Towards A Theory of Protestant Horror

Over on Twitter, there was some discussion on the role of Catholicism in horror, and whether or not there is such a thing as Protestant horror. Catholicism, with it’s sacrements, rites of exerocism and coherent iconography offer a compelling cinematic language. Catholicism in popular culture tends towards a more vivid cosmology too, more willing to talk about demons, angels and the reality of a spiritual realm. From at least the 1970s (with the success of The Exorcist), Catholicism on screen has been the foundational site of encounters with the demonic but I’m not sure this is the same thing as saying that this is specifically Catholic horror, and not just horror about and featuring Catholicism. After all, the very foundations of horror — emerging as it did out of a tradition of Anglophone Gothic writing — is inescapably bound up within a certain culture of Protestant theology and religion.

The early English Gothic novel, exemplified by writers like Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, or even something like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was deeply anti-Catholic, positing Europe as both politically unstable and religiously hysterical in contrast to the sober, sensible and reasonable religion and politics of Britain (a rhetorical move reflecting the early nove’s politics too). The Gothic novel of the late 1700s and early 1800s was a mode of cultural production that aimed to unify English Protestant political theology (and thus English political identity) against Europe. This was such a widely ackowledged part of the historical fondness for Gothic novels, that Jane Austen highlights this in Northanger Abbey, in Henry Tilney’s famous “anti-Gothic” speech to Catherine Moreland

‘Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Here, Austen links a specific kind of religion to a particular kind of social organization that is essential to English national character as such and thus, part of what makes the English state different from Europe. The Gothic with it’s mysterious monks and nuns in decaying European ruins and mysterious abbeys were hotbeds of theological and political danger. Yet again though, I’m not sure it’s sufficent to say that simply because there is an anti-Catholic strain within the English Gothic novel, that constitutes Protestant Horror.

I think to get at a better answer to this, it’s necessary to think not just about theological aesthetics, but rather political theology. In short, the key turning point in the development of horror through the English Gothic novel is not 1789 but rather 1688 — the year in which the so-called Glorious Revolution saw the ascension of William of Orange and Mary II to the English Throne and restoration of a Protestant Monarchy.

What makes Protestant horror is not just a certain set of theological and religious doctrines (as, after all, there’s plenty of divergence on these matters in practice) but rather, a specific set of politics which finds expression as a specific set of anxieties. The biggest anxiety is about the status of truth and the insistence that only Scripture is trustworthy in a sinful world. Given this, it is no suprise that two of the best Scottish Gothic novels, James Hogg’s The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are both testinomy narratives and exercises in investigating the truth. Victor Sage in the magisterial and sadly-little read Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition connects the testimony narrative that is designed to give faith a firm intellectual foundation to both discourses of the law and conscience. The question becomes what is true, and when this kind of epistemic uncertainty is introduced everything becomes uncertain.

When it comes to discussions of Protestant, specifically Calvinst theology, (which shaped the Scottish Gothic very strongly) critical attention often turns to total depravity and limited atonment– the idea that all are condemned to hell and only some will be saved from it. This spreads throughout the various facets of Protestant theology, being refined through non-conformist sects like the Puritans who made their way in the North America. Jonathan Edwards famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God is a horror story, in a style and mode entirely congruent with someone like James Hogg.

There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”—By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God’s mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment.—

If Catholic horror presupposes the reality of a spiritual conflict between good and evil that may endanger your soul, Protestant horror sees the world as concealing a terrifying truth — you are alone before God, in a terrifying world that you cannot trust and cannot depend upon. Physical existence is a facade of the true spiritual reality, a nightmare of possibilty that leaves you deeply alone before a vast universe destined only for perdition and destruction. Take Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, Young Goodman Brown in which the New England woods are not some Edenic idyll but simply conceals the presence of Satan. Robert Egger’s 2015 film The VVitch is, in part, a re-imagining of the short story, showings the main characters of the family as deeply engrained in this particular mode of religion, shown in the conversation between Caleb and his father William.

William: Art thou then born a sinner?
Caleb: Aye. I was conceived in sin, and born in iniquity.
William: And, what is thy birth sin?
Caleb: Adam’s sin imputed to me, and a corrupt nature dwelling within me.
William: Well-remembered, Caleb. Very well. And canst thou tell me what thy corrupt nature is?
Caleb: My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually.

So much of the film unfolds like a crime — who is it that is responsible for the disappearance of baby Samuel? How can we know what is true if the only thing taken to be ultimately reliable, sola Scriptura is completely insubstantial. If faith fails, then you are left alone, always-already in Hell. I cannot think of any recent film that so carefully explores this specific kind of theological anxiety than Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. The film opens on Ernst Toller, a depressed alcoholic minister, being laceratatingly self-critical in his journal:

 I have decided to keep a journal. Not in a word program or digital file, but in longhand, writing every word out so that every inflection of penmanship, every word chosen, scratched out, revised, is recorded. To set down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything. When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy. I will keep this diary for one year; 12 months. And at the end of that time, it will be destroyed. Shredded, then burnt. The experiment will be over.

For Toller, his first questions are, can you trust yourself? Are you willing to examine oneself so honestly that you would know yourself as God already does? Another journal entry. “A terrible night. No sooner than I shut my eyes desolation came upon me. What is one’s last thought as you pull the trigger? “There goes my head” or “Jesus watch over me?” Or neither? I’m going to tear these pages out. This journal brings me no peace. It’s self-pity, nothing more.” If there is a horror here, it is not that God is not real, but that the world has no God in it.

In The Exorcist, which is a deeply Catholic film, God will save us — through sacrifical love a priest saves the soul and body of an innocent girl and the rites of Holy Mother Church are shown to be ultimately efficacious and powerful. In contrast, in First Reformed , Ernst Toller is alone in a world almost completely emptied of the divine, and left alone without anything to depend on just as we all are in contemporary capitalism. “Who can know the mind of God”, asks Toller at one point, a horrifying question that perfectly encapsulates the essence of Protestant horror.