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One need only scroll through social media, watch the news, or read a newspaper to confront the reality that we live in a world filled with pain and suffering. Each day unveils yet another source of dis-ease: wars, pandemics, addictions, ecological woes, mental health crises, the countless -isms (racism, ageism, sexism, etc.) that demean humanity and threaten our ability to be in relationship with one another, with creation, and the Creator. The Christian doctrine of original sin offers a theological interpretation of this brokenness. The fragmentation of the world, Christians posit, indicates a primordial frag-event of disobedience, a “Fall” that shattered the original harmony and communion of creation. According to this teaching, our current taxis reflects the metataxis of sin that turned God’s world upside down. Thus, as noted in the last chapter, the author of Genesis 3 can voice agreement with Thomas Hobbes to the effect that human life is often “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This sentiment could be shared, too, by other biblical writers. The Book of Job, the poets behind the Psalms, the Prophets of the Old Testament, the four Evangelists who wrote the Gospels anchored in Jesus Christ’s ignominious Passion, Death, and Resurrection: none of these turn a blind eye to sin or discount human suffering. We are, as it were, born into and live within sin’s “horror story.” The Christian believer, however, does not believe that sin or horror is the final word in this story. Another word or Logos has revealed another way for us to live.
The truth we cannot deny about the human condition is that because we are born into a sin-scarred world we, too, are damaged. Nothing within the created order is quite as God intended it to be. The world as God created it to be, Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests, radiates “the grandeur of God.” Yet the diaphanous splendor of God’s work has been sullied. He writes:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
Fallen humanity is alienated from creation’s primordial goodness. Yet our alienation from it does not mean that it is no longer saturated with God’s glory. This, at least, is Hopkins’s belief:
And, for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Hopkins believed God intended the world to be an icon revealing and inviting beholders into communion with the Divine. Yet sinful humanity has tarnished and distorted God’s work. To cynical and pessimistic eyes, our world has become an infernal icon that reveals and is drawing us into a hopeless abyss. Yet the Christian believer has reason to hope, as Hopkins hoped, that we have not exhausted creation’s glory. We have reason to believe, that is, that sinful alienation can yet be overcome through an act of divine reconciliation.
Hopkins’s hope has deep scriptural warrant. Recall that, in Genesis 1, God surveys the whole of creation and sees that “it was very good” (1:31). Only a few chapters later, in Genesis 6 and 7, humankind’s wickedness unleashes a Flood that nearly wipes out all living beings. These etiologies or “origin stories” are not news accounts; they are myths expressing and exploring the truth of human sin and its consequences. At the same time, these biblical narratives recount that God labors to free humankind from the shackles of sin. In Psalm 68 we hear, “Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belongs escape from death” (68:2). From Abraham to Moses to the Prophets, God seeks to redeem and heal fallen humanity. For Christians, God’s desire to save humankind culminates in the Incarnation, where the Word or Logos of God “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). In the words of the Apostles’ Creed, Christians believe that Jesus Christ was “conceived by the Holy Spirit” and “born of the Virgin Mary.” They believe that, through Jesus, God enters our horror story to free us from the snare of evil and liberate us into the life of God’s Kingdom. In word and deed, Jesus proclaims God’s Reign, God’s anti-horror story, and invites us to find our place within it.
In this and the next three chapters, I use Noël Carroll’s “complex discovery” plot to continue exploring how horror films can function as theologically illuminating infernal icons. The movements he sees as constitutive of many horror plots—onset, discovery, confirmation, confrontation—are also operative within the Gospels. To introduce complex discovery plots, I begin with a discussion of Jaws (1975). Next, I look at Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Based on Ira Levin’s book, RB traces the events that lead Rosemary Woodhouse to become impregnated with, and give birth to, Satan’s son. The inhuman insemination by the Dark Transcendent should be seen as a photographic negative—or, better, an infernal icon—of Christian belief in the Incarnation of God’s Word in Jesus Christ. As an infernal icon, RB depicts an antichristology that presumes and exploits an—at least implicit—theological worldview of its viewers. For the film’s satanists, the Antichrist’s birth promises to prolong sin’s grasp on history; for those who profess belief in the Incarnation, Christ’s birth begins the subversion of sin’s taxis that inaugurates God’s Reign on earth and renews creation. Now, over fifty years after its debut, the film is hailed as an icon of horror cinema. Approaching RB as an infernal icon will create an opening for the film’s depiction of the onset of the Antichrist to disclose its Christological depths.
(excerpted from chapter 7)
