Divine Darkness

Nearly everyone can relate, I suspect, to the feeling of being “scared of the dark.” It is no doubt for this reason that dark-ness saturates the horror genre, from the earliest examples of gothic novels and graveyard poetry, to the most recent films, comics, and video games. We do not know what it is that dwells in the darkness, only that our not-knowing is a source of fear. Darkness seems to steadily creep forth, submerging everything in an anonymous, pitch blackness. Our fear of the dark seems as ambiguous as darkness itself. This ambiguity is at once horrific, and yet, because of its ambiguity, it also ob-tains the quality of the mystical. Georges Bataille, writing about religious art, highlights this ambiguity: “What I sudden-ly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish—but which at the same time delivered me from it—was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.” The concept of darkness evokes this combination of religion and horror; it is the shift from the horror of something inthe dark, to the horror of darkness itself. Put simply, the concept of darkness invites us to think about this basic metaphys-ical dilemma of a nothing that is a something . . .