New Year, Darker Narratives!
Talking about horror and morality plays
Welcome to a new year, horror fans! After our brief pause last year, we’re back and better than ever.
In this month’s issue:
A few publishing announcements from the horror community
Open calls to add to your calendar
Horror as Morality Play (and the importance of choice)
First up, some new release news:
Keep an eye out for Eric Larocca’s new release, We Can Never Leave This Place, coming from Trepidatio Publishing in June (and, in 2023, his novel Everything the Darkness Eats from Clash books - Eric is on fire).
Christi Nogle’s book Beaulah is up for pre-order now from Cemetery Gates: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NT2L3HH?linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1&tag=sofferscom1-20
Speaking of pre-orders, be sure to snag a copy of Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home from Mulholland Books: https://bookshop.org/books/the-devil-takes-you-home/9780316426916
And how’s this for a double-hitter: Laurel Hightower’s new book Below is up for pre-order, featuring cover art from Trevor Henderson: https://perpetualpublishing.com/product/below/
Award news: If you have any splatterpunk recommendations, be sure to send your nominations for The Splatterpunk Awards for Best Anthology, Best Collection, Best Short Story, Best Novella, and Best Novel to SplatterpunkAwards@gmail.com
And some open calls you might want to scope out:
There Used to Be a House Here is a UK-centered charity anthology whose proceeds will go toward helping the homeless. The prompt: A house which used to be there, but no longer is. Details here: https://nightterrornovels.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/announcement-our-third-anthology-is-now-open-for-submissions/
The Cellar Door is calling for submissions on the theme of “Forbidden Magic.” Submissions close on Jan 31, so be sure to send them what you have soon! https://www.darkpeninsulapress.com/the-cellar-door-issue-2---forbidden-magic.html
Finally, my newest guide is live on Gumroad: https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/cfzal
This one is all about dialogue, including specific tips for giving characters unique voices and side-stepping some common pitfalls. As always, it’s available for $1 or pay-what-you-want (and free to my Patreon subscribers)!
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Slasher films are morality plays, right? This is such a well-known take at this point that it hardly bears talking about. The rules of horror movies dictate that transgressions like sex and drugs are punished by death and the virtuous virgin is the one who survives to the end of the story.
But here’s the thing: Not only does this interpretation sell horror short as a genre, it also fundamentally misunderstands what a “morality play” actually is. I’d argue that the horror genre is absolutely the modern grandchild of the Medieval morality tale — but not in the way “common sense” interpretations of that idea would suggest at all.
What Is a Morality Play?
Before we can get too deep into this, we first have to talk about Medieval storytelling as a whole. Between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century and the Renaissance somewhere around the 15th Century, Europe went through the Medieval Period or Middle Ages. During this time, not only was Christianity the prevailing religion of the land, but the Church — capital C — was a powerful political entity and probably the single greatest influence on arts and culture.
Creative types in the Middle Ages had limited options for plying their trade. Since the majority of common folk were illiterate and poor, surviving as a poet or storyteller generally meant either relying on the monarchy or the church for your financial support and creative inspiration (and even then, playing it safe by pleasing the Church was a wise plan when creating art for the royal court). Which is all to say that a great deal of Medieval art and storytelling was inextricably linked with Christian ideology, iconography, and so forth.
So when it comes to Medieval theatre, there were three main types of plays that would be performed:
Mystery Plays, which were dramatizations of Biblical stories. These started out more like sermons that were sung or chanted but became increasingly complex over time, picking up more elements of acting, set design, costuming, and so forth. (Bear in mind that most common folk in this time period would not be able to read the Bible, or have access to one even if they could read it, so these performances might be their primary education in these stories).
Miracle Plays, which used similar techniques to tell the story of saints and how they came to deserve their sainthood.
Morality Plays, which were allegorical in nature. Rather than re-telling a Biblical or historical tale, these plays were original works that featured an everyman protagonist facing personifications of virtues and sins. The plot would usually follow the same basic story beats: temptation, the fall, and redemption.
Obviously, the point of the morality play was to show people how to live an appropriately righteous life (and perhaps frighten them away from making the wrong choices). But categorizing them as purely moralistic fables designed to teach simplistic lessons is kind of missing the point. These were stories written by and performed for people living through an incredibly dark period in history, a time characterized by ongoing war, rampaging plague, and horrific wealth inequality (sound familiar?) — and they tried, in their way, to reckon with this darkness and find some sort of meaning. The point of the morality play is not to say, “Being a good person is easy.” The point is to say, “Being a good person is the hardest thing imaginable, but still totally vital.”
It’s probable that you’ve never encountered an actual morality play from this time period unless you’ve gone out of your way to study them. There are only a handful that survived to our modern time. But people do still sometimes perform them, and you can track down some of the texts online if you’re curious.
Here’s a 2015 performance of “Ordo Virtutum” (“Order of the Virtues”), recorded at St. John's Cathedral in Los Angeles:
This particular morality play was written in 1151 by Hildegard von Bingen, aka Saint Hildegard, aka The Sibyl of the Rhine. St. Hildegard was a German abbess and writer, philosopher, music composer and all-around badass. She's one of the few known composers of her time to write both the music and the words, and more of her work survives than any of her contemporaries. She’s worthy of a whole discussion on her own right — but let’s get back to morality plays.
"Order of the Virtues" sets a template for most of the morality plays that would follow over the next several centuries. A human soul, or Anima, is eager to skip life and go straight to heaven. But before she can do that, she has to live a mortal life -- which means being tempted by the devil. The story follows the push-and-pull of temptation before the ultimate triumph of virtue over vice at the end.
Another of the well-known Medieval morality plays is "The Summoning of Everyman," written sometime in the late 15th Century. The author's identity is unknown, and no production records survive telling us how it might have been performed, but the text at least can still be read today.
The story begins with God lamenting that humans have become too obsessed with wealth to follow him, so he commands Death to go summon Everyman for a reckoning. But Everyman is frightened to face judgment, so he tries to find a companion for the journey, variously approaching characters like Fellowship, Goods, Knowledge and so forth. In the end, his only companion in death is Good Deeds, whose company he receives only after some struggles, repentance, and self-sacrifice. (Look, nobody ever said Medieval plays were subtle).
Okay - So What Does All This Have to Do With Horror?
Now that we’ve looked at a few morality plays and the framework they’re created in, let’s make a few general statements:
A morality play is an allegorical story where a protagonist encounters the personification of evil (among other concepts)
It attempts to make sense of human suffering and ascribe meaning to it
It deals heavily with death and may include supernatural elements like demons, witchcraft, magic and so forth
It asks questions about the nature of good and evil and dramatizes the struggle of the everyman against the powers of darkness
Viewed through that lens, the link between horror and morality play is pretty obvious.
It’s not that horror stories are (necessarily) tales where bad people are punished for their misdeeds and good triumphs over evil. In fact, of all the genres, horror is the least likely to follow that framework. Instead, horror — like those old-world morality plays — asks questions about the nature of evil, examines human suffering, and dramatizes the internal struggles we face as human beings.
The All-Important Choice
The 2011 film The Cabin in the Woods re-envisions the tried-and-true slasher film formula as a complex ritual sacrifice -- a pattern that must be played out, time and again, to appease ancient and terrible gods.
In the film, a number of specific plot points and tropes are lampshaded as being essential to the sacrifice. One of these is the "choice" -- the moment where the characters are given the option to turn back but choose instead to continue. Only when their suffering is freely given can it be meaningful.
While studying horror structure to create my horror-specific beat sheet, I found that this moment of choice is indeed an essential element of nearly every horror tale. In most every story, there are a handful of vital lynchpin decisions the characters make that put them in a collision path with the monster — moments when they could turn around and leave, stopping the horror in its tracks and abruptly ending the movie.
And I think that moment in the story is important.
Not just narratively, in the sense that characters should have agency and make choices that drive a story forward. But thematically as well. Because “bad thing happens to someone for no reason” is not horror — that’s just life. It’s tragic. It lacks the catharsis and healing that many people look for in scary stories. Horror fiction is, to some extent, about entertaining our most terrible what-if questions and exploring the consequences of our worst impulses.
And in that sense, yes — I think horror does for us exactly what those Medieval allegorical dramas did for our ancestors: afford a space for people to think about or even flirt with temptation, to get a taste of consequences without committing. And I think that’s pretty damn important…Important enough that we’ve done it for at least a thousand years, and will probably still be doing it a thousand years from now.
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