Gen Z horror’s search for the sublime

In a 1987 interview, musician Frank Zappa said that his industry had been ruined by the demise of “cigar-chomping old guys” and their replacement by “supposedly hip, young executives” who claimed to know what their generation wanted. Zappa concluded that “The man in the chair may not be the final arbitrator of taste for the entire population.”

With Gen Z sudden interest in horror movies getting attention at the box office, Hollywood executives seem to be doing their best to catch up with the times. Both Backrooms (rated R for language and some violent content/bloody images) and Obsession (rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity), directed by respective 20-somethings and YouTubers Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, set records with their staggering box office performances. Barker himself recently signed a contract somewhere in the eight-figures with Universal to direct a new original film, while Parsons is already working on a sequel. Steven Spielberg, certainly no stranger to producing blockbusters, is contributing his cinematic heft towards adapting the YouTube “analog horror” series The Mandela Catalogue. Step aside slasher flicks. Say hello to the true and greater frights of the inexplicable and ineffable.

Explaining why exactly we are drawn to horror in general is a quandary of its own. Some turn to evolutionary theory, emphasizing how scary movies help us deal with the struggles and uncertainties of life. Human psychology provides another viewpoint, focusing on our emotions as a guide. The most concise argument for why horror is newly important comes to us from someone who never even graced a movie theater in his lifetime: Edmund Burke. The 18th-century Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher is widely known for his articulation of the essential principles of classical conservatism. But his 1756 essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful offers a needed angle to what draws us to the particular brand of internet-based horror now on the rise.

When we normally think of the sublime, we tend to think of the majesty of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. These natural wonders undoubtedly channel sublime beauty, but the concept, and the reality, includes much more. Burke states that “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” Human beings are designed to fear the transcendent. God Himself, of course, is the ultimate realization of the sublime. Art and creation itself serve as mediums for pointing us toward His perfection and holiness and thus His wholly otherness. For, as Burke adds, “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.”

To experience true horror is to be confronted by that which we are unable to completely comprehend or subdue. The ultimate reality, in other words, is to come before the unavoidable existence and presence of God.

Whether it is the haunting, liminal spaces of Backrooms or the attempt-to-play-God-gone-awry scenario of Obsession, these films testify to Gen Z’s need for the sublime as much as it does for anyone else. Horror obviously isn’t for everyone. Many Christians might contend it shouldn’t be for anyone at all, especially believers. Yet just as it can be exploited to indulge in exorbitant violence or pointlessly grotesque themes, it equally can be used to speak to the deeper, permanent things.

Horror, when done honestly, bears witness to the terror that lurks beneath and beyond the thin veil of the mundane in the cosmic evil that we are incapable of confronting or curtailing on our own. Horror is at its best, however, when it highlights our fitting fear of the unknown when we stand apart from reconciliation to our Maker, for all is dark, mysterious, and wicked without Him. The sublime, instead of a pathway to peace, readily becomes a source of despair for those on the wrong side of eternity.