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# What’s so horrific about religion (and religious about horror)?
- URL: https://www.mattcardin.com/whats-so-horrific-about-religion-and-religious-about-horror/
- Published: 2026-09-17T08:00:01.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T08:00:01.000Z
- Description: Sleep paralysis, the daemon muse, and the questions that stayed with me
- Author: Matt Cardin
- Tags: Religion, Nonduality, and Consciousness, Horror, the Weird, and the Imaginal, Writing, Essays, The Teeming Brain

**NOTE:* This essay revisits and substantially expands a post that I first published at my old blog,* The Teeming Brain, *in 2011\. In addition to newly incorporating a contemporaneous online exchange with readers from back then, it adds historical context in a new introduction and brings the whole matter up to date with a new conclusion that describes my current perspective.*

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Today I want to share a conversation that took place fifteen years ago, a few days before I went on the air for my first-ever live interview on a radio show or podcast. It involves a written introduction that I created for that interview, plus an accompanying exchange with an audience of readers, all of them strangers, in which I tried to explain why religion and horror had always seemed to me to belong together.

I think this aspect of my thematic focus and fascinations over time is familiar to some of you and not so familiar to others. And also, perhaps, congenial to some of you but not so much to others. My days of writing horror have receded somewhat into the past at this point, and some of you became aware of me and my work after that transition had already begun. But it’s simply the case that horror was and is an important facet of the overall calling that my particular daemon muse has given me. And I think that, regardless of whether it’s a topic that attracts you in itself, it's worthwhile for me to keep talking about it, not just because it comes natively to me, but because we have come together here through our shared interests. We overlap, so to speak. Our respective interests (and sometimes obsessions) are multifaceted and interwoven, and they can mutually illuminate each other, both to each of us within ourselves and between us in conversation. This is baked right into the intro that I wrote for that online radio interview, where my explanation of the religion-and-horror entanglement began with my childhood reading and evangelical Christian upbringing and then expanded to more philosophical territory involving sleep paralysis, Rudolf Otto, and William James, then broadening still more to encompass creativity and the daemon.

As for the conversation it spawned with those readers, by the time that had run its course, I was talking about the years in my early adulthood when I literally dreaded the approach of night, and about what had helped me to live through them.

So this is all to say that we probably share at least some points of contact in what follows.

\* \* \*

The occasion for the whole thing was an invitation that I received in June 2011 to appear on a recently launched live online radio show and podcast titled *Spiritually Raw*, which was devoted to spiritual, occult, paranormal, and other decidedly esoteric subjects. At that time, I had begun to make some active inquiries into platforms for talking about my books and ideas — my first-ever foray into that kind of publicity-seeking — and this invitation was one of the fruits of those novice efforts. This particular show sounded pretty fringe, even by fringe standards, but it was professionally produced and laced with real energy in its conversations with individuals who spoke from all manner of weird perspectives. Since I fairly well understood and affirmed the weirdness of my own perspective, I accepted the invitation and began to prepare.

The way the show worked, at least at that time, was to give new guests an initial on-air screening, after which listener votes would determine whether they would return later for a full guest appearance. I was scheduled to go live for my screening on July 5, and one of the show’s producers and hosts invited me to introduce myself and my work at the *Spiritually Raw* website ahead of that first appearance, using the personal blog space they provided to guests. This felt like a good idea when I considered it, so I wrote a short piece under the title you see above and posted it at their site. I also published it at [*The Teeming Brain*](https://mattcardin.com/teeming-brain?ref=mattcardin.com), my blog at the time. I didn’t know if it would draw any attention, but to my surprised satisfaction, some of the show’s readers proved to be actively interested. They responded with questions, and my replies took the conversation further into the territory that had been driving my writing for years.

Not immaterially, this was a year and a half after the publication of [*Dark Awakenings*](https://www.mattcardin.com/dark-awakenings/), which represented, at that time, my most focused expression of an abiding fascination with the genetic entanglement of religion and horror. I was also deep into writing my short-lived *Demon Muse* blog (2010–2013) and the book that I developed from it, [*A Course in Demonic Creativity*](https://www.mattcardin.com/a-course-in-demonic-creativity/). So the relationship between religious experience, supernatural horror, and the strange autonomy of the creative impulse was very much alive for me.

Here is that blog post from 2011, followed by the conversation it sparked with its readers. I have lightly edited and refreshed my original text and paraphrased the readers’ questions to give the exchange a more continuous form. References to what was recent, current, or still to come belong to that earlier moment in time.

Note that I was talking to an audience whose level of knowledge about the horror genre was uncertain, hence the somewhat didactic tone I adopted in places.

## What I wrote in 2011

I’m a horror writer. As with many people who inhabit that title, it began in my youth when I was a horror reader. Since earliest childhood, I have been drawn by a kind of inbuilt gravity to scary stories about supernatural things. This includes all the standard elements of supernatural horror stories — ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, demons, cryptids, and so on — but around my teen years it started to tip definitively toward the type of fiction and film that’s generally called “cosmic horror” or “weird horror.” Probably the single most famous writer in this vein is H. P. Lovecraft, who has only emerged as a canonical literary figure in American and world letters in the past 20 years, with a serious acceleration in his ascent beginning about 2004\. I devoured Lovecraft in late high school and all through college and have gone on to become something of a scholar of his work, publishing articles and essays about him in a variety of journals and at a variety of websites.

For my entire life I have also been possessed by a fierce religious and spiritual instinct. I grew up steeped in evangelical Protestant Christianity. Then, in my teens, an interest in comparative religion began to grip me as strongly as my interest in horror (which was also accompanied by an interest in fantasy and science fiction). To make a long story short, I began to devour texts both ancient and modern about various world religious and philosophical traditions. In college I minored, and almost majored, in philosophy, and I studied all sorts of religions both academically and experientially, befriending people from various religious and cultural backgrounds, and pursuing various meditative practices. Several years after graduating, I returned to academia to earn a master’s degree in religious studies.

But a more immediate development in the wake of my college years was that I started experiencing horrific bouts of sleep paralysis. These were more than just the semi-common experience of half-waking and finding oneself unable to move. My nocturnal attacks were the really nightmarish kind, known to some sufferers of SP, that involved full-blown hypnagogic and hypnopompic visions. In my case, these took the form of a dark figure that was, for lack of a better word, demonic, and that assaulted me spiritually. At the time I didn’t know what was happening to me, because I had no idea that something called "sleep paralysis" existed or was a known phenomenon. However, I went on to discover it soon enough through the writings of David Hufford, the scholar who in the 1970s began to resurrect for us denizens of modern consumer-technological culture an awareness of this ancient affliction. By the by, I have been fascinated to see the level of general, popular awareness about SP on the rise in recent years.

To regroup: How does all of this relate to horror as religious and religion as horrific? By way of an answer, consider this quote from Lovecraft, from the introduction to his seminal study of the supernatural horror genre, *Supernatural Horror in Literature*:

> There is here involved \[in the phenomenon of weird supernatural horror fiction\] a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.

Did you catch that? Lovecraft was talking about the firsthand experience of supernatural horror, the psychology and phenomenology of the actual human response to these types of stories — and more than that, the primal human response that gave rise to such stories in the first place, and that lends them their power — and in doing so, he compared it directly to the religious response, to the inbuilt human capacity for what we call religious or spiritual experience. Significantly, his focus here resonates with the thought of the early twentieth-century German theologian Rudolf Otto, who hypothesized that religion originally arose from an experience of what he called “daemonic dread,” an overpowering sense of uncanny dread and awe at the psychological perception of a mysterious, awesome, utterly transcendent presence or reality that is inherently fearsome to the human sensibility as such. Otto also said this same response was elaborated in another human cultural direction when it gave rise to the ghost story. Lovecraft’s and Otto’s focus also resonates with many things said by William James, the renowned American philosopher and psychologist from the turn of the 20th century, who in his seminal book *The Varieties of Religious Experience* dwelt at length on the specific human responses of pessimism, depression, and horror to many aspects of life, and argued that the “real core of the religious problem” lies in an overwhelming experience of cosmic horror born out of abject despair at life’s incontrovertible hideousness.

> When we respond to stories of weird supernatural horror, we open ourselves to a fundamentally religious or spiritual experience — and vice versa.

Drawing this all together: What, therefore, is the upshot? What am I getting at in regard to religion and horror, both separately and in relation to each other? My point is that when we focus on the question of religious or spiritual experience, we are necessarily treading on shared ground with the very same primal psychological experience or response that underlies and gives power to supernatural horror. In precisely complementary fashion, when we respond to stories of weird supernatural horror, we open ourselves to a fundamentally religious or spiritual experience — and vice versa.

For me, this was all a mass of definitely existing but mostly unarticulated ideas and emotions until my experiences of sleep paralysis impacted my overall worldview and intellectual/emotional sensibility in such a way that the underlying ideas began to come clear. All of my horror fiction has been written from that experiential centerpoint. I also pursued my graduate work in religious studies with a view to exploring and explicating the religion-horror connection. Most recently, in the past few years I have been gripped increasingly by an interest in the muse, daimon, and genius of artistic and literary creativity. My own creativity has been fueled by and connected to all of the things discussed here in a way that is analogous to the ancient model or metaphor of the daimonic muse as a real spiritual force or entity that drives and inspires writers and artists. This in turn has raised questions about the ontological status of that force or entity.

## The conversation that followed

So that was what I posted simultaneously at the *Spiritually Raw* site and *The Teeming Brain*. As I said, I didn’t know if it would garner any interest. But then several readers responded with questions, and the conversation took the matter in interesting directions, especially since my readers raised points and issues I hadn’t thought of and probably wouldn’t have thought of on my own — which is of course one of the primary purposes of engaging in dialogue with other people to begin with.

### When reality itself is the horror

One reader asked if I could give a concrete example of what I was talking about when I referred to “religious horror” or “horrific religion.” Was I talking, for example, about unearthly monsters attacking a religious family? That question gave me a chance to distinguish the use of religious subjects in horror from the possibility that religion’s own account of reality might be horrific. I replied with what amounted to a kind of separate mini-essay of its own:

Certainly, one type of religious horror would simply involve religious elements like a religious family, a church, a clergyman, etc., being thrown into interaction with monsters or other horror tropes. This has been done frequently. See, for example, the movie *From Dusk Till Dawn*, where a fundamentalist Protestant preacher and his family are thrown together with two criminals (one of them a serial killer) and a bunch of bikers to fight a horde of vampires.

I actually co-edited an anthology of stories that combine horror with religious themes, under the title *Holy Horrors*, with T. M. Wright, author of the modern literary horror classics *Strange Seed* and *A Manhattan Ghost Story*. This project may someday see the light of publication. **\[Note from 2026: It never did, but I still have the entire project in my files. My co-editor Terry is, alas, no longer with us.\]** The stories fall into various categories, including the horrors perpetrated by religious fanatics, the horrors of supernatural evil (such as demons), and the horrific possibilities of religious supernaturalism itself.

My own authorial focus is on something like the last one. I write about the horror of the supernatural itself, the horror of commonsense/daylight reality being warped or punctured or undermined by eruptions of something beyond it. I also write about the hunch, intuition, or cosmic fear that the heart of Being itself, “God” or the Ground of Being or ultimate reality, may be horrific in its essence, which would mean that our present created world of physical reality and everyday experience is fundamentally poisoned, fundamentally a nightmarish trap from which there is no escape in the end, because what lies beyond it, and what we will encounter when we leave it, is the ultimate horror itself.

The sensibility or inspiration for this comes largely from those sleep paralysis experiences from the 1990s, which flooded my outlook on life with a growing darkness, and which linked up with my strong spiritual and philosophical sensibility. My story “Teeth” in my book *Dark Awakenings* gives a highly fictionalized version of something like this happening to a philosophy grad student who is introduced to the realization — and the firsthand experience — that what underlies conscious, everyday life is a kind of devouring vortex of nightmare.

This is, by the by, an enduring theme in weird supernatural horror fiction. From classic authors like Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to modern masters such as Thomas Ligotti and T. E. D. Klein, a multitude of writers have elaborated on this primal sense of something uncanny, something fundamentally awful, that lies behind life itself. For me with my inbuilt interest in religion and spirituality, it was staggering to recognize, as I did as some past point, that the miracles and other supernatural elements of Christianity and other religions are basically the same thing as the supernatural eruptions that are so common in horror stories, but just seen from a different angle. When I noticed that in the New Testament, for example, Jesus’s miracles are often greeted with dread and awe instead of the exuberant happiness that's popularly projected today, everything just fell into place.

### Dreading the approach of night

The same questioner then asked something more personal: Had this approach left an enduring impression on my subconscious? Had it changed, for example, how I felt about the coming of night? I replied:

Yes, my subconscious has been impacted by sleep paralysis and the accompanying intensification of my horror-fied interests, which have come to feel more existentially real. In general, I’m more aware of the very presence and reality of my unconscious mind than I was before. I have also been awakened to what Jung called “psychic objectivity,” the actual, irreducible reality of the psyche in itself, experienced by me-as-ego in the form of incursions from the imaginal realm that feel completely independent and autonomous. I guess being hit with visionary assaults by a black-shadow figure crackling with electricity while you lie paralyzed in bed will do that to you.

It’s funny that you would ask about my feelings toward the approach of night. Although it has been a long time since I felt this, during the first couple of years when my sleep paralysis episodes were happening pretty regularly, I honestly started to dread the approach of sunset and darkness. Darkness and shadows in general, like the ones inside a dark closet, began to fill me with a sharp sense of unease. I felt self-consciously stupid about the whole thing, but I was also unable to shake it. For a time I felt rather like the young protagonist Nancy in *A Nightmare on Elm Street*. Her waking life had become a kind of nightmare because she knew that if she fell asleep, she would be attacked by a monster from the dream realm.

Nobody around me knew this was happening, by the way, except for my wife, who didn’t know the extent of it. I just kind of kept plugging along in daily life, at my job, and so on, while being haunted by all these things. It was a very strange period for me.

### The empty witness

Another reader welcomed me to the *Spiritually Raw* community and asked me, based on my previous replies to other readers, whether I found it necessary to take some kind of medication for anxiety. My reply moved from the period of my greatest distress to the later outlook that had come to hold me:

I can understand why you might wonder about this. The answer is no, I don’t take meds, but that’s not because of any particular strength of mind or will. For a time during the 1990s, at the height of my sleep paralysis problems and associated life-level stresses, I had the vague but pervasive feeling that I was losing my mind. This was partly a function of the deep-seated anxiety that had begun to undercut my daily experience. Somehow, I just sort of lived through it all and grew past it — or maybe grew *through* it and *because of* it — and for quite a few years now have rested mostly (with occasional upsets) in a base-level attitude and experience of equanimity and okay-ness. My fundamental philosophical-spiritual-existential outlook is kind of a Zen Christian nondual agnostic position, which isn’t so much something that I hold onto as something that holds onto me. Whatever the sleep paralysis entities are — pure hallucinations, archetypes of the collective unconscious, shards of my psychic shadow, other-dimensional beings, or some multilayered reality that encompasses all these things and more — and whatever may be the final reality of the darkened worldview that accompanied my encounters with them, it all ultimately stems from and subsists within the empty-witness centerpoint of Being itself.

Moreover, understanding and appropriating this insight not just intellectually. but experientially, has worked for me as a way to endure and even transcend the present-moment horror and terror of sleep paralysis in the middle of the attacks themselves, whenever they occasionally recur.

## Fifteen years later

So, that was my self-confession and the accompanying conversation it spawned, from a decade and a half ago. To bring the matter up to the present, I will note that the last reply above is the one that most directly connects these older writings to my present outlook and concerns. I will also say that I find myself wondering if you perhaps share some of these same concerns, especially if you have encountered your own form of spiritual emergency, whether or not it resembled mine. In the midst of explaining why I wrote about cosmic nightmare, I was already talking to that community of strangers about a sense of detachment or equanimity that could hold steady even during the kinds of experiences that had inspired such writing. Questions about consciousness and identity were already right there, alongside the questions about horror and religion. So was the recognition that an intellectual account of these things was only part of what mattered.

For me today, the basic emphasis has shifted. As I have said, my fascination with the relationship between religion and horror is still alive, and it will always be here, but its intensity has diminished. The weird, the supernatural, and the horrific have come to draw my attention primarily for the how they are related to consciousness, creativity, identity, and waking up. When I return and reread that old conversation now, I can see I was already moving in this direction. The possible horror of what lies behind ordinary life used to be fiercely important to me. And, to be sure, it’s still here, still part of my life and writing. But increasingly I find myself drawn more to the fact of experience itself, to the awareness in which a world appears, and the sense of being a separate self within it, and the question of how that sense is formed and sustained, and the possibility of waking up from it. The old question about what might break into our familiar reality now flows into the related but, as it seems to me, more fundamental question of what that reality, and the self who inhabits it, may actually be.

And of course creativity belongs in this, too. The daemon muse had already entered the conversation in 2011 because the inner source of my writing felt intimately connected to the other matters I was discussing. So often an image, a voice, a story, or an idea or insight has arrived with a nature, character, and energy of its own, and I have found myself racing, or sometimes crawling or scraping, to find its appropriate expression in form. In such a circumstance, what is the relationship between that arrival or arising and the person who says “I” and calls himself “Matt” and speaks of “my work”? How do I, and how do *we*, attend to that? What does it reveal about the identity we ordinarily take for granted? These questions have continued to draw my intense interest through the years of writing that have followed.

> The old question about what might break into our familiar reality keeps opening into the related but more fundamental question of what that reality, and the self who inhabits it, may actually be.

Perhaps not incidentally, my involvement with *Spiritually Raw* confirmed that the religion-horror connection was indeed of interest to its audience. After my initial screening appearance, I was invited back for a full-length conversation about the subject, and then for yet another appearance devoted specifically to sleep paralysis. Both conversations felt good to me and seemed to be well received by the hosts and listeners. I wish I could still access recordings of them today, but alas, I think they’re lost.

I would be imposing too pat and tidy a shape on those earlier years if I framed them in terms of a simple passage from darkness to light. Even in what I wrote and said back then, it’s clear that dread and equanimity, nightmare and creative fascination, were already present together. What has changed today is where I tend to place my attention, and which questions seem most pressing and alive to me now.

I began my self-introduction to the *Spiritually Raw* community by describing an “inbuilt gravity” that drew me toward supernatural horror. That pull is still here, and I still recognize it consciously when it waxes from time to time. But these days, as it happens, I am simply less interested in the sense of darkness and horror as such, and more interested in the one who feels it, and in what becomes possible when we learn to question who, or what, that one actually is.

Warm regards, 

![Matt](https://www.mattcardin.com/content/images/2026/09/Signature-M--PNG-.png)