This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Religious Horror: From YKTTW
Spectrum: The article contained this: "Since this is mainly a Western subgenre, that religion is Christianity, which is convenient because it contains the most inherent horror of any belief system. (Well, it does if you don't count Cosmicism.) Specifically:..."
I see no reason why Christianity should be more horror-laden than "any other belief system", so I'm removing it. If anyone wants to put it back, add arguments for why this is so.
Dioschorium: Christian motifs make it easy to write horror. You have the baddest Big Bad of all time, complete with villains from either the Bible (demons) or popular culture (cultists). And then there's Hell, which, in modern depictions, owes a lot to Dante.
Nornagest: You could make a good case for Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and the various Manichean heresies being more intrinsically horrific than mainline Christianity, with bigger Big Bads and weaker or nonexistent doctrines of salvation, and Islam is at least on par. While the Dharmic religions don't have well-defined villains like Christianity does, they tend to be more pessimistic about the material world and most possible afterlifes — at least to a Western reading. And polytheistic belief systems can get pretty damned fatalistic — Norse heathenism's is probably the worst I can think of offhand.
Really, writing religious horror depends more on your reading of the source material than on the source you choose. Almost all religions can look pretty nightmarish in the right light.
