I think an underrated horror trope is “insular christian cult worshipping something that slowly reveals itself to be Very Much...
I think an underrated horror trope is “insular christian cult worshipping something that slowly reveals itself to be Very Much Not God”. I think it speaks something to the bastardized nature of american christian sects like southern baptist and others. I think in a lot of ways the way colonialism pairs with christianity in the americas really makes it demonic in ways that horror makes powerful statements about.
Someday I’ll check the notes for this and they’ll mention something besides Midnight Mass
What came to mind for me was the Laundry Files - The Apocalypse Codex. Specifically it makes it an outside perspective from a Brit. Not that big on the ‘slow’ reveal, but it does play this note.
prediction: confirmed
although my impression is Laundry Files is one of those series that uses horror tropes without being horror? I’m trying to define this genre better, it’s something like “most people in-universe would feel scared if they saw the thing, the audience is expected to recognize the thing as objectively scary and that they would feel scared if it were real, but there’s no attempt to actually make them feel visceral fear and they identify with the protagonist, who is experiencing action/adventure protag emotions not horror protag emotions”
Some examples:
- Buffy was increasingly this over time, and gave up on horror completely in season 4
- Indiana Jones 2 has more horror elements than 1 or 3, while still definitely being action-adventure.
- Resident Evil 4, especially past the first few levels. My impression is horror video games will drift this way over time.
- Serials in general will have a hard time staying horror, because of conventions about escalating stakes, increasing competence, and it just being kinda boring to watch the same people go through the same arc five times. Now that I think about it, most horror franchises that stay horror will focus on different people for each instantiation.
- Santa Clarita Diet is the last stage of the process, where it’s using a trope once restricted to horror (+ amount of gore prohibitive to most people) but the emotional arcs have 0 to do with horror
Anyways I read like 2 chapters of a Laundry File book 15 years ago so I can’t say for sure it doesn’t do horror. But my money’s on “horror-derived action/adventure”
Shame this doesn’t get more of a Mormon spin. Like, are you sure the force that sent Moroni with those tablets was Yahweh?
To get into woo-woo territory for a while, when I’m riding my motorcycle in the PNW sometimes I can speak to a force I’m pretty sure was the one that appeared to the Mormons but honestly suspect was an American-native trickster
Having fiction go after a particular real sect seems like way more trouble than it’s worth and the NA angle just makes it more politically toxic but I want to read that book so badly.
Yeah it’s weird I normally gloss divinities as arising from the mojo tribute of their worshippers but that one really seemed to draw on the environment of the dryland west – encountered it in eastern Oregon and scrub-brush California. Might be Coyote, dunno what other dryland trickster it would be
I’m super curious what that felt like, and and what made you think it had talked to the mormons (who didn’t make it that far to the northwest until later, right?)
Like it was a voice in my head, and the obvious possibility is it was just from my brain, like the part that composes other characters’ dialogue in dreams, but it kinda felt more autonomous. The Mormon connection was also feeling, like there was definitely some way of connecting with and evaluating it that wasn’t sound or vision or touch.