Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine

Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying, and was realizing that this dual spiritual response was inextricably linked to my equally deep responsiveness to supernatural horror fiction and film:

[H]uman beings continue unconsciously to crave contact and even interfusion with a world beyond their own, or perhaps existing concomitantly with theirs, in another, sublime plane of existence. . . .

[I]n feeling a strong attraction toward certain films usually identified as horror, audiences are seeking transcendence, or at least confirmatory contact with the sublime or transcendent.

The desire for transcendence is a primary attribute of humanity. In fact, one might argue that what most distinguishes human nature is the desire to transcend that nature. . . .

To transcend is to pass over or to go beyond the limits of oneself and to feel that one is in communion with that which is distinctly “other.” . . . Ideally, one would recognize and feel this interfusion with the company of the Good and the Just, with saints, angels, and the Deity. Alternatively, one might hope to feel at least a oneness with all of humanity. However, one can also transcend normal existence through feeling the interfusion of one’s existence with the Evil and the Unjust, with vampires, demons, and Satan. . . .

[There is] a kind of symbiosis between the demonic and the divine: without evil to be dreaded, then overcome, goodness would remain unrecognizable. In turn, the demonic requires the divine to explain why the triumph of the demonic in the affairs of men is not complete. . . .

[E]ven when it turns upward at last, demonic dread may lead to deific dread rather than deific joy, confirming that the transcendent is not only difficult but even dangerous to achieve. Indeed, is it a demon or a god one sees, or merely two faces of the same being, a Janus deity? . . .

Today, it is primarily in film and on television that dramatists seek either to offer new myths of transcendence of their own making or to recast the old myths in such a way as to make them come alive once more. Indeed, encounters with the cinematic shadow of Otherness may be as close as most will ever come to achieving even a fleeting glimpse of transcendence. . . .

The hunger for transcendence is the greatest “metaphysical aspiration,” and given the number of supernatural films produced these days . . . this hunger seems decidedly unabated. Such films provide the contact with the transcendent, be it downward to the demonic or upward to the divine, which a rational, secular society tends to rationalize away in philosophical abstraction even in its religion. . . .

[Horror is] a genre in which demonic dread abounds. A comparable “religious” genre of deific dread has never been established. . . .

The rarest approach occurs in those films that do not first posit a demonic power, but go directly to a transcendent force that is undefinable in such human-generated terms as good and evil.

Source: Will H. Rockett, Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty (New York, Westport, and London: Greenwood Press, 1988), xiii-xiv, 6-7, 10, 13, 15, 20, 21, 23

On the general subject of transcendence being sought through popular entertainment in a rational, secular society that has anathematized such things in its above-board intellectual discourse, so that popular culture serves as a kind of back door for hints of the divine and demonic to sneak in, see, of course, Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets, which is canonical around here, and which makes several appearances in my forthcoming essay collection about weird fiction, film, and philosophy. Rockett is in there, too — but only implicitly. Although I don’t actually mention him in the book, his words above, and his book as a whole, left a permanent mark on my thinking.