Dracula Surprise

When I was in sixth grade, I invited my neighbor Sara to spend the night. We set up our slumber arrangements on the hide-a-bed in the basement, the only room in the house with a TV. And Sara announced that Psycho was on that night.

Uh-oh.

I hated horror movies. They scared the snot out of me. But I was too cool in the sixth grade to tell someone who regularly watched Dark Shadows and loved Barnabus Collins's character that I was too chicken to watch Psycho. So we watched it. Afterward Sara fell right to sleep. I, on the other hand, sat up in that hide-a-bed until 4 AM, constantly looking around the room to verify that I was safe. Making matters worse was the fact that our basement was only 3/4 below ground level, and up near the ceiling was a long horizontal window. That little ground-level window creeped me out even more. That was the scariest night of my life, and for the next thirty years (no hyperbole here), whenever I took a shower, I would glance outside the curtain to make sure no knife-wielding psycho was poised to get me.

Yes, I hate being terrified. So when I started reading Dracula, a requirement in my PhD aesthetics-of-the-novel reading, I expected to loathe the thing. I certainly did not expect to be edified! But it turns out Bram Stoker was a genius...the different points of view he chose for telling the story, the varying voices of his characters--some of whom were quite lovable, the brilliant way he handled chronology. Not to mention the gripping suspense. All of it--great. And the grandest surprise he delivered was that the novel's overall point of view falls in line with a Christian worldview. Crucifixes have power over evil as does the Host. The Father of all is the laughter-giver. Selfishness is more limiting than others-focused living. Evil is bad; good is worth dying for. Christ is the giver of eternal life. If I didn't know better, I would have thought I was reading the latest CBA release.

I've been told that Christian Horror is a newly emerging genre. But after reading Dracula, all I can say is that it may be emerging, but it certainly isn't new.