Even if we are thoroughly entertained by creepy, gruesome stories, horror movies feel like a kind of guilty pleasure for some people, full of deeply unsettling characters and very bad behavior.

So here's a fascinating irony. A lot of what scares us on screen, at least in Western cinema,

is built around the ideas of good and evil, natural and unnatural that have come into the culture

from Christianity. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. Horror films like The Exorcist

and Rosemary's Baby explicitly dive into Christian themes, but my guest, who is both a

theologian and a cinephile, finds powerful connections between religion and horror, even in

terrifying films without a lot of apparent religious content.

Brian P. Stone is the Layton K. Farrell Dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and author of the new book, Christianity and Horror Cinema. Brian, welcome to think.

Hi, welcome. Thank you.

You are a Christian theologian and clearly a fan of scary movies, the kinds of movies that I think

some Christians might consider an objectionable form of entertainment. How comfortably do those

two interests coexist for you? They're like two peas in a pod for me. I think that early on in my

life, I loved horror movies, and as I moved into

theology, I began to immediately see the connections, the common themes, symbols, stories,

and the use of various Christian imagery and icons to construct these films. So there's a lot of

overlap, even if it is, even if they do tend to be confrontational

with Christianity at some points.

I think I was excited to talk to you because of all the books that have crossed my desk

over the years, and it's a lot.

I'm not sure I've seen a treatment of the Christianity in horror movies.

Why has this been so little studied or at least so little written about?

Well, that's why I wrote the book and I was surprised too that no one had really ever

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