My favorite books on religion, horror, and the supernatural

This book is a skeleton key for understanding the fundamental relationship between religion, horror, and the supernatural. Otto was a German theologian and scholar of religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in this, his most famous book, he set out to interrogate the nature of holiness, understood not primarily as supernatural moral goodness but as the feeling of numinous dread that accompanies the supernatural, and that “first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny, ‘ ‘eerie,’ or ‘weird.’” He explicitly states that it was this emotion in the mind of early humans that gave rise not only to religion but to the cultural traditions of ghost stories and horror tales. If you read only one book on religion and horror, make it this one.

Blatty’s classic novel is recommendable as much for its cultural impact, which is of course inextricably bound up with its legendary film adaptation, as for its own content. With the story of young Regan, a 12-year-old girl in the modern technological world who becomes possessed by an ancient demon, Blatty, a committed Roman Catholic, deliberately set out to communicate a vivid sense of supernatural evil to a modern, skeptical, jaded audience. Many people don’t realize that The Exorcist is actually a Christian novel. As Blatty himself later put it, if he could get people to believe, even fictionally/emotionally, in demons, they would also know what it feels like to live in a universe where God and angels are real. The result, regardless of your religious beliefs, is unforgettable.

With this book, Ingebretsen, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown English professor, wrote perhaps the most pointedly fascinating entry on my list. His subject is the strain of supernaturally horrific religious belief and accompanying demonism and apocalypticism that has threaded its way through American culture since the early European colonial days. His approach is lucid, well-informed, somewhat idiosyncratic, and thoroughly fascinating. Where else are you going to find a book that has a chapter devoted to comparing the stories of H. P. Lovecraft with the poetry of Robert Frost? If Otto’s book is a skeleton key for understanding religion and horror in general, then Ingebretsen’s is a skeleton key for understanding the shadowy supernatural-horrific underside of American religion and the American psyche in particular.

Nelson’s book became an instant classic when it arrived in 2001, and it has only become more relevant since then. Her thesis is that modern secular culture has ejected the innate human religious-visionary impulse from the belief system of above-board, “respectable” intellectual culture, and that this impulse, which is ineradicable, has now crept in the “back door” of popular horror, fantasy, and science fiction entertainments, which therefore increasingly serve as religious texts. But there’s so much more to her presentation than this. It carries the feel of a darkly electrifying spiritual revelation, as if it’s changing the one who reads it. At one point she states, cryptically, that the book became a kind of “Lovecraftian entity” during the many years it took her to birth it. Reader beware...

Beal is a contemporary scholar of religion, and this brilliant book is one of my favorite things ever. In essence it’s a book-length application of Otto’s concept of numinous religious dread to a well-considered selection of classic and contemporary horror texts. Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein, Lovecraftian horror, and also classic literature such as Beowulf and Dante’s Inferno, all factor into Beal’s examination of the way the primordial chaos of ancient religious mythology, which perpetually stands behind the scenes as a threat to cosmic order, shines through the eyes and shapes of various monsters and thus makes them carriers of Otto’s mysterium tremendum, the “radically other mystery that brings on a stupefying combination of fascination and terror.” Like Nelson, Beal enables us to see the religion in horror, and vice versa.