Welcome back to another session of Fear Academy. This time around is going to be a little different, in that the book we’re looking at today is quite similar to the last one we look at (Sacred Terror). It is also the first time that we will be looking at a book that I was personally asked to review from the author: Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies.
Steve A. Wiggins is first and foremost a scholar with a focus on religion. A quick look at his CV, which you can find on his website, reveals that his area of focus is on Christianity and the Bible. This is not to say that he appears limited in this sense but he certainly seems to know his Bible, which makes him a perfect writer for this book as its main focus is not on Christianity or religions in horror but rather specifically on how the bible is used within the horror genre.
And what a rich discussion that proves to be.
Wiggins uses the German phrase “ding an sich” to classify the Bible as a “Ding.” This term means the “thing as itself.” Kantian philosophy sees a ding, a thing as itself, as ultimately unknowable. A ding, therefore, is something which acts as it is independent of observation and, as Wiggins will argue, many of the “bibles” we see in film function in this form.
I put quotations around the term bible because Wiggins also makes a compelling argument that not every bible in film is actually a bible. There are anti-bibles, there are stand-ins for the bible and there are bibles which have been augmented to have scripture which doesn’t exist. Therefore, many of the bibles that Wiggins explores in the book aren’t bibles themselves… and yet they are. This makes for an interesting, if sometimes hard to conceptualize, argument. The lines that separate a non-bible bible from just another book can be as thin as the way it is bound or as concrete as the volume’s function within the narrative.
This in turn points towards one of the biggest issues I have with the book. Wiggins primarily focuses on the horror genre and yet there are a few films which he pulls that clearly do not fit the genre. The argument that he makes for their inclusion is at points as simple as saying “there are monsters in the film and therefore it is horror-adjacent.” While these sections of the book are still interesting, they feel out of place in the discussion and I found myself eagerly waiting to get past them so I could return to more familiar (see, horrific) ground.
My other issue with the book arises from the writing itself. Wiggins is a good writer, exceedingly so actually. The book is a quick read and there is plenty of wit to be found. Too much, at times, in fact. Wiggins references films with ease, works in lots of jokes, and effortlessly makes callbacks to previous jokes and references. This is rather unusual in a scholarly text of this kind and so it is welcomed but it overstays that welcome to the point that I found myself getting lost at points. If I forgot that a particular film was referenced at the start of the chapter, or if I hadn’t seen that film and thus wasn’t familiar with its contexts, I would find myself tripping over a reference. This slowed down the reading as I had to look through the book to find out what exactly was being said/referenced. This isn’t an indication of Wiggins being a lesser writer, far from it, but he has gotten mired in what Steven Pinker describes as “The Curse of Knowledge.” Basically, he assumes that you are on the same page with him in your own knowledge of film. While you want to treat the reader as being on the same page, there is a point at which you need to step back and offer a little more grounding.
But those are my only real issues with the book. It was incredibly easy to read most of the time, yet the discussion was incredibly detailed and I learned a lot from it. Whenever Wiggins discusses the Bible itself, as in its history or its contents, he reveals just how much he knows and this in turn greatly affected the way I look at many of the films referenced therein. I have yet to encounter a bible (or anti-bible, false bible, or substitute bible) in film since finishing the book but I eagerly await the experience to see how I conceive of it.
I would recommend the book to those with an interest in horror film, as the Bible plays a role in so many of the movies that we love and hold dear. What would The Exorcist (1975) be with a bible… or, rather, a substitute bible as the film uses? Wiggins has shown that the bible in horror is far more complicated than we might have previously imagined.
Just make sure you don’t drop one anytime soon… that’s always a bad sign of things to come.
Before we leave today’s session of Fear Academy, let us look towards something to come. Wiggins refers to the Bible as a Ding but another way of considering his book would be to say that it examines what the horror genre tells us about the Bible within the Shamanic Imagination. This is a term that comes from Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ book Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces. If you have a chance, read up on that book before the next Fear Academy because we’re going to be having an extremely special discussion on the concept and the work of Heller-Nicholas as a whole.
