In Jesus’ Name We Scare
Justin Lee and The Christian Roots of Horror
Jason Blum has made a career out of a simple formula: if a film’s budget is under 5 million dollars, the director has creative control.
Beginning with Paranormal Activity (budget: $15,000), he reeled off a series of commercial and creative hits on shoestring budgets, including Insidious (budget: $1.5 million), Sinister (budget: $3 million), The Purge (budget: $3 million), and Get Out (budget: $4.5 million). At that cost, if it doesn’t work, he can recoup his money with streaming, and if it works, then everybody wins. Each of those films grossed over $80 million (Get Out hit $255 million), and the industry has slowly caught on that micro-budget horror can be a great investment.
This strategy isn’t all that different from faith-based filmmakers like the Kendrick brothers of Facing the Giants and Fireproof or Jon Erwin of I Can Only Imagine and The Jesus Revolution. In fact, Erwin said he “talked a lot” with Jason Blum about how studios disdained horror a few decades ago, and faith-based films are in the same situation now. Like Blum, he is seeing these grounded, low-budget films connect with audiences. Because despite the difference in rating and target audience, films like God’s Not Dead and Paranormal Activity share some metaphysical DNA.
For either to be effective, they need to clearly define good and evil.
That’s why it’s no coincidence that many of the best horror filmmakers have Christian roots. Zach Creggar, the writer-director of Weapons, says growing up he went to “youth group a lot. In fact, in my prime when I was in junior high, I would go four times a week to church.” Wes Craven, the director of the first four Scream films, graduated from Wheaton College, the “Harvard of Evangelical Schools,” in 1963. Scott Derrickson, director of Sinister and The Black Phone, is a confessing Christian. Even Stephen King was raised Methodist.
One of the sharpest observers and defenders of horror’s artistic and spiritual merits is Justin Lee, an associate editor of First Things and author of a new short story collection A Prisoner’s Cinema. Lee is an intellectually serious Christian, yet, by his own admission, as a boy he always loved setting a toad on the shoulder of an unsuspecting victim, and with horror writing, he has “found the most loathsome toad imaginable.”
This combination makes for uniquely disturbing reading, especially for someone who’s familiar with the Christian subcultures Lee explores.
It’s one thing to read the story of a pedophile child-murderer slowly descending. It’s another when he frantically flips through his Bible to find a verse to explain his porn addiction: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” It’s one thing to read about a man dedicated to “saving himself for marriage” slowly succumbing to lust. It’s another when the author understands both the psychological toll of purity culture and the spiritual value of chastity.
I’m not a horror fanatic, but I’m familiar with the genre and Lee unsettled me more than almost anything I’ve read or watched. So I gave him a call to try to figure out why.
Justin Lee graduated from Taylor University, a small Christian liberal arts school in Upland, Indiana. It’s the kind of place where you make your own fun. School traditions include “pick-a-date,” where dorm wings schedule giant themed group dates; “Airband,” a competitive lip-synching competition; and “Silent Night,” where dorm wings dress in costumes to attend a basketball game and remain silent until the tenth point is scored.
If Lee were stereotypical, he’d disavow Taylor and its backward ways now that he lives in New York City. Perhaps he’d become a triumphalist Catholic or hand-wringing liberal or else deconstruct altogether. He does none of those. Instead, he tells me his theology is more Catholic and Eastern Orthodox but his ecclesiology remains very Protestant. Meaning he believes in the priesthood of all believers, but he finds Catholicism’s structure and tradition to be expedient in many respects. He thinks Catholics have a sacramental view of reality that is more accurate than much of evangelicalism, but he is not seriously considering conversion.
Keats said a great thinker must be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and Lee seems capable of that as a theologian and as an artist. He is neither dogmatic nor didactic, but he’s not wishy-washy either. When discussing the motivations of “exvangelicals” or the proper theology of evil, he does not mince words. Lee manages to hold productive tensions in his writing and thinking, rather than, as is often the case, claiming “tensions” as cover for intellectual laxity.
Lee is clear-eyed in assessing excesses of Taylor’s spirituality, sexuality, and the relation of the two. He recalls a pair of hyper-Calvinist brothers he knew who would justify their habitual masturbation by saying God had foreordained it. He admits “purity culture” can bring a certain amount of baggage with it, even “trauma.” He just thinks the secular alternative is “catastrophically worse.” A culture that holds out virtuous living as an ideal will necessarily engender some guilt and shame, he says, “And that’s okay.”
In his stories, the psychological toll of sexual sin and temptation is a recurring theme. He says he “sees it in everyone,” especially the exvangelicals who have deconstructed. Here, he’s characteristically blunt, “I don’t know anyone who has accepted that label, who hasn’t done their so-called deconstruction process as a way to get to f—. It’s that simple, it’s that crass. This is especially true of men.”
I ask him how his faith informs his writing, and he admits it helps, just not in the way you might think. He cites Flannery O’Connor who observed that to write good fiction, “you need to be able to get your hands dirty.” Lee’s faith gives him a more accurate map of reality, and for horror to truly terrify, it must understand human nature and the nature of evil. In every story, he says he wants the reader to see a bit of himself in the character even if that identification is shocking or upsetting.
In the case of the title story, that means identifying with a pedophile child molester who’s possessed by a demon. In seeing how this young man named Cal gradually descends into darkness, egged on by a demon he calls “Paul,” Lee hopes people realize how “alien” the self can be. We are not autonomous individuals. We are shaped by relationships and outside forces, demons included. That realization can be a first step toward conversion.
I asked for him to elaborate on this character of Paul. It’s common for modern Christians to be skeptical of demonic activity—“spiritual warfare” can seem lowbrow—yet he treats Paul as real, not a psychological projection. He replied:
The only theologically correct way to conceptualize evil is as privation of the good. Evil is an absence. But it’s an absence that we very much experience as a presence. The way I like to think of it is reality is this beautiful tapestry, or at least it’s a tapestry that should be beautiful if it weren’t for the tears in it, the frayed and missing threads.
Just to clarify, I say that I’ve heard people argue that because evil is an absence of good, to ascribe temptation or torment to demons is incorrect because it attributes too much “activity” to something that is merely an absence. Basically, a privation theory of evil sets the conditions for our fallen nature, but there’s no demon on your shoulder urging you to give in to your passions.
Lee replied, “Yeah, that’s a retarded perspective” and said anyone who thinks the “privatio boni” forecloses demonic activity needs to “exercise better imagination.” Because what are demons but “images in the tapestry of angels where the threads are frayed. Where there are tears?”
Perhaps that’s the clearest indicator that Lee is part of what he calls the “ragtag coalition” of the dissident right: he can use privatio boni and retarded in the same sentence. He admits there are some unsavory types on the Right, but he also sees it as the only place with a genuine avant-garde. Even if it has produced no major works yet, it’s the only place a major work could come from.
A Prisoner’s Cinema offers a glimpse of that future. The book is not some anti-woke screed, but Lee sees it as right-wing in the sense that it “celebrate[s] the order of being, [as] a gift given to us by God.” Lee wants art that is true, not art that is polemical. In the case of A Prisoner’s Cinema, that means portraying evil realistically and unflinchingly but not stopping there.
When characters are at their lowest, the opportunity for redemption still lingers. When the reader finds the self alien, it presents an opportunity to step into the mystery of the infinite. The dread of hell can give way to the ecstasy of heaven.
Horror tends to focus on the former. “Christian” art tends to focus on the latter. Lee is the rare writer that can do both.
Thank you for writing around themes of Christianity and horror, a neglected space in pop culture discourse. This is one of the more interesting pieces I've read along those lines. I've been a horror fan for years, and most of the discourse I've read immediately wants to shift away from the abyss (and look toward heaven) in their analysis, using a crass version of the creation/fall/redemption matrix (stressing redemption) to evaluate a genre that resists proselytizing, whose hellish details must be contented with, held in tension as you say. I'm excited to pick up Lee's book.
A very interesting read!