Sacred terror

Horror movies so often turn on religious imagery, yet few viewers stop to ask why those scenes unsettle them so deeply. Douglas Cowan takes up that question, treating horror cinema as a place where people act out the anxieties they carry about their own faith. He looks at fears of evil, of the body, of holy ground, and of death, including dying badly or failing to stay dead. He also considers the fear that religion is both powerful and powerless.