A faithless world

I have been wondering why there has been so little good supernatural horror coming out recently. After looking at the news from around the world a thought occurred to me. The peoples of the world are basically faithless. They no longer believe in Allah or God or any other deities. They have replaced those beliefs with faith in religion and money.
I want to make a distinction here between faith in spirituality and faith in religion. Currently we have the fundamentalist Muslims and the fundamentalist Christians. Both proclaim their faith in a god while having no faith in that being whatsoever. What they truly believe in is their religion; their church. And that is not a faith in the spiritual at all.
We have fundamentalist Muslims killing men women and children who are out shopping or getting a cup of coffee. Allah, the creator of the universe, would not support this behavior. Allah would never say that we should kill each other. Allah is the creator not the destroyer of the world. The Christian conservatives are the same way. They talk about Christ this and Christ that. Then we here about how those same people support a president like George W Bush who is a proponent of war. They support the death penalty, and believe that torture is okay. If Christ were here today and was asked whether or not he supported a war in Iraq or anyplace else what would he say? If you asked Christ whether or not torture was okay if it would save lives what would he say? If you asked Christ if it was okay to kill convicted murderers who had committed vile acts against children what would he say? He would say no. He would say forgive.
The fact is that these are indications that these people have no faith in their Gods. They only have faith in the people who lead their churches and tell them what to think. They have faith in books like The Bible or The Koran instead of the God that is supposed to be described in those books. We have lost all faith in those Gods. We don’t believe that the Divine Creator is up in their heaven and will take care of us. We don’t have faith that when we die, we will go to be next to those Gods. If so, then it wouldn’t matter whether or not we lived in Jerusalem or Kazakhstan. It wouldn’t matter if we were killed by terrorists or by a heart attack. We are going to heaven and that is what would matter. There is no faith.
If there was faith, then we wouldn’t be so worried about terrorists or gay marriage or who lived in the West Bank and who didn’t. We would believe that God or Allah or Buddha or Tara or The Great Spirit or whatever the divine force is in the universe, would have it all covered. We would be more concerned about living well and treating each other well than about making money and conquering the world. But these supposed spiritual leaders are concerned with money and controlling the world not living after the example of their God.
What does this have to do with good horror? Good horror requires a belief in the supernatural which goes hand in hand with a belief in the Sacred. If there is no God, then there is no devil and there is no life after death so there are no ghosts or evil abominations. Instead horror is littered with personality disordered sociopaths with knives or chainsaws or power drills. Freddy Kruger is a wonderful exception to this rule. Sure he started out as a serial murderer of children but he graduated to an evil spirit upon his death at the hands of his neighbors (probably all good Christians). I have noticed that the only good ghost stories have been coming out of Japan as of late. “The Orphanage” is another stellar exception to this rule. But American directors and many writers have lost the ability to write a truly disturbing ghost story. I am reading “House of Leaves” right now and I am happy to say that it has scared me. For the first time in easily 15 years a book has scared me. Yeah. I love Stephen King but am not scared by his work. As an aside I will say that Mister King’s strength lies not in his stories per se, but in his characters. And further, I believe that he is one of the great American writers when it comes to character. I will say, and I am certain I will get a lot of argument here; he surpasses or at least equals the greats such as Hemingway and Faulkner. His characters are real in a way other writer’s are not. He has a knack to capture with his use of dialogue and spare description and action the essence of those of use living in the suburbs or in small non-descript towns. It is what makes his stories so effective; we are the characters in those stories.
But I digress, horror as tied to faith. If we have faith in a divine being then we can be scared by the supernatural. “The Exorcist” is so terrifying because it is tied to faith in a Christian mythology. Today I hear people say that they think William Friedkin’s masterpiece is funny. That it isn’t scary at all. I don’t believe that is because it is dated. It isn’t. I think that it is because people don’t have faith in God any longer so they aren’t scared of the devil anymore either. The whole story just seems silly. Whereas a team of organ stealing crazies in “Turistas Go Home” is somehow horrifying.
I hope that the world can find some faith in something divine so that we can maybe get some decent horror returning to our culture. And maybe it will help to stem some of the real horror that we practice on each other.