Saving another essay, this one from October 2006

THREE AND A HALF KINDS OF HORROR

I John 4 assures us that perfect love casts out fear. In
Hebrews 2 we read that Jesus frees us from the bondage
of the fear of death. Both of these promises come up
often in my prayers in these perilous times. It may be
edifying to discuss what ARE the fears from which we
need liberation. Christians hear plenty about the supreme
fear of having to face God's wrath for our sins; and about
rather trivial fears, like a fear of social embarrassment.
But there's a vast wilderness of other apprehensions and
anxieties, which often gets less attention than either the
greatest or the smallest fears. The Halloween season
seems like a suitable time to explore this ground a bit.

Lon Chaney Senior, the first superstar of scary movies, once
tried to illustrate the essence of horror thusly: if you saw
a circus clown standing at your front door in the middle of
the night, without explanation of what he was doing there,
it would be creepy. A clown is no more able or likely to
harm you than any other man is, but the situation would
give such a sense of things being out of place as to be
alarming. It would suggest that something was wrong with
the world. Before horror movies degenerated into mere
physical bloodbaths with victims being mowed down like
grass, it was really this sense of things moving outside the
normal that gave us those delightful shudders.

In a way, fears oriented to the state of the universe
are a testimony to our being made in the image of God.
We fear a derangement of the universe because we have
some concept of how the universe SHOULD be--which
means that there is more to us than mere animal desires
for comfort and an animal fear of dying. Folktales have
always been a device to process our fears, both crude
fears and relatively noble fears; and the invention of
motion pictures broadened the folktale audience.

The "big three" of old-time horror cinema were Count
Dracula, bringing the rest of the vampires with him; the
Wolfman, bringing the rest of the werewolves with him;
and Frankenstein, bringing the rest of the mad scientists
with him. Each story type carried a different flavor of
dread, all of them extending beyond characters merely
being afraid of being killed. Each type had a different
way of upsetting the natural order--a different clown
to stand outside your door at midnight.

Doctor Frankenstein stood for man himself upsetting the
natural order, arrogantly presuming that his wisdom can
command all the forces of creation. In the greatest mad-
scientist stories ("Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde" falls into this
category too), the scientist does not set out _wanting_ to
produce harmful results, but his experiment gets out of
his control. The very _absence_ of supernatural elements
in most mad-scientist stories enhances their brand of
horror; it says that we're on our own, with no grounds to
hope for divine intervention that could remedy our blunders.
A great many recent scientific advances, as they affect
health care and the environment, invite comparison to
the story of Doctor Frankenstein; but people disagree
about _which_ activities of science deserve the reproach,
and this article has no space to sort out their positions.

Dracula stood for something almost exactly opposite
to Frankenstein. Where Doctor Frankenstein probed
_outward_ into the unknown, Dracula embodied evil
breaking _into_ our normal world. He represented a
dark force alien to us, intruding upon us as a predator.
Where Frankenstein caused harm by mistake, Dracula
caused harm very much on purpose, with a gigantic
egotism and selfishness that _should_ be repugnant to
us. I say "should," but increasing numbers of horror
fans wish that they could BE vampires and enjoy the
power to victimize others--an attitude that would have
been unthinkable to classic horror actors like Boris
Karloff, who were highly decent people in real life.

The growing prevalence of movies in which vampires
_cannot_ be driven off by anything associated with
God (the "Blade" movies take this attitude, although
the comic series they came from said that vampires
_could_ be held off with a cross) attests to the wish
of many fans that they could be vampires themselves
...AND be immune to any divine counterforce. This
may be motivated by the wish to escape from having
to answer to God for sin; but the same wish could also
arise from a pessimistic fear that God won't help us
against evil, so that we'd better try to join evil, the
way Saruman sold out to Sauron in "Lord of the Rings."
(The classic horror stories of author H.P. Lovecraft
seem to have been motivated by the same desire to
offer appeasement-worship to evil.)

Okay, so far we've got the fear of our own plans
going disastrously wrong; and we've got the fear of a
diabolical power which so insolently defies God as to
make some of us think our only hope is to placate
it by identifying with it. But for purposes of a fairly
short essay, I think the third archetype of cinematic
horror is actually the most fascinating: the Wolfman.
Larry Talbot, the title character of the film so named,
offers a wealth of material for theological discussion;
but first, let's consider the "mood" of werewolf stories.

Both mad scientists and vampires retain something of
human personality; thus, it could in some cases be
possible to reason with them, to offer them something,
to talk them out of killing and destroying. (Even the
monster created by Frankenstein, in the original book,
was no grunting goon, but an intelligent being, who
would never have become a menace if his inventor
had handled him wisely.) But who can negotiate with
a werewolf while he's in his animal form? Werewolves
(for those who are not wishing to BE them) represent
our fear of chaos, of utter lawlessness. They have no
sophisticated agenda; they merely kill without mercy.
We may be able to destroy them or confine them,
but we can make no treaties with them. If werewolves
really existed, they would be a powerful argument for
a cosmos which has no pity on its inhabitants.

But the werewolf theme can venture in two differing
directions, which is why I titled this essay "Three And
A Half Kinds Of Horror." What I am about to describe
can also occur in mad-scientist or vampire stories, but
I believe it is best understood with werewolves.

The really old folk stories of werewolves or other
"skin-changing" monsters, predating the movies, tend
to depict the monsters as unabashedly evil. They have
complete control over their transformation; they turn
into beasts because they _want_ to, and kill innocent
people because they enjoy it. Several centuries ago
in France, there were some insane men who believed
they were werewolves, and who murdered children
for fun. These men found out too late, courtesy of
angry mobs, that they could be killed _without_ the
use of silver bullets. But speaking of insanity: the
advent of motion pictures roughly coincided with
the advent of Freudian psychiatry. Thus, when the
Wolfman was put on the silver screen, he was at the
same time put on a therapist's couch, so to speak.

Cinematic lycanthropy is a disease, transmitted to
anyone who survives being bitten by a werewolf, not
a premeditated choice to do evil. In "The Wolfman,"
protagonist Larry Talbot is thus bitten, by a werewolf
that is changed all the way to wolf-shape rather than
a still-humanoid shape; the attacking monster fails to
finish him, because he kills it by striking it with a
silver-headed cane; but the curse has been passed to
him. Thereafter, Talbot becomes the Wolfman each
full-moon night, and kills people--entirely contrary
to his good and decent character as a human. When
he is the Wolfman, he loses his own personality, and
afterward he wakes up confused about what happened.
Only gradually does he come to understand. Thus
we have the already-mentioned fear of mindless
violence for all the potential victims; but for Talbot
there is another fear: the loss of humanity, the loss
of reason, the loss of control over his own actions.
All through the movie--and in the sequels, when he
is brought back despite being killed before--the hero
is tragically tormented with guilt.

Larry Talbot's ordeal _could_ have been handled as
a parallel to the Apostle Paul's experience of doing
evil that he didn't really want to do; but the scriptwriter
of "The Wolfman" intentionally dismissed the hope of
grace, as shown by the rhyme the irritating old Gypsy
woman recites: "Even a man who is pure in heart and
says his prayers by night / Can become a wolf when
the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright."
At the end of the series, in a pleasant surprise, Talbot
_does_ get cured of being a werewolf, survives an
encounter with Frankenstein's Monster despite losing
his own super-powers, and even gets the girl. (This
was in the film "House of Dracula;" the Big Three
monsters appeared in each other's movies more than
once in the old Universal Pictures era.) But his cure
is the work of a scientist, not of God.

Working a guilt-obscuring psychotherapeutic view
into horror stories produces an odd spiritual hybrid.
Larry Talbot is dramatically remorseful over all the
murders he commits as the Wolfman, so much so that
it's easy to feel toward him the sympathy we feel
for a criminal who sincerely repents and receives
Jesus as Savior. But at the same time, he's juggling
the implications of his werewolf curse having been
caused without his consent, so that it's not "really"
his fault. Some of us, I'm afraid, would probably like
to be admired for our noble confessions of guilt...but
still go on doing the things we're acting remorseful
about. It's also possible to forget that some truly
uncontrollable urges did not START as uncontrollable
urges. An alcoholic cannot rid himself of the craving
...but there was one point in time when HE CHOSE to
start drinking.

If I were in Larry Talbot's situation, as soon as I
realized what was happening, I would arrange to have
a deep, smooth-sided pit excavated--one from which
even a werewolf could not escape. Then I would have
myself lowered into it shortly before the next full
moon, and make sure there were witnesses watching to
see what happened when the moon rose. With me thus
confined, no innocent person would be in danger, and
efforts could get underway to find a cure for me. If
Larry Talbot had been _entirely_ serious about not
wanting to harm the innocent, he should have done
the same thing. (Indeed, the character of Oz in the
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series did come up with
a similar way to keep himself from killing people.)
Without failing to realize that some things _are_ out
of a person's control, we should beware of using a
sense of "uncontrollability" as a blanket excuse for
such sins as we ARE able to restrain ourselves from.

There is a real monster out to get us: the one who
used to be an angel of light, and can still appear to
be one. Satan is in some ways like Dracula; the very
name "Dracula" means approximately "Lesser Devil."
Satan would like some of us to become like mad
scientists, others of us to become like werewolves...
and the rest of us to tremble in helpless fear. But
even some horror movies have acknowledged that there
is a power greater than Satan's; in fact, Bram Stoker's
actual novel "Dracula" testified to the ultimate
superiority of God over all dark powers, and some of
the Hammer Films Dracula movies made it clear that God
intervened to help the good guys. Rather than try to
appease the forces of evil by joining them, we should
be calling on the Name of Jesus Christ, Who crushed
the Serpent under His feet.

-- Joseph Richard Ravitts