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Living in a Terrifying World

Living in a Terrifying World

Last updated on: May 9, 2025 at 8:00 am by Coyle Neal

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Living in a Terrifying World 2025-05-04T07:57:56-06:00 Coyle Neal

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Hollywood has always kept up a steady trickle of horror films of varying qualities for the public, but it seems that in 2025 that steady trickle is going to turn into a flood. Given the success of Heretic, Nosferatu, and indie-ish films like Terrifier, more than 50 big-budget releases are scheduled for 2025. (Nicely confirming my theory about genre films, btw.)

I think this provides a good opportunity for us to reflect on the nature of horror, why it’s having a moment, and how Christians can think about the genre and our culture. And to do this I’m going to regularly reference a book called Old Country by the brothers Harrison and Matt Query.

The plot of this is clever: a young couple move to a new home in rural Idaho, where they are informed by the locals that there is a spirit that haunts the region who can only be mollified if certain rituals are performed. These rituals change by season, and some are significantly harder than others.

I’ll go into more detail with the plot as we go through the series, here we should just note the important (and I think true) cultural point that contemporary Americans–even Christians–are utterly unprepared for encountering the supernatural world.

This is a point horror makes regularly–all of Supernatural features this idea. Old Country especially hammers home the fact that we are not capable of processing an encounter with an otherworldly being. We live in an Enlightenment age, when what we can see and hear and feel (yes, emotions are on the “material” side of things) governs all. This means we are ill-equipped to navigate spiritual and supernatural situations.

As Christians of course we believe in a supernatural world that regularly and directly intersects the material world–for that matter we deny that there’s a real division between the two at all (Christians have never embraced Gnosticism). Nevertheless we are as caught up in the culture’s assumptions as everyone else, and as a result we often find ourselves unable to properly attune ourselves as spiritual and physical beings to a spiritual and physical world. As a result, we don’t navigate either well.

Horror can be helpful in recalibrating our understanding of the world we live in. It does this not by giving us good advice–don’t look to Old Country or Supernatural for practical guidance–but by insisting on the connectedness of body and spirit. That’s not where we want to end (we must always end with repentance and faith in the Gospel!), but it’s an excellent place to start.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO

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