Back in 2021, I wrote an article that I expected to get a lot of backlash from readers for, but oddly, found that many agreed with me.
I wrote about how Christian media is, for the most part, incredibly awful. As I said then, it suffers from a lot of issues:
But even Christian media meant for Christians becomes overly sterile to the point of being unwatchable. The acting is usually wooden, the storylines beyond predictable, and the discussion around God and/or faith are forced. There’s hardly any finesse to the storytelling.
It’s so lazy that I wonder if the people making these films know it’s bad, but they know they’re getting a payday out of it anyway thanks to Christianity’s built-in audience.
It gets even worse when Christians make films for non-Christians in an attempt to win them over. The acting is still atrocious and the story-telling becomes disconnected from reality. They attempt to communicate with non-believers while refusing to ditch the same Christian-to-Christian communication you see in Christian-based media.
Read: Christian Film is Garbage and We Have to Take a Different Approach
To be clear, it's not entirely a disaster, at least in my opinion. The Chosen is actually a pretty solid show with few complaints, except for scenes that sometimes drag. Otherwise, it's great.
But, other than that, I'm not entirely sure I've come across movies or shows that I really would recommend to many others. The movies that were held up as fantastic were, in my opinion, not that great either. God's Not Dead has a great message, but it was delivered in a way that I'm not entirely sure it was going to convince secular audiences of anything. It felt more like Christians talking to Christians.
I could go on, but I'm not here to re-critique Christian media.
What I wanted to point out was an interesting thing that seems to happen quite often when Christians make non-Christian media. There's a pattern I've noticed that seems almost unlikely on its surface, but completely understandable when you stop to think about it.
Christians, oddly, tend to make a lot of dark stories, especially horror stories. The more I learn about some stories, the more I realize that there are a lot of Christian creators who make things that would be considered unbelievably grim.
The recent movie, Iron Lung, was originally a video game made by a Christian, as I reported recently:
By the way, you'll notice there are a lot of Biblical references in this game, and it's because, as I found out, the Iron Lung game's creator, David Szymanski, is a Christian who has said he often refers to his faith when creating games.
Read: Iron Lung Review - Cosmic Horror in a Metal Tube
For instance, "The Book of the New Sun," a high-sci-fi series with "The Shadow of the Torturer" being the most famous of the books, is a grim story set in the far distant future that, to be honest, is so bizarre that wrapping your head around it is a difficult task. To describe the story would be next to impossible, but it does pose a lot of questions about the cosmos and our place in it. Catholic imagery is used quite a bit, and you'll often be left with a lot more questions than answers, which is, frankly, life.
The author of the books is Gene Wolfe, and he is a devout Catholic.
Ever heard of the video game Five Nights at Freddy's? If you have a kid, you probably have. They were a popular set of video games that revolved around a serial killer whose ghost haunted a kid's pizzeria, similar to Chuckee Cheese. The series became so popular that they turned the game into a movie. The lore of the game, just like Iron Lung, goes pretty deep if you look for the story in the games.
Its creator, Scott Cawthon, is a devout Christian. In fact, he got his start making Christian video games.
There's an anime called Trigun that I watched back in the '90s. I was always struck by the nature of the main character being a gun-slinging pacifist on a desert planet who uses his proficiency with a gun, not to kill, but to stop evil from harming anyone. It became one of the most popular anime of the '90s and recently got a reboot with the same principles.
Trigun's creator, Yasuhiro Nightow, is an ardent Christian.
Each of these stories contains elements that would make the front row of the church nervous, but as a Christian myself, I seem to gravitate towards these kinds of stories and tales. I especially have a taste for cosmic horror, and I notice that many Christian creators gravitate toward the cosmic as well. They seem to hover around the bigger questions, even if it's a gunslinger in the desert or a haunted animatronic.
Read: It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas
I can't speak for every Christian creator, but for me, I think it's because the idea that there's a loving God out there that protects us from it all makes the real-life cosmic horror seem something worth exploring, not just creatively, but as something to conceptualize to deepen our faith. It comes about in different, odd ways, but I'm consistently fascinated by how the light shines all the brighter when we write about the darkness.
But that's just a theory. Talking to other Christians about it, I sometimes get the impression that they do seem to think that Christian media misses the opportunity to discuss concepts and explore threads that allow us to tell of the faith in a way that speaks to people's hearts, not just bringing Christianity to their minds. Oftentimes, that involves telling stories that don't seem Christian on the surface, but begin to look very Christian when you start breaking down the concepts.
Cosmic horror, I think, puts this in perspective very well. Big questions we don't have answers to, forces and entities we can't comprehend and are beyond terrifying, and standing between us and certain doom is a loving creator.
