Why Western Horror Can't Escape the Cross (Even While Pretending It Did)

Contrary to a misperception common in some quarters, Western horror does not float free of theology; it springs from it. The genre’s core assumptions about evil, virtue, and judgment did not emerge from a vacuum, or from pagan antiquity. They arose inside a civilization that had been catechized for centuries and have endured long after its writers no longer believed every line of the Creed.

This point reliably irritates readers who want horror without inheritance. The usual objections appear quickly: “What about Poe? What about Lovecraft? What about all the stories with no priest, no church; no explicit reference to God?”

The implied claim is that horror is fundamentally secular, with Christianity grafted on later as a regional thematic option. But that reading misunderstands how cultural memory works, and it misreads the authors most often cited as counterexamples.

Edgar Allan Poe was raised in a Protestant culture saturated with Christian moral grammar, Biblical imagery, and an inherited sense of cosmic order. His stories obsess over guilt, confession, and the impossibility of escaping judgment. The beating heart beneath the floorboards terrifies because conscience is real.

Such effects rely on assumptions, far older than Poe himself, about sin and reckoning that Western readers already knew how to recognize.

Lovecraft makes the dependence even clearer, though in a more parasitic form. His cosmic horror works because it negates a worldview already present in the audience. Indifference only horrifies in contrast to Providence. Blind, idiot gods can only shock readers raised to expect intelligence behind creation.

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