Spiritual Horror

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma

Religion and spirituality provide great fodder for horror fiction because most strains of religion and spirituality are bizarre and horrifying themselves; whether they be taken literally or allegorically. The Greek, Norse, and Judeo-Christian myths are especially terrible

I use Christianity a lot in my stories. It's honestly far more frightening to me than the Cthulhu Mythos. There is a certain amount of dark awe in there, too. Damnation is strangely beautiful to me, and I have grown to love old churches this past year. They're ideological gravestones. I'm less interested in atheist materialist horror. The possibility of damnation is ideally the background mythos, which is why ghost stories are more interesting to me than the Cthulhu Mythos. Non-existence isn't scary to me. I've already been there.

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Laird Barron, as poor of a writer I find him to be, had a moment of insight when he called the Bible to be the greatest horror story ever written.

I think he's an OK writer. Not a favourite of mine, but not a poor one. Sort of a more consistent Joe Pulver, but without the heights. You should read Nicole Cushing's The Sadist's Bible if you want a good modern horror piece with a strong theological bent. Mark Samuels' The Grandmaster's Final Game and Reggie Oliver's Rapture are good also – even if the latter tale is sceptical.

[Auditor]

Not much to add except that I love me some spiritual horror, maybe because I'm from the south and the G-man still looms heavy around these parts. I think that's why O'Connor and McCarthy write some of my favorite stories. The former, especially, is very adept at showing the absurd lengths people with (or at odds with) spiritual beliefs can fall.


I'm not religious, but something tells me that I would be a better writer if I were frightened of some kind of metaphysical retribution.

[Druidic]

Here's the thing: we know the universe runs on ironclad laws (for all practical purposes) so it isn't something a God, benign or evil, would create. No supernatural miracles, folks. Lovecraft had it right. Why add the superfluous?

Lovecraft saved my life, but I personally have no idea how this universe operates. My brain throws me psychotic episodes and hallucinations, so my perception of science is clearly not wholly reliable. For all I know I was born 5 minutes ago, my sense of self history is a delusion, the idea of matter is erroneous and water is poison to all humans.

I have no idea what is happening. I am measuring the laws of the universe with a series of instruments in my brain that would have been insufficient even if they weren't broken. Even if my sense of recorded history is correct, it mostly tells me that at every point in history humanity have been wrong about almost everything.

[Mr. Veech]

Quote Originally Posted by Auditor

Not much to add except that I love me some spiritual horror, maybe because I'm from the south and the G-man still looms heavy around these parts. I think that's why O'Connor and McCarthy write some of my favorite stories. The former, especially, is very adept at showing the absurd lengths people with (or at odds with) spiritual beliefs can fall. I'm not religious, but something tells me that I would be a better writer if I were frightened of some kind of metaphysical retribution.

I feel you. Texas here.

[ChildofOldLeech]

Several passages possibly pertinent to the subject at hand:

"This great evil, where's it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might've known? Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?"

- The Thin Red Line, Terence Malick

All the Roary Night

It's dark out, Jack
The stations out there don't identify themselves
We're in it raw-blind, like burned rats
It's running out
All around us
The footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of
The white and vacant eyes
Of something above there
Something that doesn't know we exist
I smell heartbreak up there, Jack
A heartbreak at the center of things -
And in which we don't figure at all

- Kenneth Patchen

[miguel1984]

That quote from The Thin Red Line is one of my favorites quotes ever.

I mean, "Robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might've known?"

Priceless.

[Raul Urraca]

As a rube from the depths of Tennessee, I have a fascination with the horror of religion. I recently wrote a piece of black comedy about religious despair/self-abuse, and a voyeuristic deity figures into the plot. I took inspiration from these two poems which might be relevant to our present purposes:

IT was far in the sameness of the wood;
I was running with joy on the Demon’s trail,
Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.
It was just as the light was beginning to fail
That I suddenly heard—all I needed to hear:
It has lasted me many and many a year.

The sound was behind me instead of before,
A sleepy sound, but mocking half,
As of one who utterly couldn’t care.
The Demon arose from his wallow to laugh,
Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went;
And well I knew what the Demon meant.

I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.
I felt as a fool to have been so caught,
And checked my steps to make pretence
It was something among the leaves I sought
(Though doubtful whether he stayed to see).
Thereafter I sat me against a tree.
-Robert Frost, The Demiurge's Laugh

AS evening shaped I found me on a moor
Which sight could scarce sustain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.

"This scene, like my own life," I said, "is one
Where many glooms abide;
Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun--
Lightless on every side.

I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught
To see the contrast there:
The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,
"There's solace everywhere!"

Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood
I dealt me silently
As one perverse--misrepresenting Good
In graceless mutiny.

Against the horizon's dim-descernèd wheel
A form rose, strange of mould:
That he was hideous, hopeless, I could feel
Rather than could behold.

"'Tis a dead spot, where even the light lies spent
To darkness!" croaked the Thing.
"Not if you look aloft!" said I, intent
On my new reasoning.

"Yea--but await awhile!" he cried. "Ho-ho!--
Look now aloft and see!"
I looked. There, too, sat night: Heaven's radiant show
Had gone. Then chuckled he.
-Thomas Hardy, A Meeting With Despair

[DarkView]

"The blatting of car horns and the rumble of engines, some screaming and others mumbling, one after another, rips me out of sleep. I am always surprised to hear the ugly sounds, for they speak to the will to want to keep making them--something I cannot fathom and the cause of immense dread in its inscrutability. In those slow moments after waking, I face the unadorned white wall. The mind slips on its surface as there is nothing to latch onto, and those moments slip into longer and longer moments, eventually stretching out to the rest of life. It is all the white wall, there is nothing to take stock of, and I am made aware of the thing behind the white wall, jeering at everyone; that thing that has no name and is no god." An excerpt from a short story of mine.

[vardalek]

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma

Religion and spirituality provide great fodder for horror fiction because most strains of religion and spirituality are bizarre and horrifying themselves; whether they be taken literally or allegorically. The Greek, Norse, and Judeo-Christian myths are especially terrible; and Laird Barron, as poor of a writer I find him to be, had a moment of insight when he called the Bible to be the greatest horror story ever written.

Odd then that a lot of "The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All" deals with Satanism. Not a fan of his either, but I agree with what he said about the Bible. Christianity is far more terrifying to me than most of the usual, generic thoughts surrounding the occult and diabolism.

To quote Stenbock, "No emotion is more inrooted and intense in the minds of common people than hatred and fear of anything 'strange.'"
What's stranger than the New Testament? And common people believe in that, and many other religions widely accepted as normal.