Haunted House Demons

Blood-stained dummies, Jack the Ripper eviscerations, and baby-doll killers are having a difficult time these days. It’s that season again of fright for fear’s sake, and it’s getting difficult to up the ante on blood and gore, according to those in the Haunted Attraction Association. (Yes, the haunted house folks have a trade group, the HAA.) Insiders in the business say it’s getting harder and harder to frighten jaded customers. This affects a lot of people: vendors, artisans, builders. As one insider put it, “When we started this, we took our cornfield, mowed a path, bought masks and scared people by jumping out of the corn. That doesn’t do it anymore.” Another business insider says that in a culture of normalized violence “it takes so much more to get them [customers] to that level of fear reaction. They’re so used to it.” Yet another industry leader says, “The only way to satisfy customers would be cut off their arms and slap them upside the head with them.”  On the drawing boards? Haunted houses where people enter naked, to make them feel more vulnerable.

The biblical response to this is so simple: For God has not given us a spirit of fear . . .” (2 Timothy 1:7). Note the verse refers to a “spirit.” Don’t buy the standard exegetical explanation for this text that it refers to an attitude. No, Paul says that fear is a spirit. A demon. What the Haunted Houses are trying to conjure is a demon, by evoking the fear factor inside the natural human response of fright to the unexpected and the grotesque. Christians should have no part of this, although there have been some commendable Christian attempts to redeem the idea by frightening people about the consequences of hell. If you can scare people away from the devil, that’s good. But it’s evil to scare people into the arms of Satan with houses of horror at Halloween.