How I Learned to Love Supernatural Horror

If you would have told me back in 2016, the year Stranger Things came out, that nine years later I would be a big fan and deeply annoyed that it’s taking so long for the final season to drop (synchronize your watches for November 26!), I would not have believed you. It was clearly going to be too scary for my taste. Yet now I love it. And not only, as a 1980 baby from Indiana, for its Midwestern '80s nostalgia and the goofy way it plays with the Cold War. I also love the show for its engagement with weird psychic powers exploited by evil government and corporate actors, and for the terrifying monsters born of the twisted mirror dimension known as the Upside Down.

When I was younger, though, I would have looked at you like you had three heads if you’d told me that, someday, a film like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners would be one of my favorites (to be sure as much for its fascinating historical depiction of Black culture in the Jim Crow South and its killer soundtrack as for its intriguing take on vampirism, but still). In the past, when something possessed me (so to speak) to watch The Omen or The Ring, or I even caught just a bit of The Exorcist on TV, I would find myself anxious for days or even weeks, afraid of the dark, afraid to get out of bed at night to go the bathroom, etc.

And I’m not talking about when I was five. Back then, I was scared of that wonky 1977 cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit where Bilbo is inexplicably as orange as an Oompa Loompa—and also scared of about fifty bazillion other things. I’m pretty sure I was in my twenties before I watched any actual horror movie in its entirety, and the fear they conjured in me was genuinely debilitating. It’s rather embarrassing to admit, but it’s the truth.

For the creepy-curious scaredy-cats out there, here's how I got over my fear of fear and, beyond that, why I’ve come to find so much meaning in horror.

In spite of that, these days, much of my television and film diet consists of supernatural horror, and I suffer no adverse consequences. I even find that I often laugh when I’m surprised by a jump scare or a sudden spatter of “blood” from a monstrous maiming. I’m still making my way through the final seasons of Supernatural, which often opens with these sorts of scenes. It came out in 2005, back when seasons were still long, kids had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow, and Donald Trump was just some reality TV doofus. The show got a bit tired for me several seasons ago (I’m on 12), and there are fifteen seasons of this shit to slog through. But as cringe as Supernatural can sometimes be, I will finish it, dammit. 

In my view, the show’s most redeeming value lies in its high degree of self-awareness and hilarious meta-commentary on genre fiction and fandoms, but I enjoy the various ghosts and monsters and lore for their own sake as well. On the subject of self-awareness: I’ve been trying for years now to figure out why and how I’ve changed from being someone incapable of watching a film like Sinners or a show like Supernatural without serious emotional fallout to being someone who actually likes watching that sort of thing and is just fine afterward.

While this has been a personal journey, the social and cultural context that shaped my sensibilities has implications well beyond one exvangelical trans girl who, at 45, is still behind on pop culture and having fun getting caught up.

I'm sure I'm not alone among Americans who were raised evangelical but later rejected that abusive faith tradition. This is anecdotal, but I find we tend either to love all things spooky and embrace supernatural horror, or to be simply incapable of handling horror. Paradoxically, both trajectories are natural results of our fear-based upbringings—and I’m living proof that it’s possible to move from the one to the other, if anyone out there in Reader Land is hoping to learn to love horror. Let me be clear: It’s perfectly okay if you don’t like it and have no interest in learning to like it. But for the creepy-curious scaredy-cats out there, here's how I got over my fear of fear and, beyond that, why I’ve come to find so much meaning in horror.

Christianity, Fear, and Doubt

I use that phrase “fear of fear” quite deliberately. It’s one of what I've observed to be the two most deep-seated fears of evangelicals and other fundamentalists, the other being the fear of death. Horror causes us to confront both.

The thing about fear is that it is intimately related to doubt. After all, doubt, which is literally anathema to true-believing Christians and dogmatic ideologues of any type, often gives birth to fear—fear that something good will not materialize or that something bad will happen or that we will face terrible consequences for having believed and acted on false information—and fear in turn can become a source for more doubt.

It's a vicious cycle. Doubt leads to fear, fear leads to doubt, and neither doubt nor fear are acceptable states for a true-believing Christian to be in. At the same time, those who take their faith seriously often become so obsessed with being “saved” that they cannot help but doubt. The result is often an unhealthy repression, which can lead to defensiveness, acting out, and even violence.

There’s a sort of paradox to hardcore Christianity. When you’re in it, you are constantly “claiming” Bible verses about being “strong and courageous” and “more than conquerors” and having “the peace that passes all understanding”; or about forgiveness and redemption and being inseparable from the love of god. At the same time, you must never forget that “working out your salvation” involves “fear and trembling,” but of course you also can’t show too much fear, lest that betray a lack of sufficient faith.

It’s a (literal) hell of a head trip, being raised to believe in very real demons.

There’s always something off about people who feel compelled to affirm the same things over and over—at least apart from the context of mantras, meditation, and mindfulness practices that encourage self-awareness. Sometimes referred to as the paradox of affirmation, this habit typically indicates that everything is not in fact copacetic under the surface. Of course, any acknowledgement of that inner uncertainty and turmoil sparks intense anxiety in the dogmatic zealot, so the tendency is to double down. If you want to raise someone to suffer from this kind of neuroticism (please don’t), conservative Christianity is a terrific way to achieve your goal.

It’s a (literal) hell of a head trip, being raised to believe in very real demons, the possibility of eternal conscious torment after death, and an apocalypse that could happen any day now, all served up with a heavy emphasis on obedience and a heaping portion of divinely ordained corporal punishment to keep you on the straight and narrow. For a highly sensitive child with a scrupulous personality, in fact, it’s severely traumatizing.

Some of my early childhood memories consist of crying in bed at night, praying for salvation over and over again in case somehow my last 57 attempts at "asking Jesus into my heart" hadn’t taken. Then, as a teenager, I became convinced that by breaking my stupid promise to god to stop masturbating, I had committed the unpardonable sin and would burn in hell forever no matter what I did from that point forward. I walked around with a palpable lump of anxiety in my chest for a week until some of the Christian authority figures in my life were finally able to talk me down.

That it was masturbation that caused me such distress as a teenager is hardly accidental. Hardline Christianity has a very long history of sexual repression (thanks, Paul and Augustine!). It was surely in large part due to fear of sin and hell that I was unable to recognize, let alone accept and begin integrating, my own queer identity until I was 33—the same age as Jesus when he was crucified, supposedly.

I stopped intellectually believing in hell in my early twenties, but long after that I remained saddled with a number of Christian fears, hangups, and habits of mind. Only when I was able to—gradually, in fits and starts—jettison that evangelical baggage through therapy and serious self-work did the fear begin to fade. When I realized I was transgender, that fear of hell that remained dissipated entirely, which stunned me at the time and continues to fascinate me. That fear, I suppose, was the engine of my sexual and gender repression; breaking through the repression broke the fear. And that paved the way, eventually, for me to learn to love the macabre.

The instilling of entrenched fears in evangelical children, and evangelical parents’ frequent refusal to allow their children to talk openly about many kinds of fear and doubt, are probably at the root of many evangelicals’ and former evangelicals’ inability to deal with horror. But being explicitly socialized (as we are in many cases) to reject horror and Halloween as “demonic” and “dangerous” undoubtedly also has something to do with it. For many who leave the church, I suppose it’s natural to revel in the spooky as so much finally accessible forbidden fruit, but for others, the lingering fear of fear and/or inculcated values remain a serious barrier.

Reactionary Christians and the Mirror of Horror

I’m convinced that throughout the entire unpleasant history of Christendom, no one has achieved a higher degree of neuroticism than early Protestant reformer Martin Luther—but that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying. When I started my PhD program, I told a new friend from my cohort that my hobby was having existential crises. I came by it honestly, as an intellectual and emotional heir of post-Reformation Christianity.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about and have a masochistic streak, I highly recommend reading Luther’s polemic against Desiderius Erasmus, in which the contemptible zealot castigates the famed Renaissance humanist over the latter’s reluctance to accept dogmatic assertions, certainty, and the theological impossibility of free will. According to Luther, Christians must “delight in assertions” in order to have “comfortable certainty” of their salvation. He repeats the phrase “comfortable certainty” so many times that the text, published under the wonderful title On the Bondage of the Will, feels deeply uncertain and uncomfortable, belying an almost weirdly erotic tension. 

Luther’s obsessive need for his divine daddy to have everything—and I mean everything—under control oozes from every page of On the Bondage of the Will. And I am clearly a twisted individual, because this strident theological treatise contains some of my favorite passages in the entire early modern western canon. (Seriously—check it out, you pervs.)

In any case, acknowledging uncertainty and discomfort is impossible for a Christian in Luther’s mold, who is trying so hard to convince himself that he is right, because he must be right, because the consequences of him being wrong are too horrifying to consider. Oddly enough, Luther himself acknowledged that this kind of dogmatic Christianity, which insists on changing the world, can and does lead to violence, whereas Erasmus hoped to calm tensions by espousing a more tolerant theology.

Even the devil can quote scripture, especially if the devil was raised evangelical and forced to memorize a shit-ton of verses.

With his insistence on seeing only god’s will in the Catholic vs. Protestant religious wars of his Europe, Luther reminds me of nothing so much as the character Beverly Keane (played by Samantha Sloyan) in the 2021 Netflix horror series Midnight Mass. Representing Christianity’s shadow side, Keane’s dogmatism and lust for power through being the best, most pious Christian possible lead her to embrace vampirism as a “divine miracle,” ultimately dooming her entire island community to a cataclysmic end.

Like any good form of storytelling, horror often shines a spotlight on hypocrisy. Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, have a long history of covering up hypocrisy and abuse because they often lead to doubt. 

Here we see, I think, one of the fundamental reasons conservative Christians are so intolerant of horror. Western supernatural horror has proven largely incapable of breaking out of a Christian mold. But in introducing the monstrous, the shadows, and the ambiguity inherent in the genre (and more broadly in myth), horror often undermines Christian values and beliefs even as it reinforces the faith as a framework for engaging the human condition.

Horror also reminds us that death—possibly a grisly death—will come to both the just and the unjust. “And who knows if the human spirit rises upward?” (That’s from Ecclesiastes, my favorite book of the Bible. Even the devil can quote scripture, especially if the devil was raised evangelical and forced to memorize a shit-ton of verses.)

Take recent interpretations of vampirism as an example.

In both Midnight Mass and Sinners, it’s nearly impossible to come away without the thought that it’s often Christian individuals (Bev Keane), institutions (the Catholic Church) and groups (the very Protestant Ku Klux Klan and the white colonizers who forced Christianity on African people they enslaved) that are the real vampires in our otherwise mundane world. I was particularly intrigued by how Sinners portrays even the Black Church as morally ambiguous, whereas the blues—that sinful devil’s music according to guitar prodigy Sammie Moore’s (Miles Caton) pastor father—is represented as authentically Black and capable of healing the people it belongs to, though it is also morally ambiguous. At its best, horror eviscerates dogmatic black-and-white thinking, leaving us to ponder life in the shades of gray that Christian zealots cannot abide.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Supernatural Horror

Catholic Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is, as you might guess, not a fan of horror. In his monumentally long monograph A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)—one of the many academic works lamenting the “world we have lost” and shouting “alas, wasn’t everything better when people actually believed in things” that too many ostensibly secular scholars take far too seriously—Taylor crankily opines that “our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane” for going “to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson.”

As Taylor so helpfully mansplains explains, “You can’t get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.” You know, like back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was terrified of demons the sixteenth century. Put aside the point that genuine fear does not give us exciting thrills, though I think it’s overstated. With one crotchety swipe of his pen here, Taylor reduces the entire modern genre of horror to something we do for a cheap “frisson,” a word choice undoubtedly derived either from his being Canadian or being a stuffy academic—I’m not sure which. 

When I was still a conservative Christian myself, I might have nodded along here—after looking up “frisson” in the nearest dictionary, admittedly. But now I can only wonder if Taylor has ever actually read or viewed any horror (and also if he’s ever pondered how the continued existence of people terrified of literal demons might impact his argument). I also wonder how a scholar of Taylor’s experience and erudition can fail to acknowledge the role of scary stories in the European cultures with which he’s primarily concerned—since long before their Christianization! Yule, after all, is older than Christmas (its de-Paganized form conjured up by the Catholic Church), and traditional Yule celebrations are rife with scary stories.

Disdain for, and fear of, horror was a part of the background of my childhood and youth. Indeed, at least one of my Christian school English teachers pooh-poohed even straight-up fantasy as largely unworthy of attention—even J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, those most Christian of Oxford fantasists who are widely loved by Protestants and Catholics and sometimes just ordinary nerds (though the nerds tend to prefer Tolkien to Lewis because Tolkien's work, unlike Lewis's, is more than just Christian propaganda). It was almost as if my teacher thought that fantasy somehow comes at the expense of reality in some kind of bizarre zero-sum game, and she certainly thought that only proper literary fiction dealing with realistic human situations can be edifying.

But just as Taylor ignores the existence of horror as frisson-producing amusement in the distant past, my English teacher was blind to the power of imaginative myth both to soothe the soul and to shed light on key matters of our human lives—often by exploring the shadow side of the human condition, which we must integrate in one way or another if we want to work toward being psychologically healthy individuals.

At its best, horror eviscerates dogmatic black-and-white thinking, leaving us to ponder life in the shades of gray that Christian zealots cannot abide.

What I ultimately learned about horror as I tested the waters and, later, dove right in, is that it is indeed often edifying, to use that stodgy Christianish word, as well as fun. It’s given me new ways to think about serious human problems in addition to some needed escapism from a world in which latter-day Christian crusaders pose a very real and increasing threat to queer people like me. Horror is as enriching as any form of entertainment, and it goes as deep (Sinners) or as shallow (Supernatural) as its creators choose to make it. At this stage in my life, I’ve come to love the genre for those reasons—and probably also precisely because western horror often subverts the Christianity of my youth, even if it rarely if ever transcends Christianity entirely. 

It wasn’t easy for me to get here, because the Christianity I was raised in saddled me with self-hatred, fear of fear, and fear of death. If you can relate to that, I’m sorry. I've been there. But I’m glad I’ve arrived here, now, in a place where consuming horror helps me overcome those fears by facing them in an engaging format. It’s not merely about the “frisson.” It’s about being human, being mortal, and letting go of the black and white certainty that Christianity claims makes us safe, when in fact it only makes us less stable and more prone to controlling and destructive behaviors.

And okay, sometimes I suppose it is just for fun (suck it, Charles Taylor). And on that note, I’m off to watch more of Supernatural season 12. Catch you on the other side, so to speak.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by s.e. smith.