Abstract
Reading the Bible with horror is how some people react to Old Testament passages as they try to assuage the cognitive dissonance due to the disparity between an angry, changeable God described in the ultraviolent and/or misogynistic texts and the beneficent, omniscient God of their childhood faith. Brandon Grafius, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, wrestles with both ultraviolent (Exodus 4:24-26, 1 Samuel 28) and misogynistic (2 Samuel 11, 12, Leviticus 15, 18:19-21, Numbers 5:11-31) pericopes using a strategy gained from his experience as a viewer of horror movies (the Introduction describes his watching The Omen [1976] when he was twelve) and as film critic whose love for horror intensified as he aged. In “Reading the Bible with Horror,” Dr. Grafius offers a playful, instructive academic book (he analyzes passages in the original Hebrew) that uses the “particular lens” of horror theory to slash through the negative accretions that have plagued the Hebrew Bible for centuries to decipher socially malignant and/or culturally distant Bible stories. This text encourages Scripture readers to re-watch well-known horror films, such as The Exorcist (1976), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Others (2001), The Thing From Another Planet (1951) and its remake The Thing (1982), The Shining (1980), Teeth (2008), and Us (2019) among others to evaluate Old Testament stories, laws, prescriptions, and prohibitions, otherwise incomprehensible to the 21st century reader.
Horror films and their source material from the past 90 years explain “…the biblical text and the fears that lie beneath…the inner workings and underlying anxieties…” by providing “a grammar for exploring uncomfortable thoughts and spaces, either within our social structure or within our own individual psychological makeup” (pp. 16–17, 21). Grafius discusses the cultural fascination with zombies, references the Haitian “fear of slavery and loss of power” in White Zombie (1932), analyzes George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) filmed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and featuring a disturbingly ironic ending still haunting today, and references The Walking Dead (2010); this section of his text resonates powerfully with the current “Woke” movement (pp. 19–21).
Published during a global pandemic, amidst political polarization, rioting, and unrelenting restlessness from racial inequality in the United States, Grafius' prescient book resurrects the specters of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that haunt our daily lives and the pages of the Hebrew scriptures, connecting common themes of the horror genre with those in Hebrew stories. By its nature, horror challenges one's theodicy; so does Scripture. The reader/viewer is forced to tremble at the existence of the slasher, murderer, the monster, the alien, the virus or plague, the bodily discharges, the natural disturbances that bring chaos into one's ordered reality. In chapters entitled “Monsters, Monster Theory, and Us” and “The Monstrous YHWH,” Grafius highlights the notion that the Creator, representing good, and the Destroyer, representing evil, are merged into the monotheistic Hebraic God YHWH or ‘el ohim (depending on the strand of authorship) which evolved from the polytheistic cultures of Mesopotamia and Babylon as the Destroyer-God Tiamat and the Creator-God Marduk were merged (pp. 29–36; see also J. Miles, God: A Biography, pp. 45–46). In ground-breaking reflections on excerpts from The Book of Job (these excerpts are analyzed in detail in Hebrew), Grafius presents evidence that the author intentionally linked Job with Leviathan in literary symbols and analogy. Like Leviathan, Job reflects God's Divine Power, is a transcendent creature that disrupts the created order and institutes chaos (pp. 37–53). Job and Leviathan are similar “monsters.” (Note: The footnotes at the end of each chapter are extremely valuable, providing detailed support for the theories.)
The chapters “Hauntings of the Hebrew Bible” and “’The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House!’: The Monstrous Within the Community” highlight how natural bodily functions and fluids of the vulnerable human condition, menstruation, sexual reproduction, excretion, pregnancy, illness inform the more challenging Hebraic law. Prescriptions for bodily discharges and prohibitions against sexual infidelity in Leviticus and Numbers are disparately different for each gender, inordinately more stringent for women compared to those for men, reflecting patriarchal fears that “impure women” threaten the community. Menstruating women must be “discharged” from the community for a week (compared to an evening for men who ejaculate). A woman accused of sexual infidelity must undergo “sotah,” the ritual in Numbers 5:11–31 to determine guilt. Stephen King in his novel Carrie, the basis for the film directed by Brian DePalma in 1976, commences his story with the “discharge” of the eponymous heroine (or antihero?) when she menstruates in the shower at her school. King ends the novel with a “sotah,” drenching Carrie with pig's blood during the American adolescent rite-of-passage (the high-school naming of prom “king/queen”). The scenes of Carrie's final revenge reflect that chaos unleashed onto a community that relinquishes its requisite vigil of women's sexual powers (pp. 112–14).
Reading the Bible with Horror, a thin volume (186 pages, with footnotes), possibly the first of many about how horror films inform other “dark passages” in both Old and New Testaments, is a powerful reminder that before we reach “the verdant pastures and restful waters to dwell in the House of the Lord,” there's still a “valley with the shadow of death” through which we must first traverse.