The twentieth century is being called one of the bloodiest and most horrific periods in history. As the century comes to a close more and more is being written about the catastrophic realities of two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, Communist China and the continuing crises of the so-called Third World. The devastating record continues into the present decade with Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan and the Middle East not to mention the violence and, with the example of Oklahoma City, the emergence of home grown terrorism in the United States as well. The realities of violence and inhuman behavior are the subjects of increasing concern among politicians, educators and philosophers. Satan himself is becoming a focus of academic interest in some of our most elite universities (see for example Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan and Andrew Delbanco’s The Death of Satan: How Americans have lost the sense of Evil). These are part of an increasing discussion in which secular humanism and traditional liberalism have long ceased to have any significant influence. The list of irrational cruelty has simply grown too long.
As evangelical Christians who have traditionally held to a biblical sense of sin and human depravity, the present discussion about violence and even evil itself should be an obvious occasion for our offering some interpretation and indeed some hope. After all, we more than anyone else should not be surprised at the bloody face of the modern world. We know that “people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19 NRSV). At the same time we need to speak to the specific context of our present culture. The gospel message must always be directed to the concrete realities of the Jerusalem or Samaria in which we live. It is well, always, to ask where is the gospel already starting to penetrate our culture? One of the few signs of the continuing impact of the Word of God on our secular, post-modern, and now increasingly pagan world, may be found in our century’s enduring fascination with the classic horror film.
Inescapably film, along with television and video, represents one of the major cultural expressions of the twentieth century and one which evangelical Christians have still not totally appreciated. Yet, if we are to overcome the pervasive “scandal of the evangelical mind” we need to come to terms with the social significance of film as perhaps the most pervasive and important art form of our time. I can imagine someone agreeing to the importance of film in general, but the horror film? Aren’t horror films with their often attendant sex and violence a major example of the problem with violence and indeed evil? Horror films truly are symptoms of the problem, but, like the diagnosis of pervasive illness, they can provide us with important information which, while not particularly pleasant, may nonetheless be true. My concern is not ultimately with horror films in general but rather with classic or more precisely Gothic horror films. The fact is that the Gothic horror tradition comes out of a profoundly Christian context.
The origin of the Gothic horror tale goes back to the eighteenth century which, not coincidentally, witnessed the birth of the modern era. The Modern period is easily traced to the movement called the Enlightenment in European history. The Enlightenment witnessed the birth of secularism and liberalism. This was unmistakably a new era in human history and culture. It embraced a basic faith in the goodness of human nature and a confidence in human reason and science as the gateway to all truth. The major thinkers of the Enlightenment include David Hume, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Johann von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (admittedly all white males but that in itself says something about the period).
The most influential figure in eighteenth century Europe may well have been Jean Jacques Rousseau who both embraced and critiqued aspects of the Enlightenment. Rousseau is notable for his absolute denial of the Christian doctrine of sin and his belief in the essential goodness and perfectibility of human beings in their “natural,” i.e. uncivilized state. Rousseau denied even the possibility of divine revelation, espousing instead a general “civil religion” emphasizing sentiment and morality rather than doctrines or creeds. Rousseau insisted he believed in God but his was essentially a god who was identified with nature itself. According to Karl Barth, Rousseau, among other things, is the true father of theological liberalism.
One of Rousseau’s disciples was an English writer and political theorist named William Godwin. Godwin embraced many of Rousseau’s views, including his confidence in the innate reasonableness and perfectibility of human nature. Godwin’s wife was the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. More importantly, his daughter was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future mistress to the poet Lord Byron, eventually second wife to Percy Shelley and author of the most famous of all Gothic horror novels, Frankenstein.
The Gothic novel appears in England during the Enlightenment and is notable for challenging most of its assumptions. The characters in Gothic novels were often clearly sinful figures who suffered for their rebellion against a very real supernatural God. Confidence in human rationality and goodness in the Gothic novel was presented as an illusion which invited disaster. Very few of the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century (e.g. The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk) are known and read today. These works are important primarily as precursors to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was barely nineteen years old. The theme of the book essentially contradicts the views of her father and other Enlightenment thinkers. It is tempting to see Mary’s work as a young feminist protest against the ideals of a group of middle aged men. There have indeed been several studies of Mary Shelley from a feminist perspective. Nevertheless, Frankenstein is particularly striking as a novel with clear theological and philosophical implications. The book’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a young scientist who believes he can create a perfect man. The result is a knowledgeable but tormented creature whose murderous frustration finally destroys Frankenstein and all those close to him. The subtitle of the book is The Modern Prometheus. The implication is clear. Frankenstein, like Prometheus and of course Adam, has rebelled against heaven. The novel also includes several references to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Frankenstein, like Lucifer, has committed the ultimate blasphemy. He has rebelled against God by usurping God’s place and he pays the terrible price for his sin. All the essential themes of the Enlightenment, the basic goodness and perfectibility of human beings, the trust in science, the identification of god with the natural order, are severely questioned in Frankenstein. The novel Frankenstein is far more than a horror tale. It is an allegory about the spiritual dangers of unlimited confidence in human reason, goodness and science. It is hard to imagine a single work of fiction which more completely predicts the coming crises of the twentieth century.
The influence of Frankenstein in our century has been more evident in film than in literature. The story has been filmed in some form in every decade of the twentieth century beginning with the 1910 version by Thomas Edison and continuing through Kenneth Branaugh’s 1994 version. What is even more notable is the way the filming of Frankenstein coincides with motion picture versions of four other nineteenth century Gothic novels. In a fifteen year period of the late Victorian era in Britain, 1886-1901, four immensely popular influential novels were written with strong Gothic themes. These include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. What is striking about these four British Gothic tales is that they appear at a time when Enlightenment assumptions about modernity are largely unquestioned.
At the dawn of the present century, optimistic beliefs in human goodness and perfectibility along with widely held views about the benefits of science and technology were virtual assumptions. Prominent evangelicals of this period such as Benjamin Warfield in America, James Orr in Scotland, Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands, Martin Kähler in Germany and C.H. Spurgeon in England were clearly going against the tide with their orthodox views of sin and salvation by grace alone. Yet, this was the same world view reflected in these Gothic novels. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Wilde’s Dorian Gray strongly questioned the dominant view of the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature. Dracula explicitly challenged a rational view of reality that denied the supernatural and, indeed, placed a strong emphasis on the power of the cross to defeat the forces of evil. These three novels, like Frankenstein, used explicit biblical and theological imagery in telling their stories. The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, likewise combines an atmosphere of intense human cruelty with an emphasis on the supernatural. Despite the story’s rational ending, it is the one occasion when Holmes, the master of deductive logic, admits he is perhaps being asked to take on “the Father of Evil himself.”
What is especially intriguing about these classic Gothic novels is that they have been filmed as a group on no less than five separate occasions in the twentieth century. The first cycle takes place in Germany beginning just before the advent of the First World War and continuing through the upheavals of the 1920’s. While Frankenstein is not filmed by name during this period, the story Der Golem which is strongly similar (a Jewish rabbi brings a statuette to life which quickly takes on a destructive life of its own) appears twice on the German screen, once in 1914 and again in 1920. Including Der Golem then, all five English Gothic classics are filmed in Germany in less than a decade, from 1914 to 1922. Film scholars such as Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner have noted that these films and others with similar Gothic themes (such as the highly influential Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) prefigure many of the social and political themes of Nazism. That is to say, the classic Gothic horror films serve as a prophetic warning about the direction in which a given society or nation is headed. These films do this at the same time that they also critique the dominant Enlightenment assumptions of the twentieth century.
We see the same prophetic impact of the filming of these stories at other critical points in the century. Hollywood’s classic Gothic horror cycle begins in 1931 at the onset of the Depression and continues until the end of World War II. Save for a brief hiatus during a short lived optimistic period in the years 1937-38, Gothic horror films are produced yearly with every major studio in Hollywood taking part. Frankenstein and Dracula are filmed not once but several times including numerous sequels. Jekyll and Hyde is filmed twice. Dorian Gray and The Hound of the Baskervilles are each filmed once. Many other horror films are made during this period, some of them such as Phantom of the Opera and various Wereworlf stories are clearly Gothic in style and subject matter (supernatural, anti-rational, anti-scientific). Others range from science fiction (several films based on the work of H.G. Wells) to routine or not so routine thrillers involving everything from circus freaks to loose adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. Yet, as in Germany two decades earlier, the five Gothic classics set the tone and direction for the fantasy and horror films of the period.
Ultimately these five British Gothic horror classics constitute an ongoing warning about the cultural assumptions of modernity and contemporary life. Like an unpopular but vigilant prophet, they return to sound a warning at the specific moments in the twentieth century signaling the onset of a cultural crisis. The fact that these Gothic classics would continue to be filmed by key artists in the film and television world has certainly not seemed obvious at times. Following World War II Gothic horror degenerated into the likes of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By the 1950’s the consensus was that Frankenstein, Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles were old fashioned and passè. Screen terror was geared to atomic age monsters and outer space. The Victorian character of the classic stories dated them inevitably for a new generation who no longer remembered the nineteenth century and, certainly in the popular culture world of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, cared little for it. This all changed in the year 1957.
Following Germany and the United States, the Gothic Horror cycle next surfaced in Great Britain. A small English production company called Hammer Studios created a cinematic sensation with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. This was quickly followed by Horror of Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll as well as a host of other familiar Gothic subjects such as The Mummy, The Curse of the Werewolf and The Phantom of the Opera. The cycle was principally the work of one crucial director, Terence Fisher. Fisher was the most overtly Christian director to work in the Gothic tradition. Since his death in 1980 his reputation has grown enormously in film circles, yet, he remains largely unknown to most Christians. The Gothic Horror cycle of the late 1950’s soon spread to Italy and the United States. The Picture of Dorian Gray was the one major Gothic story not filmed by Fisher and its appearance in 1970 suffered as a result.
In retrospect it is not difficult to see the emerging cultural crises which this third Gothic cycle was signaling. The year 1957 was the beginning of the space age and an intensifying of the cold war as the Russian sputnik satellite was launched. The reigning artistic and philosophic view of the period was no longer the confidence of the Enlightenment but rather the quasi-despair of Existentialism. It is striking in this atmosphere that the spiritual allegories of the Gothic classics with their firm convictions of human sin and metaphysical reality found such large audiences. At the same time it should perhaps not be surprising that in this dawning post-modern, post-Christian era a depiction of spiritual truth using biblical symbols was welcome.
The Gothic cycle next appears on American television in the years 1968 – 73. In the short space of six years all five Gothic classics appear on television including two versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (one a musical!). It is not difficult to identify the cultural crisis of this period. This is the era of Viet Nam war protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the shootings at Kent State University and the Watergate scandal. However, following 1973 it seems that the Gothic classics disappear from popular culture. In 1973 a new kind of horror film, The Exorcist, becomes enormously popular. While The Exorcist seems to share some superficial similarities with the Gothic tradition such as a belief in the supernatural and an anti-scientific bias, the film’s dominant emphasis on the demonic and its power is quite different. Evil invariably is defeated in the Gothic tradition either by Christian heroes or it destroys itself in the face of some stronger moral and supernatural order. The Exorcist inaugurates a different sort of horror film without a sense of cosmic order and the confidence that evil will surely be defeated.
The period from 1973 to the late 1980’s is a time of growing secularism and, indeed, paganism in the West. Enlightenment assumptions are coming under attack from post-modernists, feminists, deconstructionists and others. The spiritual convictions of the classic Gothic horror films seem not only dated but downright quaint in the wake of “splatter films” with their demented psychotics and gore-filled special effects (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth). The most popular horror fiction writer of this period, Stephen King, draws generally on some Gothic themes in novels like Salem’s Lot and The Shining. Yet, these stories and the films they inspire, like Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, belong to an essentially different world than that found in the classic Gothic novels.
By the end of the 1980’s it is once again taken as axiomatic that the old fashioned Gothic stories belong to the dated past. Frankenstein’s creature and Count Dracula have presumably been displaced by more modern horror characters like Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger and Halloween’s Michael, to say nothing of Clive Barker’s grisly Pinhead. However, in 1988 Anthony Perkins appeared in yet another version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde under the title The Edge of Sanity. The following year, Robert Englund, after five appearances as Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, starred in a new version of The Phantom of the Opera. That same year Granada Television, in the wake of its successful Sherlock Holmes series, produced an elaborate two hour version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Within a short time the 1990’s saw no less than three versions of Frankenstein including Kenneth Branaugh’s intelligent and underrated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dracula also reappeared in a major production in 1992 followed soon by new version of the Werewolf (Wolf) and H.G. Welles’ Island of Dr. Moreau. A new adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appears in 1996 as Mary Reilley which attempts to tell the story from the standpoint of one of Dr. Jekyll’s servants. Clearly the past ten years have witnessed yet another revival of the Gothic horror classics. Presumably, we will soon hear of a new remake of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The prophetic character of this latest cycle is already plain to see. The end of the 1980’s saw the collapse of Soviet Communism, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. To read the editorials of 1989 and 1990 is to encounter optimistic predictions about the end of the twentieth century. The dread specter of nuclear annihilation is no more. Yet the 1990’s have been anything but the fulfillment of these visions of peace and prosperity. Instead, we have seen the Persian Gulf War, the war in Bosnia, major conflicts in Africa, as well, as economic instability and concerns about violence and safety in the United States. The Gothic Horror cycle once again serves as a weather vane predicting a period of social upheaval, and raising the issue of Christian spiritual values in a world that keeps trying to get away from these values.
There is no comparable movement in cinema history to match the recurring nature of the Gothic Horror cycle. It has persisted from the silent era to the present day. Unlike so many other screen thrillers which have often degenerated into cheap grade B productions, the five Gothic horror classics have always commanded the attention of the leading directors and actors of a given period (granted many of the sequels of the classics themselves have often ended up as low grade budget films). The present Gothic cycle has likewise received the attention of such major directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Nichols and Kenneth Branaugh, as well as, mainstream film stars like Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Michelle Pfeiffer and Julia Roberts. The current Gothic emphasis has varied widely in quality and in its use of Christian symbolism.
The Gothic Horror cycle in both its criticism of the Enlightenment assumptions and its strong presentations of an essentially Christian moral and spiritual world view has been an often unappreciated ally of the evangelical causes. It is not too late to appreciate this film tradition. Through cable and video all the Gothic Horror cycles are available for viewing. Terence Fisher’s work is receiving growing attention and more and more of his films are available on video. A number of recent books, some of them quite academic in nature, are studying these films in greater detail. One of these authors, Bruce Lanier Wright, concludes his study by noting the nihilism of many horror films (as well as other examples of popular culture) and then adds,
The Gothic position, by contrast, is that good and evil do exist, and that men’s actions carry a moral weight; that our choices count. And if our actions have some importance, maybe we do, too.
The Gothic Horror film cycle has been an effective chronicler of the crises of the twentieth century. It has done this by recalling again and again the fundamental biblical themes of sin and redemption, of God’s sovereignty and human pride. This is a tradition that we as evangelicals should not only study but indeed celebrate. In the closing words of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain!” Amen.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Mar/Apr 1997).
