ENGAGING CULTURE

As Halloween draws closer and colorful superheroes line the aisles of stores with ghouls and goblins, and trailers for horror movies light up our television screens with eerie and gruesome images, the question comes to my mind: Why do people, as a whole, like being scared?

Now, I grant you, not everybody likes to be scared. Like not everybody likes rollercoasters. But to those who do, sometimes the act of being scared, of being frightened can be a thrilling, heady experience. However, I think those who genuinely like to be scared like to be so only when limitations are placed on whatever is scaring us. For example, I don’t think many of us would willingly experience what characters in movies or books are going through as they’re facing their worst fears. Instead, we’d rather sit in the relative comfort and safety of our living room or cinema theater and watch these characters (or read about them) being bombarded with all things scary.

As a result, our sense of being frightened, of being scared witless, is rather contained and contrived. Artificial, if you will. Our experiencing of fear is in a controlled environment, and, frankly, with a controlled fear. We can walk out the cinema, or at the least look to the right and see our friend, or date, or whoever with whom we came to the movies. If we’re at home watching a scary movie, we can turn off the television or pause the DVD and stop the onslaught of frightening imagery. We’re in control of whether or not we’re going to be scared, and, by extension, we’re in control of our destiny. Or at least we think we’re in control.

That moment when we dislocate ourselves from the intense fear that’s being generated onscreen and replace our ravaged emotions with the everyday, “real” world of our movie companion or the paused television further confirms for us that we’re in control. We’re not like the characters in the movie who are not in control, who lost control, or who were never in control to begin with. No, we’re at home, or in the cinema theater, safe and away from the threatening boogeyman. Thus, we experience a sense of superiority over the movie characters. This sense of superiority serves as a foundation to the dual-pronged process of being frightened.

The first part of the process involves the notion of culpability. These movie characters are somehow responsible for what’s happening to them. If they only didn’t look under the door, or if they listened to our frantic advice as we yelled at them “Don’t go in that room!” then they wouldn’t be confronting their own demons. Since these characters failed in ways we wouldn’t have, these characters must take responsibility for what has happened to them. These characters, we subconsciously believe, created, or at the very least contributed to, the atmosphere of their own doom. Which brings me to the second prong of the process…

Somehow we perceive the characters as being, shall we say, lacking in the smarts department. When an individual fails, or, worse yet, refuses to heed the warning signs, then that person is perceived as lacking common sense. Now, don’t get me wrong. The very nature of human beings is rife with such arrogance, the kind of arrogance that fools us into believing “It’s not going to happen to me.” Yet, when we watch horror movies, when we’re safe in our home or the cinema, we easily tell ourselves or our movie companions, “I wouldn’t have done that.” That underscores the very assumption that we viewers are smarter than the movie characters. After all, we’re safe while they’re running for their lives!

So the enjoyable part of the horror comes from the combination of two things, the rush of adrenaline that accompanies the fright and the sense of control over circumstances and (in the case of movies and books) superiority over those characters involved.

However, I am a realist. And when I think of how much we love to have the pants scared off of us, I wonder how it effects our preaching of the doctrine of hell. When a preacher stands in the pulpit and shares the horrors of the reality of hell and we are sitting in our nice cushioned pews, I wonder if we don’t feel a bit like we are in the movie theater and as soon as the scary man gets done talking we can get up and get back to reality. We trick ourselves into thinking that this fear, this fright, like so many others is one that we can control with a remote.

But let me remind you, hell is not a movie, hell is not a secure and tested roller coaster, hell is not a party for an adrenaline junkie, hell is God’s perfect way of punishing the sin that so repulses him, and it is real and hot and forever, with no pauses for popcorn breaks. That may make God sound like a bad guy to you, but God would not be God if he only had mercy and love and did not execute justice by punishing sin. So this Halloween when you have your buddies over to have a horror movie marathon (may I suggest The Shining), remember: Freddy is only a dream and Jason is just a story, but hell is real and without Jesus as the Savior who diverts the wrath of God and removes the guilt of your sins, it will be true horror for all eternity.