Deracinated Horror

Brian Niemeier

5 years ago

Horror stories give special insight into a culture’s belief system. Since they serve as cautionary tales more than any other type of story, they tend to embody their native society’s moral code.

Throughout the lifespan of Western civilization, nearly all horror stories incorporated Christian beliefs or were at least rooted in Christian morals. The West’s global dominance even managed to impress Christian-themed horror tropes onto foreign societies. See the popularity of Western style vampires in Japan.

If the prevalence of traditional horror tropes serves as a measure of a civilization’s cultural confidence, the waning of those tropes within the original culture makes a pretty reliable indicator of civilizational decline.

Old hands in the horror scene are fond of calling out the zombie apocalypse fad of the aughts as the moment when the genre fell into a rut.

Lots of ink has been spilled trying to figure out exactly what the zombie doom craze meant. The answer isn’t all that elusive when you consider that it was mostly a Millennial phenomenon. Millennials entered adulthood just as the current big push toward globalism kicked off. The horror of the zombie arises from the loss of identity and meaning. It is an irrational creature that exists only to consume.

Now, the fact that the Millennials in general embraced their fate as consoomer NPCs doesn’t invalidate my analysis. The glut of zombie apocalypse fare that finally sputtered out in the last decade was how that generation came to terms with the theft of their cultural, national, and religious identity.

Astute readers will point out that zombie horror retains a flicker of the old Christian worldview. The zombie as literary device originated from tawdry stories of Voodoo priests enslaving the living. Those B flicks in turn drew inspiration from real-world Caribbean cults that alloyed African folk traditions with Christianity.

And even “scientific zombies” caused by viruses, parasites, or radiation present a warped vision of the Resurrection, much as the vampire is a diabolical mockery of the Eucharist.

For a close look at post-Christian Western horror, we must delve into the dank corners of the web where Millennials are mere visitors but the Zoomers were raised.

Members of Generation Y and earlier cohorts will recall fond childhood memories of summer nights at camp–or just in the backyard–swapping spook yarns around the campfire. Kids don’t go outside anymore, so the internet has stepped in to replace the campfire. If you want to sample the horror stories Zoomers tell each other, it means reading creepypasta threads on 4chan or Reddit.

If you’re unfamiliar with the creepypasta format, think of an urban legend told in serial format and often expanded by other storytellers from the audience. The creepypasta with which Boomers are most likely to be familiar is the Slender Man.

You can find a pretty representative selection on this channel.

Here’s a typical entry:

Two things you notice when you dig into Zoomer horror are:

Their de-Christianization. Most of the storytellers and audience members display familiarity with Christianity on par with a typical 80s American kid’s knowledge of Shinto.
Technology as a central plot device/conflict source/theme.

The infamous BEN Drowned creepypasta is a prominent example of the latter.

After a few weeks spent immersing myself in these stories, my main impression is that the majority of them suffer from a specific type of internal incoherence that simply makes them not scary.

Whether the source of the terror is a rubber monster in the woods, a ghost girl who infests smartphones, or a cursed video game, each creepypasta reads like a deracinated rehash of the American remake of an early aughts Japanese horror film.

What’s missing is any kind of internal logic for the plot to hang on. We don’t even get the cheap anti-drug and fornication morality plays of 80s slasher flicks. The hauntings/curses/murders occur at random because the victims happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s also noteworthy that when some kind of background lore is needed to make the spooky threat intelligible, American Indian legend and prefab Wiccan claptrap are the go-to sources. Summoning a priest to conduct a house blessing or an exorcism is as rare as a Republican in Hollywood–whose fare is nonetheless put to shame by most creepypastas. At least the latter are honest efforts at entertainment.

The Millennials had their identities stripped from them and suffered a crisis of meaning which they collectively resolved by giving in.

Zoomers are the first Western generation born and raised with no inherited identity and no awareness that there ever was a meaning to it all.

The situation is going to get much worse before it gets better.

One reason for the dearth of contemporary Christian horror is the baffling paralysis that’s beset most Christian authors. Christian horror shouldn’t be a sermon dressed up in genre trappings. It should be a genuinely terrifying story told from a Christian worldview. Those are the best kinds of horror stories, anyway.

Want proof? Read my award-winning horror-sci fi series.