Shedding Light on Pagan Gods in Horror
Isn’t it weird when you’re watching a horror movie and a god shows up? Like on-screen, in physical or meta-physical form to murder the living daylights out of some unsuspecting characters?
Modern horror has mined culture for a long time, but the usual suspects are the undead, aliens, ghosts, eldritch monstrosities, or demons (usually implied to be on Satan’s payroll). These are supernatural beings that often dominate and decimate the protagonists, for sure, but are not typically deities from real-world mythologies.
The reasons for this make a lot of sense. Mainstream American audiences don’t necessarily have strong name recognition for mythological figures mostly lost to time, and it’s ultimately easier to invent a new creature without tying it to a pre-existing canon. Likewise, gods tend to be pretty powerful, which can put the stakes and scope of a movie at odds.
Fear can be healthy. It’s one of the lizard-brain instincts that helps keep us alive, but what authors and filmmakers choose to write as frightening in fiction says a lot about the cultural and historical context the story was created in, and it’s no secret that it can be used to disparage. For every old European story about waterlogged horse monsters dragging people into lakes as a way to warn about the dangers of natural hazards, there are books like Dracula, which famously played off Victorian-era fears of the foreign “other” and divergent sexuality.
This continues in modern horror movies. Whether it’s a fear of ennui, technology, the horrors of recent history, or clowns (all typically underlined by the primal fear of gory death), movies that scare us pick a topic for a reason. The level of skill and attention to detail varies — as it does in all genres — but filmmakers and storytellers generally pick a monster because it’s, well, going to be scary to their audience.
Adaptation is a major source of inspiration for the genre. The Omen (1976) is a film about the “false Christ” from Biblical Revelations. Krampus (2015) brought Saint Nicholas’ half-goat, half-demon counterpart to the big screen. However, it can add a layer of interest when the monster is part of an existing mythology — and even inspire some more complex feelings when that re-representation is handled gracelessly from a largely culturally-Christian media landscape.
With some exceptions, the mystery and fear associated with non-Christian mythologies is nothing new to western culture. Gothic horror and colonialist-era adventure stories are full of relics and found magical artifacts from ancient civilizations, generally those important to people of color. The Mummy (1932) does not feature any gods on screen, but it does contain magic and mysticism inspired by ancient Egypt and the plunderous archeological practices of the previous century. Certified terrible person H.P. Lovecraft wrote about the horror of the unknown, but for all it’s malevolent cosmic terrors, a lot of the time the “unknown” was more like “people worshipping gods we didn’t know about,” such as in The Call of Cthulhu.
Additionally, when popular culture may be the only exposure some people have to these ancient legends, it’s nice to see a little thought go into adaptation.
[Head’s up: the rest of this article contains spoilers for Sinister (2012), The Pyramid (2014), and The Ritual (2017)]
Sinister (2012) follows a true-crime author researching the grisly murder of an entire family. He does the reasonable thing and moves his own family into the house where they were murdered. As he continues his investigation, it becomes clear he has drawn the attention of Bughuul, which the movie refers to as an ancient Mesopotamian god.
While there is no direct parallel to Bughuul in the mythology of the region, there are some close counterparts. Bughuul is confirmed in promotional materials to be a brother of Moloch, an ancient Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice. Even Bughuul’s name may be a variation on the name “Baal,” which many scholars believe was another name for Moloch. While information is scarce and most of what we know about Moloch and Baal comes from Biblical and Hebrew sources, archeological research in Carthage indicates that the practice was likely common there.
By universal modern ethics, human sacrifice is a pretty horrifying concept and therefore probably not a bad fit for a horror movie. But with a fairly standard plot, the movie being placed in the modern USA, and not much about Bughuul’s design seeming to draw from Mesopotamian sources (almost definitely for the better) it can only leave us with the conclusion that something about the perceived foreign-ness of Bughuul’s backstory was intended to intensify the fear.
This is at least a case where Bughuul’s stated origin fits the theme, but the execution feels like it lacks both context and nuance.
2014’s The Pyramid has a different relationship with its inspired monster. An opened-tomb bloodbath and found footage movie that couldn’t quite commit to being a found footage movie, the film follows a father-daughter archeological team and a documentary crew as they investigate a mysterious, seemingly impossible pyramid found in the middle of the Egyptian desert. As they delve deeper and more of them die terribly — crushed by fallen rubble, dragged into the dark by the undead, or devoured by immortal mummified cats — the mystery is revealed to the audience piecemeal. Near the end of the movie, the monster is revealed to be…
Anubis?
In Egyptian mythology, Anubis is the god of mummification and guides the dead on their quest to attain a spot in the afterlife. He was widely worshipped and is likely one of the oldest gods in his pantheon. Despite his association with death, he is not death personified and instead plays the role of a psychopomp or guide to the dead, as well as those who would carry out their funerary practices.
In The Pyramid (2014), Anubis is depicted as a rotting monster with the head of a jackal who was outcast by his father Osiris and imprisoned by his followers in an impossible labyrinth. His goal is to find a pure heart so that he might open the gate to the underworld and rejoin Osiris. As far as a representation of a mythological figure, this seems like an odd choice. While pretty much all gods have some spotty stories in their canons, scholars seem to be in agreement that Anubis was seen as a protector and teacher. While some versions of his myth do say he is a son of Osiris, there does not appear to be much tension between the two, and worshippers would often call on him for protection and to enforce curses.
While it’s always tedious to pick apart a movie for having inaccuracies to its source material, this is a case where a little applied knowledge could have made for a richer narrative. With Anubis as a defender of the rights of the dead, a plot where he was punishing intruders might have been a better use of both the set-up for the movie and carried more respect for the figure’s past.
Anubis’s role in The Pyramid (2014) and similar films highlight something that goes deeper than any one portrayal: an acknowledgement from filmmakers that most people will not notice discrepancies and largely will not care. Therefore, the film makers do not.
In The Ritual (2017), a mysterious creature haunts a quartet of middle-aged hikers as they backpack through Sweden on their holiday. When one of them sprains their ankle, the group decides to take a shortcut through a forest. There, their minds are assaulted by horrifying images and the hikers are picked off one-by-one by something that appears and disappears in the wild, shifting woods. Protagonist Luke remains the sole survivor after a face-off with a community of cultists and the reveal of the many-armed, deer-like chimera with glowing eyes. In the movie, a cultist identifies the creature as an offspring of the mythological Loki. She specifically uses the word “jotunn” — a term usually translated as “giant.” (Note: while the creature is not gendered in the film, a character in the book calls the creature “Moder” or “mother,” implying that Moder is female.)
Like Bughuul, Moder is not directly pulled from her origin mythology. However, she has clear counterparts that we can use to examine her and how well her mythological backstory slots her into her role in The Ritual (2017). Loki has many children in the myths, most notably the monstrous offspring sired with the giantess Angrboda, who herself lived in a forest according to the Prose Edda. Jormungand was a colossal serpent that encircled the world. Fenrir was a large wolf associated with violence. Hel was a daughter who ruled the land of the dead.
Moder, possessing animal, tree, and humanoid aspects, arguably meshes perfectly with her siblings and (assumed) mother. Like other jotunn in the myths, her association with nature in the film conveys the idea that she is something both ephemeral and unstoppable. Though she does not change her shape as Loki and other Norse gods do, she is designed so that she assumes different shapes depending on what direction she approaches the camera from or what positions she stands in. A headless, masculine torso with arms that are both twigs and antlers crowns a disjointed, four-legged body, all seeming to secure another, shadowy figure within. She is the thing you see out of the corner of your eye in the woods at night, and exists in strict opposition to the rational society that Luke comes from.
Like her mythological father, she is depicted as having divine origin, yet is not divine and has no worshippers that she has not coerced with the choice of death or assimilation. She howls when Luke hits her with the axe, and it a cry of both anger and grief at such a violent rejection. Her power is absolute within her domain, yet she is not able to step foot outside the forest, forgotten to history and myth alike.
With her cultists dead, she ends the movie much the same way as the very human Luke — alone. Luke leaves her behind in the same way we often leave wild places that we are only visiting. Though he survives the movie, the audience is left with the impression that she was there before him and will persist long after.
Anyone whose favorite book has been made into a movie knows that not all adaptations are created equal. There is nothing wrong with storytellers drawing on shared stories. It’s even unavoidable. However, we must also remember that not all tales are fit to be shared in all contexts. Colonialism created a dynamic where some spiritual paths were given preference over others, and it’s worth mentioning that of the examples on this list, the two gods that were treated most hollowly in their films come from Africa and the Middle East respectively.
No movie has an obligation to inform, and horror — subversive by nature — arguably has even less of an obligation. But looking at how modern stories riff on the past does leave us with a haunting sense of the passage of time. It leaves us asking how deities that were once treated as living, breathing forces in the world can be relegated to fiction to become the subject of a few hearty jump scares, all to remain in some viewers’ minds as a monster and a monster alone. When we incorporate what came before in a clever and holistic way, it may just make our horror even more horrific.
