To pick one of Calvin & Hobbes many high points, I would recall the time when Calvin was industriously pounding nails into the coffee table. His mother comes tearing up to him, screaming, “What do you think you’re doing?!” He looks and her and looks at the table and says, “Is this a trick question?”
I am baffled in a similar kind of way. I am a Christian minister, an ambassador of grace, and am entirely in favor of all that love your neighbor stuff. This being the case, when I register a mild protest to the effect that sucking the blood from a young woman’s neck in such a way as to turn her into one of the undead is something that is simply not done in the better circles, it is disconcerting and amusing to be met with a chorus of yeah, butting. From Christians.
This is a trick question, right? Is this a set up? Am I going to find myself having written half a book diligently trying to prove that vampires are bad, only to have everyone pop out at a prearranged signal, yelling, “Surprise! Just kidding! Show us how circles go all the way round next!”
Painting with a broad brush, I said that attraction to this kind of thing is motivated by guilt. I do maintain that this is the main thing going on, but there are, I allow, other reasons out there — although I don’t see how any of them are healthy. More on the guilt in a moment.
One secondary motivation is the simple desire to be the “free spirit around this church,” shocking all the church ladies. This is sadly not uncommon and has accounted for many a cigarette, more than one tube of grease in the hair, many a tattoo, and many a heavy breathing abstinence scene. “Mom, he only got to third base! And the author is a Mormon, so it was Mormon third base. Sheesh.” And the free spirit walks away feeling mighty superior, being under grace as he is, and not under law.
Now this is what I mean with my statements about guilt. Stories are invitations to vicarious participation, by their very nature. The atonement of Jesus Christ is also vicarious. As a lesser specimen, the vicarious deliverance (or lack of it) in a story is either competing with or reflecting what Christ did for us. Aslan’s death on the Stone Table reflects it. Gandalf’s fall in Moria reflects it.
So here is the basic outline of horror fiction. (There are some exceptions on the margins, but the structure of horror fiction is as defined and settled as the structure of an Italian sonnet.) As one commenter noted, E. Michael Jones is great on this — check out Monsters from the Id. Here it is: 1. Girl takes off clothes. 2. Monster eats Tokyo. Justice and retribution in horror are inexorable and merciless. A man reaps the same kind of thing that he sows, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Only a culture unsettled, uneasy, defiled, and polluted is capable of producing a genre like this. A people so guilty, and so affected by that guilt, have produced a literature that is law and justice from top to bottom — our little foretaste of Hell. But we still cannot bear to talk about it directly, so we amuse ourselves with these oblique and indirect ways of producing an approximation of the exquisite thrill experienced by sinners about ten seconds before its too late. It is a literary way to pick at the scabs on your heart. It is a literary way to play a little Russian roulette. Just another spin. What’ll it be this time? Click.