Andrew Cowan. Sacred Terror, Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Wayco, Tx: Baylor UP, 2008.
* Religious oriented horror cinema relies much of its effect on the direct collision between natural and supernatural. It seeks to frighten people into conformity. The soul is a religious concept that makes little sense apart from the various religious framework in which it comes embedded.
* The metataxis of horror, the inversion or reversal of culturally accepted categories, i.e., church as a place of safety and the clergy as a guardian of decency and moral.
"Religious oriented cinema horror remains a significant material disclosure of deeply embedded cultural fears of the supernatural and an equally entrenched ambivalence about the place and power of religion in society as the principal means of negotiating those fears" (p.9)
In classic horror cinema there is William Castle's The Tingler, about a creature-parasite that lives inside people, feeding on fear but controlled by screams. The creature is chased into a movie theatre filled to capacity. At that point the real screen in the movie theatre goes black and a voice tells the real audience that the Tingler is among them and they must scream to protect themselves.
Cowan affirms the audience are not all scared by the same thngs "Not all stimuli produces the same level of frisson. For some, thoughts of ghosts and discarnate spiritual entities are the height of horror, while zombies leaves the cold. For others demoniac possessions gives the creeps, but they remains entirely unnafected by mummies or slasher films. For me, snakes are interesting and enjoyable as cinema monsters (specially when they are eating annoying cast members), but spiders are virtually impossible for me to watch" (p.20)
According to Cowan, psycological approach is not without value but horror cinema is part of a cinematic lineage that cannot be easily or reductively psycologised, as it has a lenghty social history. Those who seek psychological interpretations often ignore or proscribe that. Approaching any film with a priori assumption is to actively avoid looking for any other meaning that which psychology has set out to find and severely restrict the range of interpretations available.
