By Mason Allred
In my 2025 essay, “The Body is the Message: The Promise of Mormon Horror,” I tried to recognize and appreciate the young monster of Mormon-themed horror. I can only report the monster is growing and has escaped the laboratory!
For the first time ever, the Mormon History Association hosted a panel on Mormon Horror at their annual conference. Barret and Jessica Burgin (the creators of The Angel) and I discussed and screened several Mormon horror shorts, including The Handbook (2023), I Hid My Heart Inside My Head (2025), Drip (2025), A Light That Doesn’t Dim (2024), and The Angel (2024) to a packed room. The conversation afterward was fascinating and generative.
The horror-inspired creative output keeps multiplying. Linda Hamilton’s recent novel The Fourth Wife (2026) weaves a gothic haunted house tale around a polygamous family. In the Australian film Diabolic (2025), a young fundamentalist Mormon woman performing baptisms for the dead becomes possessed when a dead witch’s name is uttered, unwittingly serving as her proxy, then host! Having been invited to teach Mormon horror in Media and Religion courses and discuss it across podcasts and presentations, I can confirm: there is a stomach for this. The Body of the Saints can handle it as the horror genre allows us to learn through our physical bodies. How else can we come to terms with the ghosts of polygamy, the undead doctrines and policies of an evolving church, the zombie media of past practices, or the nagging uncertainty of our current hyper-saturated media environment that seems to possess our thoughts and behaviors? Good horror is good for Mormonism. And Mormonism has much to offer the genre.
This Promethean monster of Mormon Horror has taken on a life of its own. It is now bumbling about, gathering strength and size as it lumbers. But we needn’t fear it. We have more to learn from the chills it evokes.
Happy Halloween, my friends. Remember, the light only shines brighter in the face of darkness.
Read Mason’s original 2025 article
The Body is the Message: The Promise of Mormon Horror
