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Just click the link in the show description to Terrify. Good evening, children of the night. I lost track of time. Come on end. I've been sitting here doing what I do in between stories, and that's pondering our difficult to define genre.

I've mused on this before, and likely will again after tonight, but I just finished up reading an opinion piece on Vice by Josiah Hesse.

Its title, Why Are So Many Horror Films, Christian Propaganda?

The title was enough for me to bite.

I've seen a good number of scary movies, and I couldn't think of a single one,

and I left thinking, wow, I really should get to church more.

But I read the article,

and it was a bit thought-provoking. The author points out that in quite a few movies, the protagonist leans on a shield formed from some piece of Christianity to save him or her from

the supernatural threat. And conversely, someone who runs contrary to Christian values is usually

gobbled up by the monster. In a welcome but surprising bit of point-counterpoint in an opinion

piece, the author quotes from a professor of religion and art history at Duke, who responds that the

filmmakers are simply using cultural currency to tell

a story. And I found that a satisfactory response. If you're telling a tale about ghosts and

demons, there is already a fundamental cultural place to draw communal imagery from in the West,

and that's the dominant religion. I talked about the Korean film The Wailing a few weeks back,

and I feel like that there is someone in Korea who might have written a similar piece,

removing the word Christian for traditional shamanism. But enough of my pondering. Just before we

move on to our stories, I just wanted to mention that while growing up in a conservative evangelical household,

nearly every scary movie was banned, including some of the ones mentioned as Christian propaganda.

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