How Horror Enhances Your Spiritual Life

So many horror stories and "immersive experiences" are also built around spiritual situations and figures — ghosts, demons, the possessed or, in this case, the damned and restless dead. On one level I hate that; it usually reduces religious figures and spirituality to unhelpful, cartoonish notions. But the frequency of those kinds of stories also underlines the degree to which spiritual matters are a source of deep anxiety for people. So often the monsters and dilemmas of a scary movie embody our most fundamental, unanswerable questions: What happens when we die? Is there a life after death? Will we be judged there for the ways in which we have treated people? Is the universe ultimately guided by spirit and grace, or do violence and chance rule? Does God actually save?