kind of fear of, again, of the mysterious creator, right? That, that is both known and unknown in important ways and, and revealed and yet not revealed. Now you brought up psychology and I do want to give you a chance to go through some of that before we talk about any more films, I'm just curious to see, what have you learned about fear from a psychological perspective as you've developed this podcast?
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, there's a few things, but my theological mentor was Rob Johnson who basically started theology in film. On the psych side I studied with a guy named Justin Barrett who is one of the early folks who started this thing called cognitive science of religion, and in that realm one of the interesting things has to do with the near universal tendency for humans to infer agency to things that go bump in the night, right?
That this is actually common and that's a, an adaptive thing. So we have learned to say, okay, it's, I'm in the woods and whether or not I ever saw the Blair Witch Project, if I hear some rustling, it's to my advantage to assume that not only is that an agent, but that agent is probably out to do me harm because it could be a lion or a leopard.
If I'm wrong. And either there's nothing there or it's benevolent, no harm, no foul. But if I'm right, then I'm prepared to actually run away with my life. So it's a really important psychological mechanism that we've developed. And this is partly also why folks in cognitive science will say we get things like ghosts and spirits and whatnot.
Because we are inherent, inherently social creatures who read the thoughts and motivations of others, and so if we have this agent out there, then it's to our advantage to assume some of these things. So that's one thing as a sort of base, evolutionary foundation for why we fear some of the things we do, and why some of these movies, especially supernatural, right?
So even if you don't believe in anything spiritual or religious, you walk into a supernatural horror movie and you're still scared because psychologically you're biased toward oh, there is something there. So that then gets to the core thing that I've learned or that I think has been highlighted. So much of it is fear is a, back to William James, he'd say we don't run from a bear because we're afraid, we're afraid because we're running.
And what he means is fear is a kind of conscious description of what our body is doing. And we don't even realize it until after the fact, usually, and we're like, oh, that scared me. Why? Because, like, my heart rate went up. Sometimes I just ran. Sometimes I jumped. And I go, oh, that then is fear, as opposed to you, uh, are afraid of the bear.
It's more, I find myself backing up and running away. Oh, I must be afraid. And this is interesting because, again, it gets to some of the ways we navigate and learn how to fear. I talked to one guy, his name is Coltan Scrivner, who has a book coming out on this topic about why people are interested in horror and how is that psychologically, or rooted psychologically in our evolution.
And he has a really good metaphor that I really like, and a lot of it is learning how to deal with threats. And part of what we do in a horror film is we're practicing our threat response. So that I go into an otherwise safe place that I know isn't actually going to cause harm, and I learn how my body is going to react to the certain things that I perceive to be threats.
And he goes, think about gazelles and lions. And he said this is especially important for Adolescents and teenagers. This is why they go in groups to horror fans to be scared together and he goes if you watch antelopes out in the field in the Serengeti or whatever, they actually inhabit the same space with lions a lot and they're not always running. It's not always that they're running from the lions, but you'll see especially the young ones and maybe it's gazelles, I don't know I'm not... But, the young ones, they'll be in these times and the lions over here and here's the group and they'll kind of like together get up closer and closer and closer to the lion and then kind of back away and they're gonna you know, and then there'll be a time where boom they all run, well that's because lions are the big cats predators and they expend a lot of energy, hunting, eating, and then they just rest, right?
Like they got to chill. And it's part of what the gazelles are learning is how do I read the lion's activities in a way that helps me know when do I need to run and when do I not need to run? And it's a big part of psychologically, what, what at least these developmental psych folks are looking at is, we practice that same kind of thing in a place like a horror film.
And it's doing something similar where we're rehearsing threat response so that we can, in the real world, know how to actually respond well. And that, of course, is a very modern thing because a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, there weren't horror movies. But, we would tell stories, right?
Evan Rosa: Go to the gladiator, you know, you still go to the Coliseum, you know, you still are looking for violent entertainment.
Kutter Callaway: So that's also where I think then the storytelling comes in. So now let's say, you don't have the opportunity or the risks are too high, right? Like the risk for the gazelle is too high, you don't get too good of a life. So now humans tell stories about it.
Evan Rosa: So you bring up storytelling. One of the things I wanted to ask is the ways in which we have always as a species been looking for these opportunities for catharsis to manage our fear of death, to manage the threat of the unknown, we can go back to Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, we can explore how like looking in through the catharsis of a story that doesn't really happen to us, but gives us an opportunity to vacate our normal assumptions about, oh, life's so rational and clear cut and simple and easy.
And then we can visit the theater and we can be scared and we can feel the chills of tragedy that could befall us. And it's that ability of tragedy to open up for us a way of reflecting that does create the conditions of, of genuine threat or genuine unraveling of meaning or real evil or suffering.
And yet we don't have to, we don't have to experience necessarily the effects, the reality of it.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah. I do think it's a basic human thing, and there's a lot of theories. Some of them are just so stories about why we tell stories. But... One thing that I think a, a compelling idea is, I don't know if it's just mine or if I'm stealing it, so I don't have anyone to credit with it, so sorry if I'm plagiarizing, but, but essentially, art or storytelling, they traffic in empathy, and if you go, one of the basic things that, and this is very Augustinian, and interesting on teaching, he's really interested in like, how does a teacher pluck up some idea in his head and get it into the head of a student.
That's almost a miracle. Like what, what is up with that?
Evan Rosa: Plato thought it was just impossible, right? Or Socrates at least is represented as saying, no, actual learning is impossible. That's why you have that whole thing about reincarnation and learning is just recollection. Cause otherwise, how would you get it from one head to another?
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, it's just, it's like crazy making, and for those who are more or less philosophically inclined, it's a fun way, thing to think about. Augustine, though, says it's something like we, we, we have, what we have are signs, words, and gestures, right? And so this is his theory of communication, is that it's symbolic, it's embodied, and it's linguistic, right? We actually put words to it. Now, Augustine rooted this in the fall. I disagree there. I think it's just what is human, is that we're constantly in this sort of mediated relationship. But what is great about art and storytelling, now, it doesn't mean that sort of prosaic stuff is bad doesn't communicate anything, it's just it has a, it has its limits, and so we draw upon the poetic and the narrative and the imaginative I think to develop empathy. And what I mean by that is, the only way that you Evan- the closest approximation that you Evan could ever have to what it's like to inhabit Kutter's body is for me to give you the most viscerally charged, imaginative take that I can, for you for a moment to go, oh, that's what it feels like for him.
Not every artist is after that, but so much of our storytelling and stuff is to say, oh, I'm inhabiting another character, I'm- it's just, and those are the basic building blocks of empathy because you get to feel what it's like to be Oedipus for a moment. And you're like, oh, I don't like those feelings at all. Like what? No, thank you. And then you go, but wait, what would that be like? And given those situations and that scenario and how-
Evan Rosa: -your mind wander, yeah.
Kutter Callaway: And then you let your mind wander. And so, I think part of it, and this also is horror, here's a maybe more concrete example of the kind of higher minded thing we're talking about here, is Get Out.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, let's talk about Get Out. [audio clip from movie plays]
Kutter Callaway: What I think is so important right now, if what I just said is true, that art traffics in empathy, that horror actually makes you viscerally feel something in a safe context, but in a way that otherwise your body wouldn't feel. Now you get to a number of horror filmmakers, writers, and directors that are women and people of color.
And I think they are especially important and their work is especially important for those who are not women or people of color, because a film like Get Out- I, I think of myself, Kutter, as like a person who sincerely wants to know and know deeper and more fully the experience of being black in America and to know how I contribute negatively to that, how I might be a positive source for my students and friends and people I go to church with who have to deal with, I'm walking through the world in a black body. I can do all of the intellectual work that I want, but until I sit down, and like, I'm in the chair, [audio clip from movie plays] being horrified by this film, I don't feel it in my body in the same way. That movie disturbed me on a level that I needed to be disturbed.
And I don't think there really is a more... I'm trying to imagine another medium that could do it that effectively. And now I'm inhabiting this person's body for a moment. And that, to me, is both terrifying and shocking. [audio clip from movie plays]
And then I walk out of it going, this is Ricoeur, right? Like you go into this sort of narrative, and now you come out into this sort of reappropriated world. Paul Ricoeur, he works a lot in narrative. And he has three stages. And one is a pre-understanding. So what do I know about the world before I go into this narrative?
Then there's a mesas or configuration, like I'm inhabiting the world of the story. And so that would be like, if you get fully immersed in the film or the novel you're reading, and then after that, the narrative does something where you then move out of the narrative world and back into your world of everyday life.
And that is what he would call the re-, either re-appropriated world. And that's where the narrative, each narrative gives us an opportunity to basically redescribe our reality in light of what we've encountered in the movie or in the story.
Evan Rosa: Which is such a valuable, I mean, like that is so valuable to all of us, right?
That's, it describes so much of what feels good about seeing a movie at all.
Kutter Callaway: And to each of us, it's going to land a little differently. And sometimes- this is the invitation I think a film like Get Out gives us is it's almost then like a dare. It's because it's like you don't walk out of that not feeling something.
You feel something. Now the question is, it's the question of in the gospel, what then should we do, right? I can accept or reject that invitation. And that is where you get people that either think it's all rubbish or horrible or people that are like this changed my life. Or maybe even worse, they just don't- they ignore it, right?
But I do think part of the power of that and the horror genre is for different people who encounter the world on a daily basis as a horror story, horror gives a really great place where those who don't inhabit those same bodies can experience that for just a little bit. And that, and so maybe that is a little more of just a personal thing for me to go, I really value that. [audio clip from movie plays]
Evan Rosa: I think we would be missing something if we didn't talk about The Exorcist a little bit, and here's where like the spirituality and religious element is just on its face and overt that, yeah, fear not who can destroy the body, but he who can destroy both the body and the soul, absolutely. You had a wonderful explanation of that passage, but it's utterly, utterly scary.
You, I think I'm right in saying that you said this tops your list of scariest film.
Kutter Callaway: It did for a while. Mainly because of reputation. I just didn't watch it. I refused to watch it. Cause I knew if I'm like, if Blair Witch messes me up, I can't do The Exorcist, right? I only recently watched it like 18 months ago.
And so the good news is like with all things, it's about expectations. I- because I had made it so much up in my mind of what it was going to be, it wasn't as bad as I thought, but it's still pretty intense. I, what I think I appreciated most about it is that it's actually just a really interesting movie, and again, some of the horror films I actually like the most are made by what I would call filmmakers first, who are making a horror movie.
So that's The Shining, right? Kubrick isn't a horror filmmaker, he's just like an- and then he went and made this movie as well. But the interesting thing about The Exorcist is that it's, it's slow, like by modern standards, if you sit down and watch, it's not a, it's quiet, actually. And then you get these intense outbursts, right? These moments where you're like, whoa, what? And all of that, and there is this interesting, to your point of like, mystery and stuff, I hadn't thought about this until I interviewed Scott Derrickson about it, because there's a director's cut where the two, um, priests go out and sit, they like, take a break from one of the exorcisms, and they talk about what's happening, and they're asking like, this question of like, why this girl and why- it's the odyssey question, but also it's the, it seems especially bad because it's a young person.
Why her? Why this? Why would God allow it? And, and there's some explanation given. It's basically, Satan wants us to think we're unlovable, basically. Like we're just animals that how could God love us? Okay, it's an interesting part. I think it's in the novel. It's in Blatty's novel, but it wasn't in the original cut, and according to Derrickson, he likes the original cut because he thinks that scene attempts to explain something that needs to be mysterious and inexplicable. And he goes, part of the power of it, and I think part of the power of just evil or acknowledging evil is a kind of fundamental mystery. And what I mean isn't that it's like any mystery. It doesn't mean that there is no explanation, but it's rather it exhausts our explanations like it exceeds that it's more and deeper than our ability to explain however we might come up, so we can come up with some decent theodicies right? Like that I go okay that I get that but if we pretend or fool ourselves thinking any theodicy is going to fully explain a possession of a young girl- we're idiots, right?
So I think that I, so I like that of Derrickson's point of going, yeah, there's something important about leaving that mystery there of forcing us not to walk out going, okay, I get it. But instead inviting us in to going, man, evil really is a mystery. It's both very real. It's undeniable. And no matter what you make of religiously, it is mysterious.
And- Actually, I invert- I don't know if I've ever heard, uh, talked to you about this, but, or you've heard me say it, but I actually have less trouble on the lines of theodicy and I don't know why. I actually think for the secularist, right? I think the burden of proof is actually on the non-theist to explain beauty.
And what I mean by that is, given the horrors that we see, the real world actual horrors of suffering, of trauma, of chaos, of catastrophe, over and over again, my question is, how dare you, when it comes to beauty, how dare you say something, one, even bother with it, much less dare to say that there's something in this world that's beautiful in light of this overwhelming amount of suffering.
I think you need to, I think you need to figure out how to justify beauty given horror if, and the only way I've come up with that is some sort of theistic response. Without that, I find, I don't know. I don't have a good reason. When I watch The Exorcist, I'd go, I don't know how to respond to evil and the beauty that comes out of it.
So the beauty that comes out of it, I think at the end, and this is where if people haven't seen it, and again, it's been 50 years, so it's spoiler alert, but a beautiful depiction of self-sacrifice. It is, it's like, there's not a, a broad- Pauline Kael, film critic, said this is like the best advertisement for the Catholic Church in decades.
Because it's, hey, evil's real, and the calling of Christian vocation has something to say, like addresses it, and here's how. And that is really compelling, I think. And it's both explicitly religious, and it's also deeply Christian film, and terrifying.
Evan Rosa: Compelling's a good word. There. Because the power of Christ does in fact compel. [audio clip from movie plays]
Evan Rosa: I think that's a really insightful read and it's fascinating again how there's this- that in the response, in this gaping response of inexplicability or mystery, or what we think of as horror, as something that threatens to annihilate us, it's still that human connection at the end of the film. It's the willingness to sacrifice and to lift up the humanity of, of really, of both, of both the little girl and the priest that says, take me instead.
And, and it's just interesting. That is, it seems recognizable that it is in fact a response, that there's something there's, there is something satisfying in the denouement there. There's something that, that does appear to wrap it up, that, that, that human connection is a beautiful thing. And, and the banding together of friends is a beautiful thing.
And the saving of human life is- it feels satisfying in that sense.
Kutter Callaway: Yep. Yeah, I'm with you. [audio clip from movie plays]
Evan Rosa: Are horror films beautiful?
Kutter Callaway: Some, if we ask the same question of just movies in general, there'd be some that high art aesthetites would say is rubbish. What are you talking about? This is low culture, mass culture, no. So I respond and say, it's probably, or I think it is unfair to speak and generalize for the whole genre, because of course there are some that are just ugly, crass, no good. Nobody should watch them. And the same could be said, I believe, for Hot Tub Time Machine 2. What? But there are some really excellent examples of the genre that I would describe as beautiful. Now, what I would mean by that is maybe it's a McCourt Adams version or another scholar that I really find helpful her name is Cecilia González-Andrieu. Um, wrote a book called A Bridge to Wonder and it's on theological aesthetics. I can't remember if it's in a book of hers or a lecture, but she talks about, she says the opposite of beauty is not ugliness. The opposite of beauty is glamour. And she says the question of what, how you know which is glamorous things are inward turning and solipsistic and self infatuated.
Beautiful things spin outward and ultimately point you to, now she's Roman Catholic, to capital B beauty, right? This is her vision. And so sometimes things that are horrific and disturbing and terrifying point you toward the beautiful. And the cross would be a perfect example where we can rightly describe the cross as beautiful. It's not pleasing or pleasant by any stretch of the imagination, but it is beautiful because it's, it is pointing to something that we would describe as capital B beauty in an ultimate sense. And so, the best of horror films, when they're, when they exceed at this, and they exceed at the, both the genre, what it offers, and the hands of a great storyteller, I think do something similar.
Now, do I think they're the same as the Cross, no, don't hear it, I'm not equating them, but they make a similar gesture, similar move, where we could say, yeah, some just get caught up in, I haven't seen it yet, but Saw 10, there is a 10th installation of Saw. Saw 1 might have been an interesting thing, but Saw 2 through 9, I'm like, at a certain point, this is just gratuitous.
It's just, what? But, so that, you know, is the more glamorous, I think, could be an example. Or there's another one, Terrifier 2 came out, everyone was like, don't ever watch. But some of these others, I think, are really deeply disturbing, like the cross is disturbing, but they're pointing us towards something that I would say is beautiful. They don't always answer what that is, but they certainly set us up to, to go there and create the possibilities for that. And so in that case, I would be comfortable calling a number of them beautiful.
Evan Rosa: Kutter, thanks so much. I think, I think you've done something really interesting here in bringing more, more of these artifacts together. Horror films, Christian reflection, and the psychology of being afraid, and so I'm excited to see where this podcast goes. Thanks a lot.
Kutter Callaway: Yeah, me too. Stay tuned because it's going to get fun.
Evan Rosa: Insert jump scare.
Kutter Callaway: That's right.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian and film critic Kutter Calloway. You can listen to Be Afraid wherever you listen to podcasts. Production assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show.
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