Halloween is the perfect time to reflect on how Westen horror fiction stands apart from other fiction genres. Whereas other storytelling forms have veered away from their spiritual and moral foundations, only horror has retained a clear link to its Christian roots.
From medieval Europe’s tales of demonic possession to Victorian Gothic novels to modern psychological horror, the genre has explored humanity’s deep-seated fear of sin, Satan, and the possibility of eternal damnation. This unique foundation keeps Western horror fiction grounded in a Christian moral framework, establishing it as the last remaining genre with an essential Christian influence.
The origins of Western horror as a genre stem largely from medieval Europe, where Christian beliefs about the supernatural dominated the cultural imagination. Horror tales often involved monks or priests warding off demonic forces or divine punishments meant to remind humanity of the fragility of life and the wages of sin. Works like Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost blended fear with moral instruction, using Christian imagery to communicate messages about sin, grace, and the reality of divine justice.
In fact, horror’s earliest stories were warnings cloaked in terror. These tales didn’t merely exist to frighten but served as spiritual allegories. This Christian emphasis on an ever-present cosmic battle between good and evil provided the bedrock upon which horror fiction was built.
And one of the best examples is perhaps the single greatest writer of all time.
Related: Star Trek Is Zombie Horror
For whatever reason, everybody seems to miss the horror elements in the works of William Shakespeare. The Bard often flirted with the supernatural, using horror elements to underscore Christian ideas of repentance, judgment, and redemption. No discussion of Shakespeare is complete without mentioning his ghosts, which often carry messages urging the living to repent and mend their ways.
In Hamlet, the King’s ghost appears as a harbinger of moral reckoning. Similarly, Macbeth uses the horrifying specter of murder to explore themes of guilt, ambition, and divine retribution. These tales’ Christian foundations assume that supernatural terror has a moral purpose. And they raise profound questions about cosmic justice and the afterlife, echoing Church teachings about sin’s consequences and the need for repentance.
Which leads us to horror’s next evolution …
By the 18th and 19th centuries, Gothic literature had secured horror’s place as a formal genre and codifying its Christian symbols and themes. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while not a traditional horror story, centers on a creator’s responsibility to his creation, an idea that holds clear echoes of humanity’s relationship with God. This novel portrays the horror of a fallen creation in light of Christian understandings about the evils of grasping for power not meant for man.
But it was another Gothic novel that would solidify the Christian morality at horror’s core.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is steeped in Christian imagery. Crosses repel the vampire, holy water burns him, and only after Abraham Van Helsing and his companions confront Dracula with the Eucharist itself do they succeed in defeating him.
Stoker created Dracula as an anti-Christian figure, whose vampirism represents an unholy inversion of Christ’s sacrifice. Dracula’s parasitic immortality mocks eternal life, revealing the terrifying consequences of rejecting redemption.
Related: Vampire of the Amazon
Sadly, many modern horror writers have drifted toward secular explanations for horror.
But some, like Dean Koontz, have maintained a clear Christian perspective. Koontz’s work often grapples with classic themes of light versus darkness, despair versus redemption, and the power of love and faith. His characters are frequently forced to confront not only physical threats, but moral and spiritual tests informed by Christian beliefs.
In novels like the Odd Thomas series, Koontz builds stories around the resilience of the human spirit when bolstered by faith. His protagonists face preternatural evils that symbolize moral corruption or despair. So their triumphs are frequently grounded in the theological virtues. Koontz’s horror thus aligns with the Christian tradition that has animated horror fiction from its origins.
But why has Western horror retained vestiges of its Christian roots in the face of rampant secularization?
The endurance of Christian themes in horror may seem surprising, given how other genres have succumbed to the new state religion. Yet horror, with its existential themes and supernatural focus, is uniquely suited to explore Christian ideas about life, death, and the afterlife. The terror the genre is designed to provoke makes humanity’s most profound fears its natural subject matter. And no one has yet devised a more terrifying idea than the prospect that all your secret deeds will be made known, and you will be subject to their eternal consequences.
Regardless of personal beliefs, audiences recognize the fear of judgment, the horror of evil, and the hope for redemption as universal constants. The simple fact is that other genres have fallen to secularism because they have lower stakes. Horror’s focus on existential fears and moral conflicts keeps it anchored to the Christian tradition.
Western horror’s Christian foundation is much more than window dressing. It elevates the genre’s themes, giving horror fiction a philosophical depth that other types of stories often lack. Horror allows readers to face the inevitability of mortality, the reality of inhuman evil, and man’s fallen nature. As long as horror continues to draw on this well of Christian themes, it will do more than frighten; it will serve as a mirror reflecting humanity’s deepest fears while holding out the ultimate hope of salvation.
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It should be noted that non-Christian horror is almost always focused on not knowing anything or having any clear escape. Lovecraft is steeped in this, though holy objects still function in his works, as are other country’s horror tales like Japan or India. I don’t tend to consider this anti-Christian, just pre-revealed horror.
Anti-Christian horror, however, is terrible. Clownish, shallow, and without purpose. It doesn’t work. Life is meaningless, then you die as a nobody. It’s pointless. It’s also increasingly pathetic and hacky, as the Castlevania hackery about indicates.
Might also be why I don’t really like Stephen King. I don’t find anything he’s come up with scary in the least, and his disdain for the Truth as far too obvious. IMO he’s someone who could only have been made popular in the age of Boomerism.
To be fair, some of the anti-Christian horror can be effective by “revealing” God as a Lovecraftian malevolent entity with good propaganda. I’m not sure whether the movie Frailty counts as pro or anti Christian when SPOILER it’s sort of implied God turned the one kid to evil so he could be dealt with.
King…the last thing I read of his was Revival (A library copy of course, I haven’t given him money in over a decade). It was way too long and should have been a novella or short story, but I’ll confess a chill at the ending: there’s an afterlife, but its basically hell and everyone goes there no matter what.
A moment later I shook my head and recognized the reveal for what it was: A spoiled, spiteful, resentful old man who’s had everything and is miserable, who senses where he might be going and so making up a story where everyone goes to he’ll with him. It ties in with the whole novel itself, A hate-letter to Americans. Particularly to religious Americans. I got a sense of the reader invited to take comfort in the fate awaiting the “smug, insufferable, bigoted” religious characters.
By the way, I’m about to start reading Star Wanderers. It looks fun!
Thanks for reading! They were a lot of fun to write.
“Might also be why I don’t really like Stephen King. I don’t find anything he’s come up with scary in the least, and his disdain for the Truth as far too obvious. IMO he’s someone who could only have been made popular in the age of Boomerism.”
From the following comment: “A moment later I shook my head and recognized the reveal for what it was: A spoiled, spiteful, resentful old man who’s had everything and is miserable, who senses where he might be going and so making up a story where everyone goes to he’ll with him. It ties in with the whole novel itself, A hate-letter to Americans. Particularly to religious Americans. I got a sense of the reader invited to take comfort in the fate awaiting the “smug, insufferable, bigoted” religious characters.”
Take the following with a grain of salt, as I don’t read horror fiction.
Steven King struck me as writing out of a long line of New England Congressionalist/Puritans. Other similar authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe.
When those raised in Puritan type culture go dark and/or abandon God, it can produce an attitude of walking around in Hell but with no hope that Christ ever really came. What holds Puritanism together is a faith in work as a sacrament and that somehow God is saving you personally. Yes, the rest of the planet isn’t so luck, but that’s okay. When those dogmas prove unsustainable, all that’s left is that bitter sense that everyone is broken and unsalvageable. The primary target for that bitterness will be smug, insufferable, bigoted, and hypocritical religious leaders. That is though, without quite enough self awareness required to realize that they have become what they are complaining about.
You’d think that hacks living in Christendom who presume to write horror sans Christ would consider that not even Lovecraft could escape the shadow of the Cross and abandon the project.
Stoker’s imagined use of Catholic sacraments and sacramentals got pretty loopy. I seem to remember Van Helsing saying he had a special dispensation from the Vatican to grind up consecrated hosts and sprinkle the crumbs around the room to keep the vampire out.
But because evil remains present in physical form, even the protestantized imagination recognizes that God’s grace would work through physical means to combat it. So call for the Catholics who still have the candles and bells…
I’ve been listening to an excellent audiobook of Dracula (read by Simon Vance) this month, and it did occur to me that it would have made a lot more sense, both logistically and sacramentally, for Van Helsing to use holy water to seal cracks and make sacred circles to keep vampires out. Not only do I seriously doubt a layman would be allowed to carry around an apparently inexhaustible supply of Hosts and crumple them up, but the holy water could also have been applied much more quickly, at moments like the attack of Dracula’s brides on Van Helsing and Mina late in the book. Stoker was Church of Ireland (i.e., the Irish branch of Anglicanism), but you’d think he’d have at least been familiar with holy water.
In partial defense of Stoker, holy water is a sacramental that works ex opere operantis, i.e., according to the recipient’s disposition. The Holy Eucharist is a sacrament, which works ex opere operato, regardless of how the celebrant or recipient is disposed.
That said, it’s hard to see how Van Helsing’s use of the Host wasn’t sacrilegious. But there’s every indication that it was well-meant.
And as Elizabeth Bourg Nicholson points out in her Critical Edition of Dracula for Ignatius Press, van Helsing working the Host into a putty reduces it to the point where it’s no longer recognizable as bread, which means the Real Presence would depart …
Yes, but theologians are divided as to when that happens. The current consensus is 15 minutes, so while not a long-term solution, it may not have been entirely ineffective, either.
Dracula is a classic, though I think it’s a little hard on old Vlad Tepes. The man was brutal, but he had to fight the Ottomans at the height of their vigour and power. He made a pretty good job of it, too.
Dracula is the Darth Vader of gothic horror – from a certain point of view.
Take it or leave it, but my impression is that stories about vampires and witches come from the edges of Christian society. Both categories are heavily entwined with legends (fair/unfair/true/untrue/partially true – leave to the reader to decide) about a certain ethnic group that has lived in opposition to European Christendom.
From a website that I found *ahem* (Wikipedia):
“Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish writer and traveller (born in Szent-György, Kingdom of Hungary now Svätý Jur, Slovakia). Dracula likely emerged from Vámbéry’s dark stories of the Carpathian Mountains.”
Anyway, what repels a vampire is about a complete rejection of Christianity/something closer demonic possession. We aren’t allowed to discuss past sins of the ethnic group in question anymore, but it’s pretty certain that a few isolated groups went off the rails with blood rituals during Passover at various points during the medieval era. Not most of them, but a few irresponsible diabolists, as Chesterton calls them. Blood lust, combined with horror/rejection of Catholic sacraments/sacramentals, combined with wealth, and a want to live forever via dark arts and we have a stereotype that’s a little too close for comfort. We can even find that today in the people we call globalists, regardless of ethnic origin.
An obviously unforgiving crusader/defender from Islam somehow becoming associated with vampires is maybe about living in 2024. Good old Vlad does not appear to have rejected Christianity, other than not exactly offering the peace pipe to his enemies. If anything I would call it a classic Protestant substitution of a traditional Christian villain for the closest Catholic version available.
Anyway, today, there’s a sense of trying to redeem both vampires and witches in pop culture. Oddly, I think Hollywood is getting so open the nature of both that they may resurrect a natural horror and distain of them.
I can’t blame Vlad. He was certainly a Christian, but didn’t really have the option of being peaceful to his enemies. Having been raised as a de factor prisoner in the Ottoman capital, he knew all about the Turkish way of life and of war. He actually learned the impaling thing from them. He also had to deal with his brother, who had been the Sultan’s catamite (yes, really) and was more than willing to sell his people out to be a Turkish vassal.
The whole “Dracula is Vlad” thing has been overblown; as I understand it, Stoker originally intended to name his villain “Count Wampyr” (a terribly on-the-nose name!) and them stumbled across the Dracula name during additional research after the book was mostly complete, and recognized how good it sounded. He wound up incorporating a few details of Vlad’s biography into Dracula’s own account of his past life, but those were late additions; the story was fully formed before he ever heard of Vlad.
Correct. It was a last-minute addition.
There’s a great book by Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller called “Dracula: Sense and Nonsense” that clears up a lot of misconceptions about Stoker and Dracula, including the idea that Dracula was based on Vlad Tepes from the ground up.
The only connections between Vlad Dracula and Stoker’s character are the name and general location. Everything else is the work of later hands,
It’s the American geography problem. “Both are from Eastern Europe, so it must same person!!” I’ve seen it with an issue much more recent too.
Even in the book, Van Helsing and Arminius’ identification of the Count as “that Voivode Dracula” is speculation. It’s also never specifically stated that they meant Vlad III. As it turns out, there were a lot of Draculas.
And that air of mystery maintained throughout the novel is one of its biggest strengths. Stoker never tells us outright who the main antagonist really was or how he became undead. He trusts the reader to grasp the basics of the folklore and lets the mythology do the heavy lifting. Major W for the no-magic-system bros.
Hitchcock’s method of letting the audiences’ imagination fill in the really horrific parts wins again.
Uninterrupted W streak!
I’m not the biggest fan of Koontz’s newer stuff. From what I’ve read it’s a little too overwrought with characters who are over the top good or evil (I know, considering a lot of people in the real world, Koontz probably underplays his characterizations, but a limitation of fiction is that it’s got to be plausible). Generally I find his earlier stuff preferable, with Door to December a favorite.
An exception is his Your Heart Belongs to Me. It’s a little padded, and will throw off readers expecting one of Koontz’s thrillers, but the ending has some intense scenes of mercy and grace that’ve stayed with me months after reading, along with some very subtle characterization.
One of the things I like in his works is how he shows how evil decays while good lifts up. “From the Corner of His Eye” and “One Door Away from Heaven” both do this quite well. Another fun one was “The Taking” which is an alien invasion story with a twist that made a lot of seculars mad. I think he more or less maintains his balance, though since he constantly puts out books they can’t all be winners.
On the other hand, I’m reading “Strangers” right now, an older work of his, and finding it is taking far too long to get going and I keep stopping to read something else. I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that most mainstream books between the 70s to now’s biggest problem is tremendous padding to get that expected minimum girthy book length, and it hurts to have edited enough to see basic things that should be gutted but aren’t. It’s hard to get past that now.
Regardless, I’d still rather read any of his works before King’s.
I’ve been spoiled by pulp. Several times I’ve gotten to the end of a chapter in a tradpub book and thought: why was that even there?
To be fair, A lot of indie has a similar problem of stretching things out to make series that aren’t necessary.
I watched the first few episodes of the Netflix Castlevania. It was odd how a handful of episodes could seem padded, and I think Trevor doesn’t even fight any monsters in his first two episodes.
As for that bishop, he’s not just evil, he’s stupidly evil and such a caricature as to make one long for the old days when villains still had to have something admirable about them.