‘It poisons your heart and your mind’: Frank Peretti warns about horror movies 

The author who helped popularize Christian suspense four decades ago says he’s no fan of mainstream horror movies, noting he once halted a film adaptation of his best-known novel because it was set to be too graphic.

Frank Peretti is celebrating the 40th anniversary of This Present Darkness, the 1986 bestseller about a pastor and a newspaper editor who uncover a conspiracy threatening their small town while unseen angels and demons wage a spiritual battle and Christians turn to prayer. He has more than 15 million books in print.

Next month, David C Cook will release a collector’s edition of This Present Darkness.

“I don’t like it at all,” Peretti said of mainstream horror movies. “It’s dirty, it’s insidious. It poisons your heart and your mind.”

To be clear, Peretti was not asked about any specific movies, and his comments were not a response to the ongoing social media debate among Christians over the horror genre. Still, Peretti said he’s had personal experience with potential adaptations of This Present Darkness.

“There was one attempt at making a film of This Present Darkness, and one of the screenplays was written by writers that are really into that genre – and they were leaning real heavily toward making a horror movie out of it, bringing out the horror and the scare.

“And I was very concerned about that. ‘No, no, we’re not going to do that. That’s not what the book is about.’”

This Present Darkness has “good guys and bad guys,” he said, and good stories always focus on the “struggle between good and evil.” But a key difference between his fiction and mainstream horror, he said, is that his characters face spiritual evil with powerful allies fighting on their behalf.

“I wanted to unmask the evil and let people know there’s a real intentional personal evil out there that we’re struggling with, and the Bible says so. It’s going to be dark and scary at points, but don’t lose track of the fact there are glorious, brilliant angels that are fighting for us, and that’s one key difference,” he said.

Peretti rejects comparisons with Stephen King and doesn’t care for the “Christian Stephen King” label.

“That’s not really fair because in Stephen King’s works, the evil is often a spiritual evil, but there’s never a spiritual good. The characters are always pitted against this big spiritual evil of some kind. They’ve got no one to turn to,” he said.

Peretti said his stories offer hope.

“My work is more like C.S. Lewis. I want to highlight and demonstrate [that] there’s a battle, but [there] are really big, strong, powerful warriors battling for us, and we win in the end. That’s a good story. The good guys against the bad guys, and the good guys win.”