The Bible Has a Séance in It

Allie Beth Stuckey’s annual Halloween episode of Relatable aired on October 19, and most of it was the conversation she has every fall: where the holiday came from, four ways a Christian can respond to it, and her pick, which is partial participation aimed at evangelism. She framed the whole question as a matter of Christian liberty rather than a gospel issue, and said she wasn’t sure it even rose to secondary. That is a sensible way to hold Halloween, and she asked her audience to be charitable with each other about it.

Then she took a step past Halloween. Her team clipped it and posted it the next day under the caption “Christians shouldn’t be a fan of horror.” In the clip she says it isn’t only movies: books that scare you, true crime podcasts that scare you, anything built to make you afraid. Her reason is Scripture. The Bible tells us over and over not to fear, she says, and we turn around and pay for content designed to frighten us, which she calls a direct contradiction of Jesus’ command not to be fearful or anxious about anything.

I’m in the middle of a 31-movie October right now, so I suppose I’m who she was talking to. That is also why I went back to what she actually said instead of the summary going around on X, which has her urging Christians to be “cautious” about dread-driven films and says she’s fine with suspense and violence that serves a purpose. The clip doesn’t say that. She drew the line at whatever makes you scared, and she put Law and Order: SVU on the wrong side of it right next to Rosemary’s Baby. If I’m going to disagree with her, it should be with the position she took.

What Does “Do Not Fear” Mean in the Bible?

She is right that the phrase is everywhere. In the Hebrew Bible it is mostly two words, al tira, and it turns up in some of the biggest scenes in the story. God says it to Abram after a battle and follows it with “I am your shield” (Genesis 15:1). The angel says it to Hagar dying of thirst in the wilderness (Genesis 21:17). Moses says it to Israel with the Egyptian army behind them and the sea in front (Exodus 14:13). Isaiah gives it to an exiled people with the reason attached, because God is with them (Isaiah 41:10).

The formula shows up around 75 times in the Old Testament, spoken by God, by someone he sent, or by one person steadying another.^[1] Edgar Conrad spent a monograph on these passages, and his conclusion is that it began as the assurance given to a warrior before battle, then spread to kings, to prophets like Jeremiah, and to the whole nation facing its enemies.^[2] Others file it as a salvation oracle, a promise of help with reasons attached for trusting the God who gives it.^[3] John Goldingay sits between the two: the war-oracle parallels are real, back to Israel at the Red Sea, but in Isaiah the weight falls on the relationship, on God saying “I am with you” and “I am your God,” more than on any named enemy.^[4] Whichever label you prefer, the pattern on the page is the same. The phrase almost never stands by itself. It comes with a reason, and the reason is God’s presence in a real danger.

The Gospels keep the pattern and sharpen it. Almost every “do not be afraid” in the New Testament is said to someone who is already terrified, and with good reason: Zechariah in the temple (Luke 1:13), Mary (Luke 1:30), the shepherds out in the field (Luke 2:10), the women at the empty tomb (Matthew 28:5), John on Patmos falling at the feet of the risen Christ as though dead (Revelation 1:17). The command comes because something from the other side has just walked into the room. It assumes the fear is there, and it never pretends the thing in front of you is harmless.

The verse she leaned on works the same way. “Do not be anxious about anything” (Philippians 4:6) is half a sentence. The other half is prayer and thanksgiving, and the verse after it is the peace of God guarding the heart. Paul is writing from custody about the worry that grinds a person down, which is not the same animal as two hours a man picked off a streaming menu.

And Jesus commands fear in the same breath he forbids it. Do not fear those who can kill the body, he tells the disciples, but fear the one who can destroy soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28). The Bible’s problem has never been fear as such. It is fear pointed at the wrong thing, or fear that runs a life when God has said he is present, and the clip runs straight past that distinction.

Are There Horror Stories in the Bible?

If content meant to make us afraid is off the table, the biblical writers broke the rule deliberately and more than once.

Eliphaz, in Job, describes a word that came to him in the night. Dread seized him, his bones shook, and then “a spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up” (Job 4:12–16). Something stood there he could not make out, there was silence, and then a voice. The text never says what the spirit was, and the word for the form in front of him gives it no outline.^[5] That is a writer staging a scene to raise the hair on the reader’s neck, and he does it well.

Saul goes to Endor at night in disguise, to a woman who calls up the dead, and asks for Samuel. When she sees who comes up out of the ground she screams (1 Samuel 28:12), and Walter Kaiser’s read is that she was not used to it actually working.^[6] What she reports seeing is an elohim coming up out of the earth (1 Samuel 28:13). Heiser points out that the word is not reserved for Yahweh; the Old Testament uses it for members of the unseen world generally, including the dead, which is why a medium can use it for an old man in a robe.^[7] When Samuel is done speaking, the king of Israel falls full length on the floor (1 Samuel 28:20), and the woman and his servants have to talk him into getting up and eating before he walks back out into the night (1 Samuel 28:23–25). The Bible has a séance in it, and the narrator does not cut away.

Revelation sends locusts up out of the pit with faces like human faces and hair like women’s hair (Revelation 9:7–8), a composite of horse, man, lion and scorpion built to say these things are fast, intelligent, and cruel.^[8] The end of Judges is worse than anything in a theater, and it is there because the writer wants the reader to feel what Israel had become. At the center of the whole story is a public execution, which one person in Stuckey’s replies put plainly: what could be more horrifying than watching your God die on a cross? None of these authors were trying to keep their readers calm. The question they answer is what the fear is for.

Is Horror the Most Christian Film Genre?

Matt Walsh replied the same day, saying he would argue horror is the most Christian genre of film. He set aside the “torture porn,” films in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre line, and made the case for supernatural horror: it is the one place in film where demons, spirits, exorcism, and the Church are consistently taken seriously, and where the priest might actually be the good guy.^[9] He added that the refusal to let Christian stories be tense or scary is a large part of why so much faith-based entertainment is bad.

Scott Derrickson said much the same to Christianity Today back when The Exorcism of Emily Rose was about to open. A Christian directing horror didn’t strike him as odd at all; the genre deals with the supernatural more openly than any other, he said, and draws good and evil more sharply, and a lot of Christians avoid it mostly because it is unpleasant.^[10]

That lands with me for a reason that has more to do with Heiser than with Hollywood. Most of modern culture, and a fair amount of the modern church, treats the unseen realm as a figure of speech. Horror is about the last place in popular film that still treats evil as a person with a will, a spiritual geography, things that are real whether you believe in them or not. It gets the costume wrong. Scripture does give the devil horns, but they are the dragon’s ten horns and seven heads in Revelation 12:3, a picture of power, not a goat’s pair on a man in a red suit. The claws and tail come later; Philip Schaff catalogs medieval writers having Satan turn up as a toad, an ape, a pig, a black horse, even a nun, with French poetry and popular imagination supplying the horns, claws, and tail.^[11] But it gets the premise right. Paul wrote Ephesians 6 to people who already knew that: the fight is not against flesh and blood but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). A lot of what passes for safe entertainment tells you the opposite.

Even the film Stuckey’s mother kept from her in sixth grade, Signs, is a story about a minister who lost his faith after his wife died and what it takes to bring it back.

What Separates Good Horror From Gore?

I’m closer to Walsh, but I’d put the line somewhere else and for a different reason. The 1974 Chain Saw barely shows blood. Tobe Hooper said he was aiming for a PG and that the picture might have been an X if he hadn’t tried.^[12] What’s horrifying about it is a world where nobody is coming to help, which is a theological statement whether Hooper meant it as one or not.

The films that don’t work for me are the Terrifier kind, and not because they’re too violent. There’s nothing underneath them. Art the Clown is a delivery system for gore with no reason to exist. This year’s Mummy has the same problem, The Exorcist with the dread drained out and grossness poured in where it used to be. Disgust is a reflex, and fear takes a story.

The story is the whole point. Horror that works for me has lore under it, some account of why the evil is there and what it wants. Rosemary’s Baby has it, and so does The Exorcist, which puts a priest who has lost his faith in a bedroom with a demon and asks him to give his life for a girl he barely knows. Event Horizon has it too, a ship that went somewhere it shouldn’t have and came back carrying something, even if the third act can’t hold the idea up. Ghosts of Mars is a mess, but spirits sealed underground and let loose to take human hosts is closer to 1 Enoch than most of what I’ve heard preached. In 1 Enoch 15 the dead giants become evil spirits bound to the earth, afflicting and destroying, hungry with no body to feed.^[13] Heiser’s argument is that the Gospels’ phrase “unclean spirit” carries that tradition with it, a label pointing back to spirits born of an unnatural mixture and loosed from the giants’ corpses.^[14] Mark’s man with an unclean spirit lives among the tombs (Mark 5:1–5), and to a first-century Jew tombs were unclean ground and a known haunt for demons.^[15] The New Testament never tells the origin story outright, and Heiser says so himself.^[16] Set the pieces side by side anyway and John Carpenter doesn’t look so far off. Heretic spends nearly its whole runtime on an actual argument about religion and lets the argument land before anyone pushes back.

Should Christians Watch Horror Movies?

The strongest pushback on Walsh came from people who agreed with Stuckey. Samantha DeLoach of Them Before Us put it this way: so much horror is watching innocent people suffer with no justice, and she asked why that counts as entertainment.^[17] That is a real objection to a real slice of the genre. Stuckey has a point too about people who use dread like a drug, and some of what gets sold as horror is cruelty with a soundtrack. A film that treats evil as evil and a film that sells cruelty as the product are different things, and a Christian ought to be able to tell them apart.

So the test is not my pulse rate. It is what the fear is pointed at, what the story says about evil, and what it does to the person watching. That last part is individual. Someone who can’t watch an exorcism film without spiraling for a week should leave it alone, and Paul has a whole chapter on not pushing a brother past his conscience (Romans 14). That is the Christian-liberty frame Stuckey herself used for Halloween earlier in the same episode, and it fits horror better than the blanket rule she reached for.

Footnotes17

1. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged, 1274.
2. Conrad, Fear Not Warrior.
3. Smith, Isaiah 40–66, 132.
4. Goldingay and Payne, Isaiah 40–55, 1:156.
5. Koehler and Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1746.
6. Kaiser et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible, 217.
7. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered, 100–101.
8. The ESV Study Bible, 2476.
9. Walsh, X post, October 20, 2026; follow-up quoted in Mouser, ChurchLeaders.
10. Derrickson interview, Christianity Today.
11. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 5:879–880.
12. NPR obituary of Tobe Hooper, August 28, 2017.
13. 1 Enoch 15:8–11, trans. Charles.
14. Heiser, Demons, 137–139, 196–197.
15. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 139.
16. Heiser, The Unseen Realm, expanded ed., 393.
17. DeLoach, quoted in Mouser, ChurchLeaders, October 20, 2026.

Sources

Allie Beth Stuckey, Relatable, Halloween episode (YouTube, October 19, 2026). Supports: the four responses to Halloween, the Christian-liberty framing, and the full context of the horror comments. Free online.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey (@RelatablewABS), clip post, X, October 20, 2026. Supports: the clip and its caption. Free online.

Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog), post on horror as a Christian genre, X, October 20, 2026. Supports: the "most Christian genre" argument and the torture-porn carve-out. Free online.

Jessica Mouser, "Allie Beth Stuckey Says Christians Shouldn't Be Fans of Horror; Matt Walsh Pushes Back," ChurchLeaders, October 20, 2026. Supports: the episode structure, Walsh's follow-up on faith-based entertainment, Samantha DeLoach's objection, and the reply about the cross. Free online.

Adam Staten, "Should Christians Watch Horror Movies? Allie Beth Stuckey Sparks Heated Debate Over Faith and Fear," Crosswalk, October 21, 2026. Supports: a second account of the clip and the responses. Free online.

Kingdom Of Herod (@KingdomOfHerod), summary post, X, October 21, 2026. Supports: the AI-labeled summary that softens Stuckey's stated position. Free online.

Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 1274. Supports: the count of the "fear not" formula in the Old Testament. In my Logos library.

Edgar W. Conrad, Fear Not Warrior: A Study of 'al tîrā' Pericopes in the Hebrew Scriptures (Atlanta: SBL Press). Supports: the formula as an assurance to warriors before battle. In print from SBL Press; the publisher page summarizes Brueggemann's review.

Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 40–66, New American Commentary 15B (Nashville: B&H, 2009), 132. Supports: the salvation-oracle reading. In my Logos library.

John Goldingay and David Payne, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40–55, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 1:156. Supports: the war-oracle parallels back to the Red Sea, and the weight on relationship and "I am" statements. In my Logos library.

Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), 1746. Supports: the undefined "form" Eliphaz sees in Job 4:16. In my Logos library.

Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996), 217. Supports: the medium's scream at Endor. In my Logos library.

Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2017), 100–101. Supports: elohim as a term for members of the spiritual world, including the dead. In my Logos library.

The ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 2476, note on Revelation 9. Supports: the locusts as a composite image of power, intelligence, and cruelty. In my Logos library.

Philip Schaff and David S. Schaff, History of the Christian Church (New York: Scribner's, 1910), 5:879–880. Supports: the medieval forms of Satan and the poets' horns and tail. In my Logos library.

R. H. Charles, trans., The Book of Enoch, chapter 15 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917). Supports: 1 Enoch 15:8–11, the giants' spirits as evil spirits bound to the earth. Free online.

Michael S. Heiser, Demons: What the Bible Really Says about the Powers of Darkness (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2020), 137–139, 196–197. Supports: the giants' spirits as the origin of demons in Second Temple texts, and "unclean spirit" as the New Testament's link to that tradition. In my Logos library.

Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, expanded ed. (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2025), 393. Supports: the New Testament's silence on the origin of demons. In my Logos library.

Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), 139. Supports: tombs as unclean ground and a known haunt for demons. In my Logos library.

"Horror: The Perfect Christian Genre," interview with Scott Derrickson, Christianity Today. Supports: Derrickson on the genre and the supernatural. Free online.

"Tobe Hooper, Director of 'Chain Saw Massacre,' Dies at 74," NPR, via WGBH, August 28, 2017. Supports: Hooper aiming for a PG and the film's low gore. Free online.

Where the sourcing stops: the link between 1 Enoch 15 and the man among the tombs in Mark 5 is Heiser's argument from the phrase "unclean spirit"; the New Testament never states that origin, and the post keeps the gap visible. The film judgments are mine.