What Do Horror Movies Tell Us About Gen Z’s Spirituality?
Religion is everywhere across the horror genre — but religious people continue to have varying views on the value of these stories.
Prominent conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey recently argued that Christians should not be horror movie fans — emphasizing that they should avoid making themselves scared unnecessarily.
She received significant amount of pushback, mostly online, from fellow Christians who urged her to see all the ways horror films with demonic elements often demonstrates God’s power over the devil.
Whether or not the films are healthy, they are often revelatory, just as fiction always has been.
The ghost stories and villains of any era can tell us much about what a past society feared. From the Ancient Greek myths which depicted the sea as strange and full of terrors, to the work of Edgar Allen Poe whose stories featured debilitating illness, to the Dark Knight trilogy, which presents the Joker and Bane as domestic terrorists, the things that make us feel unsafe in our real lives, wriggle their way into our fiction.
When fiction shows our fears it also tends to reveal what we think is best at fighting those fears — and what we think is not. And often an era rejects the solutions of its past—with regard to faith in particular. So just as religion is the best weapon against evil in “The Exorcist,” it is the weapon of evil-doers in The “Handmaid’s Tale.”
So how will this upcoming generation reveal its fears and faiths through story? In 2026, Gen Z has finally grown up enough to make their own movies. This year’s biggest horror films were both spearheaded by Gen Z directors, with Curry Barker and Kane Parsons making “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” respectively.
This week, Religion Unplugged’s culture writers Joseph Holmes and Jillian Cheney sat down together to explore how Gen Z thinking is changing the horror genre.
Listen to this episode of the Religion Unplugged podcast on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
Matthew Peterson is Religion Unplugged’s podcast editor and audience development coordinator. He took part in the 2025 European Journalism Institute held in Prague, an annual program co-sponsored by The Media Project.