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1 results

  • 3 - Religion and Spirituality

  • from Part I - Histories
  • Edited by Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, Mark Storey, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
    Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022, pp 45-59

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.