Religion and Its Monsters
In Religion and Its Monsters (2002), Timothy K. Beal explores the relationship between horror and Judeo-Christian religion. The opening chapters seem to promise a discussion of theological horror, a horror that comes from grappling with the theodicy problem of why a good, all-powerful God allows the existence of evil and confronting the possibility that God is not so good or not so powerful, and that more sinister forces may lurk in the universe. Beal fulfills this promise in his chilling examination of theological horror in the Book of Job. But for me, the book too soon strays from its most interesting themes.
The next chapter after the deep-dive into Job describes stories from the Talmud and Midrash about Leviathan, Behemoth, and other monsters. These stories are amusing and illustrate the strange paths that midrash can go down; for example, the rabbis debate whether it would be kosher to eat Leviathan or Behemoth if they died in battle. However, these tales don’t really seem to contribute anything to book’s argument; the conclusion of this chapter is only that these stories show how monsters are part of the Judeo-Christian worldview. The second half of the book, purporting to be about religion in popular horror, was a bit of a letdown for me. The topics of the first two chapters are only tenuously, if at all, connected to monsters from the horror genre—a discussion of Hobbes’ Leviathan was tied to a minor character in Hellraiser II, and a discussion of how white colonists make monsters of other cultures’ gods was related to the flying monkeys of The Wizard of Oz via the Hindu god Hanuman. The remaining chapters include close readings that highlight religious elements in Dracula, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and ecohorror movies such as Godzilla.
The book was undeniably well-written, and mercifully free of the jargon that tends to plague academic books. However, I sometimes felt that Beal employed a dramatic turn-of-phrase rather than offering a clear conclusion, and the text was choked with unnecessarily long block quotes. All that being said, this book is definitely worth checking out, for its discussion of theological horror and the Book of Job alone. It will definitely make you think a little more deeply the next time you pick up the Bible or a Lovecraft story.
The accompanying image is from a French manuscript c.1330 depicting a scene from the Book of Revelation in which angels slay monsters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art made this image available in the public domain.
Angels slay dragon-like monsters in this illustration of the Book of Revelation from a French manuscript c.1330.