The Theological Terrors of Easter

This past Sunday the AMC zombie apocalypse television series The Walking Dead brought its fifth season to a close with a stunning 15.8 million viewers tuning in, an accomplishment once unimaginable for a horror franchise. Fitting then that the wildly popular finale kicked off Holy Week, which symbolically culminates in a different, yet equally horrific, fright fest with the death and resurrection of Jesus.

     
In general, the horror genre is about the inversion of the natural – and thus sacred – order. Victor Frankenstein creates new life (previously the exclusive domain of God) from dead scraps; H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and their madness inducing forays into our mundane universe; and, yes, the zombie, now a staple of popular culture, a shambling reversal of the inexorable power of death.

     
These classic tropes of horror are theological terrors through their capsizal of the accepted understanding of the world. They challenge the sacred order by introducing existential chaos, totems of a new world order where the status quo is wiped out amidst a frenzy of gods and monsters, our ritualistic intimacy torn asunder by monstrous claws and teeth.

     
Within the Bible, the natural order is routinely shattered, never more famously than during the Easter narrative. I write in my book Such a Dark Thing: Theology of the Vampire Narrative in Popular Culture:

     
“After the resurrection but before the ascendance into heaven of Jesus the Christ within the narrative of the Gospels, the Nazarene has plunged through the mortal coil of the organic order of life and death, straddling the invisible chasm between the two. Neither dead nor alive and inhabiting a realm that can only be described as undeath, the numinous aura of the Christian demigod is evident to all who bear witness to his post-crucifixion exploits.”

     
While Jesus hinted at a reversal of the natural order when he reanimated Lazarus, it is the Easter narrative where Scripture downshifts into full horror movie mode. Aside from the physical torture of Jesus at the hands of the Romans (depicted in all of its torture porn glory in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ), readers of the Gospels are treated over Easter weekend to a veritable parade of horror genre tropes.

     
The natural, sacred, and accepted orders are turned on their collective heads throughout the final days of Holy Week when, after Jesus breathes his last, the light of day ominously and unnaturally transforms into darkness followed by a rock splitting earthquake, frightening and supernatural imagery echoed in countless apocalyptic horror narratives within contemporary entertainment.

     
Following this, the gospel of Matthew, predating the zombie craze in popular culture by several thousand years, reads, “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” While we have no way of knowing whether these revived corpses were muttering “brains” or “shalom,” it’s safe to say that the undead suddenly showing up after an unnatural darkness descends on the land is, read literally, nothing short of a terrifying turn of events.

     

Fast forward to Sunday where we are confronted with a chilling finale to the horror story known as Easter. Aside from the alarming implications of the empty tomb, the response of the disciples to an apparently undead Jesus might serve well as a companion to the Insidious film franchise. The gospel of Luke tells us, “They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” By this account, while Jesus looked physically as he did before his death, his post-mortem appearance to the disciples created a horrific response, as one should expect when a dead person shows up for their own wake.

     
While this article is intended to be somewhat ironic, it’s important to acknowledge that religion and the horror genre are dueling narratives revolving around the unknown, of what lies beyond human reason and understanding. I would argue that one of the reasons The Walking Dead consistently draws tremendous ratings is that horror entertainment has emerged as another form of religious language. In some sense, due to the need for palatable religious ritual, the ghastly elements of Scripture have been buried, only to arise in the sinister form of vampires, zombies, and malevolent elder gods, symbols that enable us to explore the shadow side of the Divine.

     
It’s fascinating that pastel colors, the ritualistic painting of eggs, and bunnies have come to represent the gruesome torture and death of Jesus, the shocking inversion of the natural order, corpses wandering through the streets, and an undead savior shattering the immutable barrier between life and death. This is the horror of Easter, a narrative that, while possibly hopeful, might lead us to a darker deliberation of the nature of humanity and our search for the Divine – benevolent or otherwise – in a fearsome and mysterious universe.