Let’s Bring Objective Morality Back to Horror

October 3, 2016 by David Dubrow 3 Comments

sas-dub-3 On the terrific website Scifi and Scary, I wrote a guest post on God and supernatural horror:

Supernatural horror has turned away from its roots, replacing the traditional battle of Good vs. Evil with Us vs. Evil. In large part this is reflective of cultural trends; mainstream writers and movie makers tend to take their thematic cues from the less-religious metropolitan areas of the East and West Coasts, which drive culture more than flyover country. The replacement of an objective power of Good with expedience, the need to survive, has dulled the effectiveness of the genre of supernatural horror, reducing vampires to fanged superhumans and Hell-born demons to savage mutants.

Read the rest at Scifi and Scary!

Comments

Sean Eaton says

October 9, 2016 at 8:53 pm

Very timely and insightful. It seems to me if you take religion–and more generally, the supernatural–away from horror, don’t you wind up with what amounts to science fiction, but without the science? A moral compass that helps characters navigate epic battles between good and evil is necessary, both for suspense as well as horror. I agree that there is a large readership for this approach.

Reply
- David Dubrow says
  
  October 10, 2016 at 7:36 am
  
  Hi, Sean:
  
  Thank you! Consider this my attempt to stand athwart the horror genre, yelling, “Stop!”
  
  No doubt William F. Buckley would approve.
  
  Reply

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2016: The Year in Review says:

December 29, 2016 at 5:46 pm

[…] wrote a piece that was well-received on October 3 for the website Scifi and Scary called Let’s Bring Objective Morality Back to Horror. In it I argued that vampires and demons without God, or a force of absolute good, lacked punch. On […]

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