Can Horror Serve as Lament?

Why aren't the dead mourned in horror?  In horror, the focus is on surviving, on not being dead - so the camera and the audience's attention quickly moves off the dead and onto the living, the survivors. In some way, death makes the dead impure and survivors must flee, distance themselves from the dead unless they too end up dead.

Horror often moves fast - to stay alive, you have to be one step ahead of the killer - so one cannot linger with the dead. Consider this scene from The Walking Dead, Season 1, Episode 5 in which Andrea's younger sister - an innocent - falls prey when the camp is over run by a zombie horde. Andrea kneels over her sister, mourning her death. "Amy, I am sorry," she says "for not ever being there. I always thought there would be more time." But there simply isn't time. The mourning turns into horror as Amy gradually revives. First a soft breathing, then the reanimated corpse slowly almost tenderly raises her arms as if to embrace Andrea, then snarling and attacking as a fleshing-eating zombie. Andrea pulls out a pistol, whispers "I love you" as she shoots her zombie sister in the head. 

(Caveat: In the full scene, Andrea is actually granted much more time to mourn - an uncomfortable and excessive amount of time for some of the group. She sits with her sister's corpse for hours, maybe a whole day or more, holding a sort of vigil. In fact, the group is busy burying other dead people, not wanting these deaths to be unrecognized and devoid of sentiment. The group grants her and themselves some time and space to mourn. But only contingently - they hover around her in their nervous distress, interrupting politely but insistently to hurry her up, to end the delay, so the group can move on. Everyone knows that the sister's corpse will turn into a zombie sooner or later.)  

Here we see both the theme of impurity -- the sister's corpse is infected, impure, it must be destroyed. To live means to separate from it, to avoid being infected by it. The dead are contamination, waste material. There is also the theme of haste - there is no time to mourn because this must be dealt with immediately, lingering makes us all more vulnerable. Perhaps mourning is ultimately stupid or misguided from an existential perspective because the person is no longer there and what returns is a threat. 

At time in horror, the dead are protrayed as responsible for or at fault for their demise. If they had been smarter, faster, stronger, more observant, more ethical then perhaps they would have avoided death. The silly frivolous sexually promiscuous teenagers of the Halloween and Friday the 13th films may be examples of this. The victims in these slasher films tend to be those engaged in "illicit sex, illegal drugs, and general adolescent irresponsibility" while the "final girl" fights back, fortified "because she represses these very impulses and desires, in particular, retaining her virginity. . . .Abstinence and rectitude evidently give final girls the power to fight back and survive" (Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction, 228-29). Their death is a judgment, the killer's vengeance is something like a secular wrath of God that is visited upon the sexually immoral. Jess Peacock writes "In the world of Friday the 13th where teens take drugs, engage in wanton sex, and…gasp…go skinny dipping, Jason Voorhees appears as a nightmarish fundamentalist Christian champion, God’s unstoppable angel of Death. He imposes judgment on those who fail to sprinkle their door with the blood of moral uprightness. He is the arrow straining against Jonathan Edwards’ righteous bow [referencing his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"]. In these examples, the dead aren't mourned, cannot be mourned, because they just got what they deserved.

This theme came up in a question I was asked at the AAR in San Antonio. In Old Gods of Appalachia Season 1, Episode 2,  a group of African-American workers are brought into Barlo, Kentucky to break the strike at the Old Number Seven mine. These workers are all killed in the mine explosion. In my reading, the podcast portrays these strike-breakers in a sympathetic light. They are victims of the merciless capitalist system, exploited workers reduced to a state of inhumane vulnerability without protection, dignity, or even names. The podcast portrays their deaths and their subsequent internment in anonymous mass graves as a moral offense. 

At the AAR Religion and Science Fiction session, the questioner asked me if this portrayal was nuanced by the moral complexity or culpability of the scab. The questioner referenced Jack London's short essay "The Scab," in his book War of the Classes, which presents the scab as a traitor, worse than Judas. "When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing.  In the deepest holds of his being, though he does not reason the impulse, he has an ethical sanction. . . . In addition to the use of bricks, clubs, and bullets, the selfish laborer finds it necessary to express his feelings in speech. . . . the selfish laborer applies the opprobrious epithet a 'scab' to the laborer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labor power." Following Jack London, the questioner was asking if the scab is morally at fault? Not just a victim of capitalism, but someone who has chosen a morally wrong path--the scab is essentially stealing someone's job, stealing the food from off their family dinner table. Thus, the violence perpetrated on the scab is simply justified as retribution or justice. Much like Michael Meyers, the scabs receive their due by dying in the mine explosion.

But all this made me ask "Can horror help us to see the dead in new ways? Can horror serve as lament?" 

In Old Gods, the scabs return as zombies "burned Things" and destroy Barlo, tearing the entire town down. At first, I thought this was a type of justice, vengeance for the town's treatment of them. But I don't think so - even in their death, these zombie scabs can't escape their exploitation. Revived as zombies, they continue to serve the interests of the Dark, tortured and exploited even in death, given no rest, perpetrating even more horror on the town and people of Barlo.  

Why aren't they mourned? Why doesn't Old Gods take a moment to stand at the mass grave of these exploited workers and lament? It was a missed opportunity in Old Gods - these scabs come back as zombies to wreck the town, to take vengeance, and to enact a sort of moral accounting for their deaths. But there is no sense of memorializing them. Perhaps Old Gods could have taken time to treat these workers with more complexity and compassion, to tell those stories or to erect a virtual monument to the memory of those who died in the mines. However, there isn't really any lingering with these dead. There is a buildup of moral outrage, but not a transformation in the audience's perspective.

Image #1: AI image generated by Bing Copilot Designer with the prompt "mourner standing by a lonely overgrown grave in the woods dark colors drawing sketch pastels"

Image #2: AI image generated by Bing Copilot Designer with the prompt "worn overgrown gravestone cemetery gloomy trees mourner standing laying flowers crying sketch drawing black and white"

The Blue Line Project, Circular Church in Charleston, SC

 Almost every year at our academic conference, someone brings up the relevancy of these meetings. Are we just talking without any effect? In our Religion and Nature section, we are trying to make connections to local activists and eco-justice projects. It is something that we have been thinking about for a couple years and I was able to pull it off this year.

Circular Church,
Charleston, SC
photo by author

I just started searching the internet for churches and community groups in Charleston, SC that were doing work in environmental justice. I found Circular Church, a UCC congregation pastored by Jeremy Rutledge who did his doctoral work in religious naturalism. The church has its own Climate Work Group and also participates in the Charleston Area Justice Ministry. Pastor Rutledge as keen to be involved, so things started tracking from there.

On its historic campus downtown, Circular Church has set up a Blue Line Project that shows anticipated sea level rise and storm surge. As the church website states, "Blue Line Projects are found around the world in coastal communities seeking to draw attention to the climate crisis. Many blue lines mark the height to which sea levels are expected to rise."

Circular's blue line marks the height of the storm surge if the 1989 Hurricane Hugo were to land in Charleston again. Hurricane Hugo was a big and devastating storm. Of course, the reality is that with climate change and rising ocean temperatures, storms are becoming bigger, more powerful and dangerous. The next hurricane to land in Charleston may indeed be worse than Hugo. 

Circular's Blue Line Project is pretty modest, to be sure. It consists of four small informational placards, and future storm surge levels marked on the wall of one of the church buildings. 

What do you think about this as 1) a type of environmental justice action, and 2) as a religious practice?

The religious and the environmental are not separate of course - the blue line project is both. As the signs indicate, this awareness of climate change and its impact arises from the religious and ethical imperative to love the world and care for the neighbor.

Blue Line Project at Circular Church,
photos by author

As a religious practice, the signs serve as reminders of what or where one's core ethical commitments should be. 

As people - congregation members or visitors - walk through the historic cemetery surrounding the church, they have the opportunity to be aware of the place where they are - note how the placards point out that Charleston is particularly at risk, how "you are standing at 10.4 feet above sea level" on the church campus, how the public housing projects - such as the one by Gadsden Creek - are in lower-lying areas. 

So it is a very place-based sort of approach. The blue line project is a sort of augmented reality. It overlays a future potentiality onto the present. By marking potential storm surge, the blue line asks us to see the place from a different perspective. It's not "what if" but "when this place is underwater." Can you see the place with this in mind. If you have that awareness of "when," the inevitability of that, then how does that change the way you live in the place now?

In The Location of Religion, Kim Knott writes about the simultaneity of space - that spaces are "synchronically dynamic because at any time they are overlapping, co-existent, in parallel with other spaces, and because they are internally in tension, being made up of multiple, contested, real, and imagined sites and relations." Synchronous spaces, she writes, "contain the past within them" like a palimpset (Knott, 23).

But they may also contain the future within them. Or potential futures that can be marked or indicated in certain ways. And that is how I understand the blue line project. It indicates this simultaneity of space - that both the past - like Hurricane Hugo - and potential futures - like devastating storm surge - are present, contained within the space in the present, all simultaneously experienced if we can become aware of it. As Knott points out, these are not "layers" like a slice through time, but the "dynamic and simultaneous coexistence of social relations" in that space (Knott, 20).