The Rise of Horror & What It Says About Americans' Souls explores how horror's dominance stems from "vicarious atonement," where guilt-ridden viewers seek penance through digital sacrifice rather than the Gospel. While capitalism fuels cheap slasher films, the demand reflects a pagan desire to appease fears of death, contrasting ancient human sacrifices with Christ as the spotless Lamb. Ultimately, the episode argues that while horror taps into universal instincts for blood and suffering, true Christian faith redirects this focus from gratuitous gore to the redemptive passion of Jesus, urging believers to reject morbid media in favor of meditating on divine propitiation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why Horror Thrills Us00:14:40
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The rise of horror and thriller movies is off the charts.
They've been rising as a genre.
Within the film industry, more than any other genre that there is, more than action movies, more than anything else you could possibly imagine.
Now, what could account for this infatuation with thrillers and horror movies?
There's a lot of things that we could say to explain this phenomenon.
I think one reason is because young adults who go and watch movies don't have families, right?
For a long time, Christmas was always the biggest holiday that you would see celebrated in the American.
Tradition, Christmas, and perhaps as a close second runner would be Thanksgiving.
These days, even in my own neighborhood, when I'm driving around, I'll see as many, if not more, decorations on people's houses at the time of Halloween than I see with Christmas.
Halloween has become kind of like the holiday for young adults who are stuck in perpetual adolescence, who never got married and never had kids.
It's not a kid friendly holiday.
It's something that Adults celebrate.
And I think that that's part of what explains this rise and the genre of horror and thriller.
But another reason is because I think guilty people are looking for some kind of vicarious atonement.
And we'll talk about that in this episode as well.
There's always some scene in most horror movies where some promiscuous, sexually degenerate person is decapitated or taken and tortured.
And it's as though the person going into the movie knows that that should be them.
They know that they're guilty.
They know that they have a guilty conscience, but they don't actually want to be tortured themselves.
And so vicariously, they go and watch their blood guilt passed on to someone else who suffers in their place.
Horror movies, at some level, is a replacement for the atonement of Christ, it's a replacement for the gospel itself.
So, childlessness.
This guilty conscience that continues to grow in America.
These are at least two of the reasons, and we'll list some more for why horror and thriller is shooting through the roof.
Tune into this episode now, and we'll get into the discussion.
All right.
Horror is on a generational run this year, for being honest.
There's been a number of big box office hits.
We're about three fourths of the way through the year.
Weapons was a huge one.
I think it's going to take in something like 10 times its budget.
So you had Weapons, you had Sinners, which was another kind of quasi horror thriller movie.
Super popular.
I mean, Alien Romulus, Final Destination Bloodlines.
There's tons of people talking about how 2025 has really been the year for horror.
And I think a lot of us hear that and we go, that makes sense, honestly.
We're guiltier than ever, we're more wicked than ever.
And it would make sense that.
To a greater degree, people are spending more and more of their money.
I'm going to go to the theater and I'm going to watch something perverse.
I'm going to watch something violent.
I'm going to watch something that's promiscuous, like you're alluding to, Joel.
I'm going to go see that.
I want to parse out, though, and make a careful distinction because it can be easy to do single factor analysis.
Say, all right, horror is up.
That means people are just worse than ever.
But there is an actual underlying kind of theme that drives this.
Now, just to back up the growth in horror, take a look at this graph here.
And this is film genre popularity.
For one, I mean, movies are the stories of a culture, the soul of a people.
In some ways, you could look at its art, you could look at its music, and you could look at its movies.
So, what we're seeing here is the soul of America, film genre popularity in the United States in the last hundred years.
Actions held pretty steady.
War, it's funny enough, we're pretty sick of war.
We had two of them World War I, World War II.
We had Korea, we had Vietnam.
War is actually pretty much at a low.
Romance is going down, similar to it.
We're not a society that believes in love the way that we used to.
So, romance is on the decline.
You've got crime a little bit on the decline, sci fi, fantasy, maybe growing a little bit, holding a bit steady.
But without a doubt, the two that are growing the most, I'll throw three in there documentary would be one of them, horror and thriller.
In the last hundred years, those are the ones that have grown to the greatest degree.
Musicals are way down because nobody is cultured anymore.
And they're just a bunch of country bumpkins like you, Wes.
It wouldn't appreciate a musical, even if it punched you in the face.
I was raised on musicals.
West Side Story, My Fair Lady.
My parents are both music majors, so I was forced to play piano, all these kinds of things.
I can't do it without you tune into Hamilton.
I was allowed.
Well, Hamilton, yeah.
That's got to be the biggest musical theater, though, of the past.
Yeah.
Okay.
The things that are popular now, like, what is it?
Wicked, you know, or Hamilton.
These are not like classic traditional musicals.
These are for people who don't know anything about musicals and want to watch revisionist history or something like that.
But classical musicals, that used to be a thing, but now nobody appreciates music.
That's fair.
And Western is down too.
Western is the quintessential American identity.
When you think of America, the cowboy is the only thing.
That's not Canada.
That's not Europe.
Westerns are way down.
But anyway, horror and thriller are up.
You can even see this is a second graph.
Horror genre releases per year from 1995 to 2015.
That's a 20 year kind of growth.
You're looking at about 500 movies a year to now over 6,000.
This is per IMDb.
So you're Releases in the genre calculated as horror.
So it's undeniable that horror has been growing and it's not just been in the last year or two.
2025 is kind of the cap on a 50, at least 25 year growth of the genre.
People are making more horror movies and they're watching them.
Now, part of this is, and we have to be honest, some of this is, to be honest, they make more money.
Most horror movies are lower budget, right?
If you compare a war movie, you compare an action movie.
I mean, how much did Avengers cost to make?
You have to make five, six, seven, eight times the amount.
To get your return on investment compared to a low budget $40 horror movie, horror relies on suspense.
Yeah, what was that?
Local sets.
That famous movie, the Witch Trials, Salem Witch Trials.
Oh, the Blair Witch Project.
Yeah, it was like somebody used a camcorder.
A camcorder and just shook it the whole time.
And they used flashlights under their faces.
I'd never watched that movie, and I still have not seen that movie.
And part of it is on principle.
It's like any movie that I could make myself, I refuse to give my dad to.
I'm pretty sure my children could make The Blair Witch, whatever.
I don't think there's any monster even in it.
So it's not even like they had to use CGI or like prosthetics.
It's literally just people running around shaking a camera with a flashlight just barely out of the screen.
Incredible stuff.
And then they're just like, take my money.
Here's millions and millions of dollars.
But all that being said, we'll talk about the guilty conscience in a minute.
But you do have to root some of this in we are pumping out more crappy horror movies because they make more money.
Capitalism.
And these, yeah, these movie studios, like if you look at it, it's like, well, I could do this, I could do that.
But practically, one of the reasons that we're being served this up again and again, and I mean, you can't even go to the movies if you're watching a PG 13 movie without three, four, five horror movie ads before it, is because we got to be honest that part of it is that they make money.
And so it's not always going to be a single factor.
Well, we're guilty.
And that's why we desire horror.
We don't care how much it costs to make them.
Part of it is we are being served it because it makes a lot of money.
Right.
It's like a supply and demand.
So the supply is coming from the fact that it's cheap to make.
You don't need big actors, big names.
You.
Like, just very tactically, CGI can do a lot of the work that, you know, in the 80s and 90s prosthetics would have to do.
You'd have to bring, you know, tons of like really high class makeup artists and set designers and those sorts of things.
And now you can accomplish it with one guy and a computer, essentially, you know, where we've arrived technologically speaking.
And so you have the supply side, it's just easier than ever to make a horror film, simpler than ever to make a really high quality horror film at that.
And then on the demand side, that's where the meta analysis, the cultural analysis becomes important.
Well, why are people coming to these things?
And so you can talk about.
The guilty conscience.
You can talk about the fact that horror is almost predicated on everyone in the film.
I don't know if you've noticed this being dumber than you.
I think people get a high from, oh, I would make a better decision than that.
And I think directors know that.
And so it's like, people are running from this thing when they could jump in a car.
They're passing a helicopter, passing a car, passing a plane, running from something.
And so people feel good about that, oh, maybe I'm not dumb.
And then there's also, of course, the element that goes in line with the guilty conscience of, oh, I can walk out of the movie theater and feel like my life is so much better.
Than that person's life, right?
Whatever they were accustomed to.
And the sense of like, I did my good deed for the day because I know I'm a guilty person.
I know I'm a degenerate.
I know that I deserve to be tortured.
But I subjected, I voluntarily subjected myself to go and kind of do penance, to go and watch this thing that made me uncomfortable for an hour and a half.
And someone else ultimately is split apart and tortured in my place.
So it's like this.
Yeah, it's like this quasi atonement.
So, in terms of reasons, we're saying capitalism is one of them.
Horror movies are slop and it's super cheap to make.
And people just, it's like Adam Sandler, you know, it's like, sloppy Joes, please, can I have some sloppy seconds with the sloppy Joes?
Please, you know, please give me some more.
I know that I am slop.
I deserve slop.
And that's what I want.
So, part of it is capitalism works and people have a pretty low bar these days when it comes just to quality.
And then, two, The atonement factor, guilty conscience.
Three, prolonged adolescence and not having children, right?
Is not children friendly, but if you know half of your population is unmarried, you know, without kids, um, then that just all of a sudden you have a bigger market for that.
Um, I think a fourth one honestly is, um, I'm gonna work it in there, you know, like right before we started recording, I would look at myself in the mirror and I said, You get in there and you make this episode about immigration.
And I honestly, so like when you said, uh, Westerns are down, I thought, Well, that's quintessentially American, like, like, you know, like I understand that there's, you know, the one iconic.
Photo of Vivek Ramaswamy, you know, wearing his cowboy hat and a Texas shirt.
But, like, by and large, like, what do a bunch of, you know, Indians on H 1B visas have?
Like, what kind of interest would they have in a country Western?
Because it's historical.
And they've tried to Hamilton some Westerns.
I mean, there's been some notable films in the last, you know, 10 years where it's been, you know, brown Westerns.
Or the opposite.
I don't know if you've caught this, but like, Kevin Costner's, a lot of his stuff is like the, Native American positive side of a Western.
And that's become really big as we're doing that.
But even that play well in the international markets too.
So if it's a movie for Americans, well, what about our China?
What about Japan?
And that's my point is that like, I think horror is kind of universal because part of it is the fascination.
So, like, to give, you know, maybe one positive attribute, all these, you know, like prolonged adolescence and not getting married, not having families, guilty consciences because everyone's degenerate, wanting slop, you know, and capitalism playing off of that.
They're cheap movies to make.
Having a bunch of immigrants who aren't tied to America, they aren't tied to the wild, wild west and that tradition, part of our ethos and the myth that's uniquely American, all those kinds of things.
But if I could say one positive, it is kind of universal.
Universally, people have some level of interest and fascination in the mysterious, the unknown, the preternatural, the supernatural.
I think that that's kind of.
It plays on some things that whereas a western maybe only plays to a particular, you know, uh, audience, you know, like thinking of the south in America, you know, or like for us, we're in Texas, uh, but but something like ghosts, everybody like wants to know about the paranormal, everybody, because everybody, I think, instinctively realizes that there's more to life than just flesh and blood, that there's more than just the material world, you know.
Some have said, you know, the world is not just stuff, which is absolutely true, right?
So, I think everybody made in the image of God knows that there's Some kind of, you know, behind the veil, there is a spiritual reality, and that spiritual reality at various times and various ways actually does kind of pierce through the veil, even if just for a moment, and have real, tangible effects in the material world.
And people instinctively know that, and horror tends to play off of that.
Yeah.
And I could add even a fifth one to that.
The villain, in many ways, is real.
I think of the Conjuring film series, for example, kind of cool in the end, where they said, Hey, here's the takeaway.
It's, I think, Ed and Lorraine Walker, other names in the movie.
They're like, God is real, Satan is real, and your soul hangs in the balance.
If we're being honest, there's been a dearth of good, compelling villains.
If we've forgotten how to write many good characters, I think we've also forgotten how to write a lot of villains, how to write people that actually have compelling, understandable interests.
So, in the dearth of a million comic book movies where it's like, oh, here's a guy that.
The villain is Thanos.
The villain is Thanos.
Or it's just a celebrity that's like brought in, there's nothing unique about him, nothing benevolent, to then go to a horror movie and counter, oh, this is something demonic, or this is someone that's sadistic and twisted.
Well, these things exist in real life.
The Inescapable Supernatural00:04:48
Demons are real.
Twisted serial killers are real.
That is something that I actually can feel something from compared to I'm watching a popcorn flick.
Everything is so fake.
And of course, the villain himself is as thick or as robust as a sheet of paper.
Yeah, that's another reason people are drawn to horror.
You're right.
The devil is real.
And so it does feel realistic.
Like that's what I was saying with the interest in the supernatural.
People, that's a universal interest because people, whether they consciously admit it or not, everybody's universally interested in that because they all have this sneaking suspicion that it's real.
But playing with the villain aspect of horror films, you're absolutely right.
Like when you've got some movie with a coven of witches, well, Thanos is not real.
Witches are.
Yeah.
Witches are.
You know, or like there's ghosts.
Okay.
Well, maybe it's not ghosts, but there are demonic spirits.
We talked about this just a couple of weeks ago in one of our episodes where we talked about, you know, the witch of Endor who conjures the spirit of Samuel.
And she herself is surprised because it's actually Samuel's, you know, soul that comes up from Sheol.
But what she usually did was probably not just sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors, but she probably conjured something.
It wasn't actually the person's soul.
But what it was, was a demon.
It was a familiar spirit that would take on the appearance of the person who's seeking her out, you know, who wants to talk to their dead loved one.
And so, my point is whether it's ghosts, familiar spirits, demons, or whether it's witches, well, there are actually witches or warlocks.
These are things that are actually real.
And I think people instinctively know that they're real.
And so, again, there's this universal appeal of, and they want, they want, I think at some level, it's like a desensitizing.
You know, like sometimes people will think about death because they know it's inescapable.
They know it's inescapable.
And although it's not entirely true, right?
There are actually good, positive ways to think about death.
You know, back in the day, you know, they would have a skull sitting on the table, memento mori, you know, remember your mortality, remember that death comes for us all.
And the point wasn't to be morbid, the point was to live life to the fullest in light of the fact that death is inescapable.
Well, likewise, so is hell for those who don't know Jesus Christ.
And I think, in this tragic irony, in a twisted sadistic sort of way, people are thinking, like, well, I could prepare for death by thinking about it now so that when it comes, maybe it won't be so frightening.
Maybe it won't be so terrible.
And I think that subconsciously, there are many people who are probably thinking, I could prepare for hell now by going to Saul number 49, whatever movie they're up to at this point.
So, I'm preparing for this thing that I know is coming, you know, so that I maybe I'm diffusing, right?
Like a balloon, so that when it finally does come, the pop is not so dramatic.
I'm diffusing some of the air preemptively so that it's not quite as terrible.
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
I think, like, particularly, this is something we're seeing.
It's just a problem of American sort of late stage capitalism, is that life has become so comfortable that people seek.
Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, involuntary suffering.
So, right, I don't have to work, you know, till the land anymore.
So I involuntarily suffer by going on a run or going to the gym.
Or cold plunge.
Or cold plunge.
Right, exactly.
But as also, I don't see death, right?
Someone dies, you know, the funeral home comes and picks them up.
They put a sheet over them, they cover them.
I never experience what it feels like to see a dead face, to hold the dead body, to have to carry a lifeless corpse.
And so I'm sort of.
Shielded and protected.
And so there's an element of me that craves the reality of death.
And horror is sort of an outlet, I think, for people, along with sort of what's happening, you know, as it relates to biblical anthropology and what we know as original sin and so on and so forth.
So I think that's a great point.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was really, you know, as we think about the emergence of horror in the 21st century, is the broadening of it.
So you think about The Exorcist, if you're familiar with the Exorcist film, right?
It's like the quintessential film.
I think a lot of horror started.
Are in that kind of very narrow, sort of demonic possession.
Catholic priest has to travel across the globe.
Now you see the broadening of it and you can just see how sloppy it's become.
You think about this more recent horror film around Christmas.
From Talk to Action00:05:22
Are you familiar?
I've never watched it.
I wouldn't watch that slop, but there's apparently a film where I think it's Krampus or something.
Yeah, Krampus.
I don't know if it's Santa Claus per se, but there's some sort of like wickedness going on at the time of Christmas, which is just.
So, you know, it's just like horror at its basis.
So, anyway, all I'm pointing out is that you see this like broadening of the category of horror to try to get this mass appeal.
So, it's not just ghosts, it's not just demons, it's vampires, it's aliens, it's piggly.
A lot of them go for kids and marriages too.
So, they'll take that relationship and it'll be a couple.
And then she's realizing as they go on vacation, oh my goodness, he's a psychopath.
Right.
Or even children, like a child becomes possessed.
And that's the scariest thing ever.
Right.
Subverting and tainting good natural relationships that should only be promoted and looked at.
Hey, these are good and beautiful and rightly ordered.
And it comes in and it twists them.
And it's like, can you imagine if your spouse was trying to kill you?
Can you imagine if your own child had been inhabited by a demon?
I think of Pet Cemetery, for instance.
That's real recoiling and you're just aghast at it.
Yep.
And then, you know, maybe one other reason to account for the rise of whore would, of course, be Peter Thiel, Palantir, and probably the Jews.
All right, let's go to our first commercial break and we'll be right back.
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Tragedy and Catharsis00:08:12
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I cracked myself up.
I feel like right before we went into that commercial break, I just thought it in my head.
I thought this is funny and I'm going to say it.
Yeah, you go out there and you make this about.
Palantir.
Yeah, you make this about Palantir and immigration.
Yep.
This is horror.
What are we doing?
The subject is about movies and horror.
Yeah.
I'll tell you what's a horror movie right now.
Our immigration policy.
So when I said, yeah, I'll tell you, that is a horror.
Now, okay, so Palantir, maybe not with horror.
However, though, I threw the Jews in there.
I mean, we do have to mention, we're talking about Hollywood.
There's a specific genre called body horror.
So you think of Alien Romulus.
And it's fascinating.
Think of the subversion of this movie.
You have an alien.
And the scariest thing about them is it's kind of actually a hyper fertility that someone gets killed by it and it plants its eggs in there.
I mean, I think in what was it, Prometheus, like this terrible scene at the end where she's literally giving birth to this half human, half alien.
Well, how is that not an image of, and this is how life is?
And if you're not careful, life will grow and you don't want this thing and it's literally in your stomach.
And the origin of body horror is literally a Jewish director who pioneered the genre as this gross, macabre twisting of like fertility and femininity.
I knew it every single time.
Let me trace this back that we've mentioned the catharsis.
I literally said it as a joke, but then when we went into the commercial break, I thought, hang on.
I probably nailed it.
It's got to be the case.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
We mentioned the catharsis, and we do have to trace this back, not to just this is something that came about recently.
I would argue, and this goes all the way back to the Theban plays, I'm gonna use it as an example Oedipus and Oedipus Rex.
We have told these stories for thousands of years, and the stories we tell, they give us catharsis from some of the emotions that we experience.
So, Oedipus Rex, Aristotle, I think he kind of ties it to this.
There's a tragedy in it.
So, the fear of a lot of the people at the time, the story, the way it's written, think about the person that, not by their own action, so they didn't mean it, they didn't have bad intentions.
But they fall under, because of tragedy, they fall into terrible circumstances.
In the story of Oedipus, you've had 3,000 years to read it.
I'm not spoiling it.
It's prophesied that he's going to kill his father and he's going to sleep with his mother.
And so this whole story is him going about his life trying to avoid it.
But it turns out the stranger that he murdered was actually his father in disguise.
He then goes to the city, he defeats the Sphinx, and he marries a woman who's a widow, and that turns out to be his mother because he separated at birth.
And there's this terrible moment at the end where he realizes what he's done.
And he actually takes the pin, I think, from his cloak and he blinds himself.
And what a lot of the Greek scholars kind of point to, what's this story doing?
Okay, like we read a story where a guy sleeps with his mom, he kills his dad.
Why would anybody want to experience that?
Well, we all recognize that life can have tragedy like that, that we can take tons of steps to avoid our own destiny.
Well, I don't want to end up like that.
I don't want to hurt those that I love.
But through tragedy, we end up doing it.
So people flock to those plays and they flock to them because they say, I'm going to watch someone go through that and I'm going to realize that it's real and can happen.
But I'm going to get this psychological release, this psychological relief.
From watching someone else undergo the punishment and maybe the tragedy, as we were alluding to earlier, the tragedy that was supposed to fall on me is going to fall on them.
You said it earlier in the Cold Open, but a lot of horror has a sexual element to it.
It does.
And how fitting is it that the most promiscuous generation that possibly ever lived, it's popular among young people, popular among Gen Z.
So you have a promiscuous generation, a generation not having kids because they're delaying it, that they go in and they watch movies.
And in it, they see those that are promiscuous, like them.
They see themselves.
They see themselves.
And then they see what befalls on the person that's representing them is what they, I think, whether conscious or subconscious, what they know should befall themselves.
And it's like, so I have my movie avatar is going in and receiving the punishment that I know that I personally am due.
And it.
It's weird.
It's cathartic.
It's like you're going and subjecting yourself to something that's demonic, something that's horrific, something that's grotesque, and all these different things.
And yet, people do it for the thrill of it, for the entertainment.
But they also do it, I think, in a therapeutic way because, ironically, even though they're subjecting themselves to something terrible, they come out feeling a little better.
Because they're like, but I kind of deserve it because here I am.
Living for myself, being selfish, being degenerate in all these different capacities.
And yet things go well for me.
I'm not getting the punishment that I know I'm due.
And so I'm going to go and kind of like whipping themselves, a little self inflicted punishment so that I can just keep going and not be overridden by guilt.
Yeah.
And so, all the way back to the plays.
In that time, controlling fate was a lot more difficult.
You didn't have predictions for weather.
You didn't have more autonomy than you did today.
So we no longer tell the stories of worrying about tragic fate befalling us, but we do tell the stories that they didn't tell then, which are stories of guilt, of feeling the weight of, man, I'm a guilty person.
So I think it's just interesting that for thousands of years, we've recognized, hey, there's a catharsis in a story.
And sometimes we didn't tell the same stories that we told now.
So it's not just one story playing out again and again and again.
We told a story then that related to man's plight and man's struggle.
But now, literally at the box office, we can look at the numbers and go, Hmm, I wonder what people are feeling.
What would be the title, maybe, of a movie that people are watching?
Oh, Sinners, like that just made like $300 billion in the box office.
There's literally a movie titled Sinners where people go in and watch sinners get the punishment that they deserve.
I don't know if I can make it more obvious than that, but to say that's a symptom of sick people looking for atonement.
And everybody does this, like even the person that's self pitying, what are they doing?
They're punishing themselves so they feel like, hey, I got punished and you don't have to do it for me.
I feel guilty about this.
I feel insufficient and I'm going to tear myself down.
It's not even a real humility.
I'm going to tear myself down and that's going to atone for the bad things I've done.
But all of it is, of course, it's a faux covering.
It's like Adam and Eve trying to cover themselves with leaves.
Yeah.
And I think that point that I made about the character being inherently less, I think it's important that the average horror film doesn't really do any character development.
It kind of just throws you in the middle of it.
You don't get attached to the characters.
And then as a consequence, you're kind of typically okay with them dying.
These are the subtle ways in which I think horror sort of alleviates your, or I would say, not alleviates isn't the word, but it sort of provides you with this sense of that cathartic release that we're talking about.
But it's very fake in the sense that you weren't attached to the character.
Even using the movie itself, it's like it didn't really cost you anything to see that happen.
And so I think of like, so that's one part of it.
The other part of horror is like the, I think it's called Saw or Jigsaw.
Where it's like, again, I get to go see people be punished, and I'm actually better than them.
And so it's kind of like a pat on the back of seeing just quote unquote justice be done.
Of course, it's just gore and terrible in all sorts of ways.
So you have kind of those two different streams of horror happening.
One is like the self flagellation, but it's like that fake kind.
And then one is like the, you know, I'm more virtuous than any person I'm about to watch on the screen, and I get to see them suffer.
They're getting what they deserve, but I'm better than that.
Storms, Gods, and Justice00:14:58
Yeah.
Right.
I have one more major point that I want to make, but I'm going to, this is going to be a shorter episode.
And so I'd like to save it and make it after this last commercial break.
So let's go ahead and go to our final commercial break.
We'll come back.
I'll make a point, and then I'd like to hear both of you guys respond to it.
We'll give some concluding thoughts, and that'll be it.
All right.
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Wes, you made a great point earlier where you were talking about, you know, back in the day, it's the fear of the unknown, it's the fear of not being able to control the elements and the environment.
And so it's this fear of tornadoes and hurricanes and storms, you know, and lightning.
And then also the weather in terms of rain and crop growth and fear of famine, fear of starvation, these kinds of things.
There was a lot of fear that came from elements of nature that had yet to be harnessed or protections that we now have that keep us safe and remove at least a great degree of our vulnerabilities to the raw elements of nature that our ancestors. didn't have.
And so I think it was Sigmund Freud, a quick early life check on Sigmund Freud.
What do we got going on there?
Not Scottish, not German.
Anglo Protestant.
Anglo Protestant.
So Sigmund Freud, a terrible, terrible person, and hated Christ and hated the Christian faith and hated all religion for that matter.
But one of his big arguments against God, because ultimately he's trying to, he's an atheist and he's promoting atheism.
One of his big arguments against God is he would say, well, all the people who used to believe in God, the reason why.
They believed in deities is because deities are a way of personifying certain natural elements that cannot be reasoned with.
They can't be appealed to.
You can't barter with a storm.
Even if there's a mob of people who take you hostage as you're walking home in the middle of the night down a back alleyway, which you shouldn't do.
But if that ever happened and a whole group of people surround you and they grab you and they threaten to kill you, Even though they're terrible people and they may be beyond being reasoned with, at least they're people.
And so you can try.
You can at least try and say, please, I'm a father.
I have children at home.
Or, here, take my money.
Or, I'll give you this instead if you spare my life.
There's some element of hope because you're dealing with a person and a person can be spoken to.
A person can be reasoned with.
But there is no reasoning with a storm.
There's no reasoning with famine.
There's no reasoning with the crops just not growing.
And so, what people did, according to Sigmund Freud, is, and I think some of this is true, but it just explains gods, lowercase g gods, and many different world religions, but it does not explain God, that is the true God, the triune God.
And R.C. Sproul talked about this, and I think it's insightful, some of the things that he has to say, and I'll paraphrase.
But this is why you attribute certain personification deities to storms.
So you have Thor, or you have Odin, or you have.
You know, this person or that person, and the gods still can do terrible things to you, and they're not necessarily even on humanity's side.
When you look at Greco Roman mythology, the gods are petty.
The gods are usually at war with each other, angry at each other.
And they're not necessary, they're not omnibenevolent.
Some of the gods may have some benevolent moments towards humanity, but they can hurt you, they can help you.
But with that, at least you have a person.
You have a person.
And so you can appeal to a person.
And one of the ways that you think of the ancient Aztecs or the Mayans or, you know, One of the ways that you appeal is by blood, by blood.
And I think of horror and going in and watching on a screen this person being torn apart.
And I wonder, like, what people felt when there was a human sacrifice because there was a famine and the rains didn't come that year, you know, and people are starving.
And you've attributed to this natural phenomenon a godlike deity to personify it so that you can appeal, right?
Because otherwise, you're actually more hopeless.
Because then it's like, well, if it's just the weather, then there's not a dang thing we can do about it.
So, we've attributed this deity personification to the weather, to the rains, you know, and there's been no rain this year.
And so we're having a famine.
Our people are starving.
And we're going to appeal to the deity so that he might send rain, so that we might have crops, so that we might not starve.
And we're going to appeal to him by sacrifice.
We'll sacrifice something.
It's going to be a person.
We're going to make.
A human sacrifice and spill their blood out, and everybody's watching, and everybody probably has this sense of that could have been me, or even that should have been me.
But this person is dying for me in my place so that me and my family can eat, so that the God would see the blood of this sacrificial lamb and turn from their wrath and bless us, the people, by sending rain.
Well, skip forward.
These days, it's like we.
We don't live outside.
We don't live in huts, you know, at least here in the West.
We're far less vulnerable to hurricanes and to storms.
These things still happen and there is still a death toll, but it's minuscule by comparison.
Even today, you know, if you go to like whenever there's an earthquake or something like that in Haiti, far more people die.
And not necessarily because the earthquake is more severe, although there have been very severe earthquakes in Haiti, but there have been comparable earthquakes in the West and less people die because.
Because of technology, the way that the buildings are structured, they don't cause as much damage.
So, there's just through technology, through innovation in our modern world in the West, we have found a way to drastically mitigate the casualties of natural disasters.
So, there's less, my point is, there is less fear instilled in the average modern Western person when it comes to storms and hurricanes and famine and these kinds of things.
We typically don't go hungry.
Even the poorest among us in Western countries are eating Cheeto Puffs and whatever on our tax dollars.
And so people aren't fearing famine.
They're not fearing starvation.
They're not fearing storms coming and sweeping them away.
But the one thing that we still do fear, very, very much so, is our own guilt and what we think is due to us.
So instead of we've attributed a deity to a storm, And we have a human sacrifice in some Aztec temple.
We go to the movie theater and we have a virtual, digital sacrifice on screen, not to die to protect us from the hurricane or to die to protect us from famine, but to die to protect us from our own sense of guilt.
And I think that's a lot of what's going on.
And we talked about this as we were preparing for the episode, and all three of us agree that the thing that's missing, that's probably quite obvious by this point, is that the Christian faith.
Has a sacrificial lamb.
We actually do have atonement.
The Christian faith actually deals with moral guilt and it deals with moral guilt not by placating people and just patronizing them and saying, oh, but you're not that bad.
Somebody else is actually worse.
So sleep easy at night.
The Christian gospel doesn't come to us and deal with our guilt by convincing us that our guilt isn't that bad or convincing us that we're not guilty at all, but it actually elevates man's guilt and says, you think you're bad, you're actually worse.
You're so bad that the only sufficient punishment is eternity in hell or Jesus being ripped apart on the cross under the wrath of God for your sin.
However, this second option is, in fact, an option because God is so benevolent and so merciful that he poured out his wrath that you deserve and you know you deserve on Christ, who knew no sin.
He was made to be sin as a substitute on your behalf.
And so we have this.
But one thing, going back to Sigmund Freud just for a moment, R.C. Spool said this.
He said, The thing that Freud didn't understand is that his way of accounting for the gods, you know, people who were powerless because of a lack of technology and innovation, the famines and storms and all the rest, trying to personify these natural elements so that they could be reasoned with to give them some sense of peace of mind, to make them feel like they had at least some control over the things that they were most afraid of.
That may be a reasonable explanation for false religions and false gods, but it doesn't explain the Christian God for one.
Fundamental reason.
And the reason is because the Christian God is actually more terrifying than the storm or the thing that you're trying to get rid of.
And so he gave the example of the disciples with Jesus on the boat.
And when a great storm, and you can tell from the text, it's a storm of demonic origin.
It's not just a natural storm.
It's like Jesus is going somewhere, Satan is trying to inhibit him and stirring up the waters.
And Satan does have authority over the natural elements.
That doesn't mean every time there's a storm that it's satanic or of a satanic origin.
But he does have that power because Satan, remember in the book of Job, Satan is given permission by God to go and torment Job.
But the first kind of ring of permission that Satan is allotted by God is that he cannot inflict Job in his personal body.
And then later, he's allowed to inflict Job's body with sores and all those things, but he cannot take his life.
But at first, he can't touch Job's body, but he can take everything else that Job has his livestock, all of his resources, and even his children.
And Satan does that.
Satan actually, the text says that he causes a great wind to blow that capsizes a house that Job's adult children were congregated in, and the roof collapses and kills all of his children.
So, this is wind that's being controlled by Satan.
And likewise, I think when Jesus is on the boat with the disciples, it is a satanic origin of this storm, Satan controlling the wind and the waves.
Now, Jesus, of course, has even greater authority over wind and waves.
And so, when he says, Peace be still.
The wind and waves were not just acting on their own.
I think they were obeying a voice, namely the voice of the enemy.
But Jesus gives a higher command with a higher authority.
And so they're forced to then obey the word of Christ rather than the word of Satan, and they stop.
But here's the big thing that Sproul points out.
He says that when that happens, before Jesus calms the storm, in the midst of the storm, it says that the disciples were afraid.
After Jesus calms the storm, and there's no more threat now from wind and waves, it says the disciples were then exceedingly afraid.
So if Freud is saying that the whole point of mankind manufacturing a false God, It is to give them some sense of peace of mind because they're afraid of natural elements, but the God makes these things less frightening.
Well, the Christian God and the God man, Christ Jesus himself, we have from documented evidence that the gospel narratives that he actually caused not less fear, but greater fear because the disciples then turn.
Their fear is no longer attached to the wind and waves and the storm itself.
But now what they're afraid of is that there's a man standing on the boat with them that has authority over wind and waves.
And he has the authority to cast their souls into hell.
And so he's actually more terrifying, not less.
And so the Christian God, basically, what Sproul says is that Freud's explanation for manufacturing gods would cause you to manufacture all kinds of gods, but never the Christian God.
That could account for coming up with Zeus or with Thor, but never in a million years would you come up with, if you want to come up with a deity and it's just, It's just a figment of your own imagination.
It's not real.
You would come up with something that would be beneficial for you.
So you would come up with a deity that has power over the things that make you feel powerless.
Sure.
So you would come up with an omnipotent deity.
But you would also want to come up with a deity to be powerful.
This is what you wouldn't want.
God's Propitiation00:07:57
You wouldn't want the deity that you manufacture in your mind to be thrice holy, terrible in his judgments, by no means pardoning the wicked.
You wouldn't want that deity.
You would want him to be powerful, but you wouldn't want him to have a moral standard of perfection that damns every single person alive.
You wouldn't come up with that God.
The only way that God comes into the annals of history and the minds of men is if it's true, if that God actually exists.
And that God, terrible as he is, and terrible is a perfectly biblical and appropriate word to describe the God of heaven and earth, to describe the triune God, but as terrible as he is, he is also a merciful God.
Not a God who sweeps our guilt under the rock, not a God who turns a blind eye to our sin.
He is a God who will not pardon the wicked.
Every single sin must be held accountable and punished justly under his wrath.
But he is a God who puts forward his own propitiation.
Going back to the Aztecs or the Mayans, people would put forward, they would take someone, whether willing or unwillingly, they would take a vessel, usually a virgin or something like that, a pure, spotless, Lamb, you know, but of the human variety, and put them forward as a propitiation.
That word propitiation actually comes from pagan religions.
It predates Christianity.
It is used in the New Testament two or three times in the entirety of the New Testament combined.
So it's only used a couple of times, but it's a concept that predates Christianity, but of putting forward a human sacrifice, some kind of offering to placate the wrath of a God.
But Paul uses it, and the difference in the Christian gospel is this it's not that, well, the Christian God, he's such a good God, and he's the author of sugar and spice and everything nice, and so he doesn't require a propitiation.
He doesn't require, you know, he just makes his own wrath go away by just changing his mind or turning his eye.
No, he still demands a propitiation, not because he's vengeful, but because he's just.
He's just.
But here's the quintessential difference there is a propitiation that God requires, but the propitiation is God, Jesus, given to God, the Father, and put forward by God.
Instead of mankind having to gather together and we, Have to find and put forward a propitiation to die for us, to placate the wrath of the gods.
God Himself puts forward His own propitiation, Himself to Himself, by Himself, who is Himself to Himself, to satisfy His own wrath on our behalf.
And that is the gospel.
And I think horror, one of the reasons that it's succeeding is because it's a cheap alternative to the gospel of Jesus Christ for a guilty people.
So, any thoughts?
I think it's the craziest thing you've ever said.
No, I think that's helpful.
Yeah, I've never really thought about the interpretation of like the pagan gods and of the Romans and the Greeks in that way of like they sort of stand in for nature.
But it makes sense, I guess, if you think about how these gods are lowercase g gods are depicted.
Poseidon.
Fickle.
Yeah, they're fickle.
Right?
Like Poseidon, who's very fickle, which is like similar to how you would interpret nature per se, right?
If you think about the ocean and the wind and storms and those sorts of things, it's sort of unpredictable.
And in a lot of ways, they think of the gods the same way.
So it certainly makes sense.
And then, of course, I agree with everything as it relates to the gospel and the way that God is much more terrible and frightening.
Yeah.
I like because it references, honestly, a deeper than deeper truth, like talking about blood.
So you said, like, well, horror in one sense is the cheapening of it.
Well, it's a cheap atonement.
And there's that true.
But then another reason it does appeal is because it is actually true that we're getting down to brass tacks.
None of this action movie, none of this musical.
We're getting down to blood, the core thing at the center of the universe.
I read a story.
It was a lapsed Catholic and he did a Huayahuasca trip and he had a terrible trip.
And he remembers just like looking up and feeling the weight of sin.
And he said at that moment that he felt as though the crucifix of the universe was the yearn for atonement, that he's there and he's tripping out.
And so obviously, don't take it fully to the bank.
But he was saying, like, he felt like, man, the yearning deep in my soul is for atonement.
And so, on some level, whore is getting down to the truth of it all that blood is required.
And that's why it appeals to us.
All the other trappings and everything else go away.
We're dealing with the fundamental substrate of the universe that something is required for a people.
And of course, again, the Christian gospel is the one, it's not a simulated blood like a whore.
It's not somebody else's blood.
It's not the blood of bulls and goats, but the son of the spotless Lamb of God who can actually atone for it.
Amen.
Last little piece of practical advice take it or leave it.
But I think there is a clear distinction between mystery, even some thrillers or suspense kind of movie, when it's a whodunit, where there's like a silly.
Serial killer, you know, and there's a detective who's trying to catch them.
And I think those things are different than strictly horror, where it's just the whole point of the movie is a person is going to be, you know, split apart and tortured, and you're just going to sit there and watch it happen.
So the last thing that, you know, Wes, you mentioned this before we started the show, but to leave you guys with is yes, there's all these different connotations and parallels between horror and what's going on in broader society and our culture and ties to the Christian gospel.
And atonement and propitiation, and all those things I think are profound and important to think about.
But in terms of should Christians watch horror, we do have, you know, so we've dissected it, but now in terms of the realm of counsel, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't end the show by saying there is something to be said for the scripture that tells us whatever is pure, whatever is noble, whatever is lovely, whatever is good, think on these things.
I don't think that the mind of the Christian, we should be mindful of our mortality, the fact that we will die, but there's a fine line in thinking about our death.
Occasionally, reminding ourselves that we're made from the dust and to dust we will return and we must give an account to God for our lives.
That's very different than morbid, grotesque, torturous kinds of thoughts.
And especially for the Christian, it makes sense that the unbeliever, that the pagan, that the truly guilty person would subject themselves to that again and again and again.
But for the Christian, we have the willingness.
Suffering servant who was ripped apart on our behalf.
And in terms of things that are grotesque and morbid, the only one that I want to allow my mind to ever contemplate is the passion of the Christ and his death on the cross.
If I want to think about anything that is truly grotesque, I'll read through the Gospels and the crucifixion of Jesus.
But beyond that, I don't want to subject my mind to.
Morbid, torturous things.
Because as a Christian, I don't have to, because those aren't things that are waiting around the corner for me at the end of my life, but they're things that were taken from me and for me on my behalf by Jesus Christ.
And so if I think of brutality and if I think of gore, I'll think of the blood of Jesus shed in my place.
So I would encourage you to consider doing the same.
Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you again next time.