[Blog] Media Spotlight: Dean Bryan Stone on the Sacred and the Scary

Perkins Dean featured on KERA Think and SMU’s “Why We Love Being Scared” exploring faith, fear, and the theology of horror

As spooky season arrives, Bryan P. Stone, Leighton K. Farrell Endowed Dean at Perkins School of Theology, appeared in two major media features unpacking the unlikely spiritual power of horror cinema. His recent interviews with KERA Think and SMU News invited audiences to explore how theology and fear intertwine—and what horror films can teach us about human vulnerability, culture, and faith.

These conversations follow the release of his new book, Christianity and Horror Cinema (Routledge, 2025), which examines how Christian symbols, beliefs, and anxieties have shaped the monsters and moral questions that haunt Western horror films.

The Christian Core of Horror Movies — KERA Think

In October, Stone joined KERA Think host, Krys Boyd, for a Halloween episode titled The Christian Core of Horror Movies. Together, they explored how ghosts, witches, vampires, and demons often draw from Christian imagery — sometimes reinforcing faith, and other times subverting it.r

“Horror cinema preys on Christianity’s narrative, moral, cultural, and aesthetic traditions; reverses them; upends them; inverts them; and offends them,” Stone explained. “But it also reflects and relies on them.”

He emphasized that horror is not simply about fear — it’s about confrontation. “What horror film does is confront us,” he said. “It confronts us with our vulnerabilities, our finitude — those things we’ve buried deep. And it brings them back up in front of us.”

In a companion feature produced by SMU News, Stone joined Rick Worland, film professor at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, in a video conversation titled Why We Love Being Scared. Filmed at the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection in the Hamon Arts Library, the discussion explored the psychological and cultural fascination with horror.

Reflecting on footage of audiences leaving The Exorcist in 1974, Stone and Worland traced how the genre has shifted from classic monsters to deeply personal fears that mirror modern life. Together, they considered how horror reflects moral questions and spiritual anxieties in every generation.

“Horror films are mirrors,” Stone noted. “They show us what we most fear about ourselves — and sometimes, what we most long for.”