“Protect yourself. Look away from the ugly images… avoid violent and grotesque media,” wrote Anna Broussard in her Oct. 30 opinion, “On Halloween, look away.” Coming into contact with disturbing content can be uncomfortable, but the solution is not to “protect yourself” by looking away. We can’t protect ourselves, and we don’t need to look away. We need to become braver.
It is impossible to really look away from evil. Any honest purview of our interior lives, let alone the entire world, will reveal a place filled with disturbing evils of all sizes. We may regret being exposed to evil in the first place — this is to wrestle with the mystery of the Fall — but we cannot try to undo that any more than we can try to live in a perfect world.
Pain and discomfort are natural responses to horror, but life is not about avoiding discomfort. Things that disturb us should fascinate us, in a sober way, because they present a conundrum to our preferred, comfortable idea of reality.
Of course, there is a difference between video recordings of real-world violence and fictional depictions of evil. We should not promote or encourage mass consumption of excessively gruesome recordings such as we have seen in the past few months. But voluntary exposure to fictional horror media can provide a safe space for learning productive responses to real horror. This is what Halloween is all about. Good horror fiction always presents our deepest fears to us with the goal of helping us understand and conquer them. Psychologically, voluntary exposure is equivalent to healing.
If we chose to avert our eyes from the crucifixion because it’s disturbing — and it is — we would be acting against Jesus’ own wishes: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up” (John 3:14). Just as the Israelites had to look at a statue of a serpent to be saved from the serpents themselves (Numbers 21:6–9), so we must look at the evil of innocent suffering to be saved from evil.
Maggie O’Connor is a sophomore studying art.
