Why a ‘Meditation Rabbi’ is Watching Horror Films
In 2025, catharsis takes a little more energy.
Until this year, I never appreciated the pleasure of a good disemboweling.
As readers of this publication know, I am a rabbi who meditates, teaches about psychedelics, and writes in this newsletter on the intersection of politics and spirituality. I’m also a longtime film buff, and occasionally talk about movies in these pages. As you might suspect, I often like quiet, contemplative films about the complexity of the human experience.
But not this year. This year, it’s been blood, guts, and gore.
As it happens, 2025 has already seen some brilliant horror films: Zach Cregger’s Weapons is currently atop the box office, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners may be the first horror (or quasi-horror) film to win an Oscar (though The Exorcist was nominated). But of course it’s more than that. Both of those films, and others that I’ve enjoyed this year, are about the dark realities of America: racism, violence, alienation. They are both about the news without being about the news; they reflect our shared reality. Meanwhile, their violence reflects my inner reality.
Sinners is about many things: race, of course, but also religion (old, very old, and new), the birth of American music, the tensions between assimilation and separation, and the varying ways in which its protagonists attempt to negotiate a world in which power is often accompanied by evil. It is also, fundamentally, a story of survival and coming-of-age in the Mississippi Delta, in which the youthful Sammie navigates his way between piety and sin, art and money, love and lust.
As in other Black horror films (a genre dubbed horror noir by Professor Robin R. Means Coleman), the supernatural horror of Sinners the surreal horror of everyday life in Jim Crow America, where the authorities are also klansmen, where everyday life is a matter of survival and luck. And yet, the vampires are also vampires: there’s blood-sucking, and promises of immortality, and a whole lot of gore. Like Get Out, Django Unchained, and the TV series Lovecraft Country, Sinners offers the catharsis of Black heroes beating the crap out of white racists, while also unflinchingly depicting the cruelty of American racism. It is both release and reminder.
Weapons is a bit more elliptical. Seventeen children vanish from a third-grade class: it’s not a school shooting, but the grief-stricken, rage-filled community meeting held afterward might as well be about one. Its villain is almost a cipher, an embodiment of inexplicable evil. Its title may refer to the ways in which people are controlled, to guns (at one unforgettable moment, an AK-47 appears floating in the air, a metaphor within a dream), even to the children themselves. There is dread and mystery and tension.
Like Sinners, there’s also plenty of gore: the aforementioned disemboweling, lots and lots of flesh being torn, and one random death so gruesome and surprising that I won’t spoil it here. Though unlike Sinners, Weapons takes place very much in the present. It is filled with phones and cameras and contemporary suburban alienation. It is gothic horror set in a societal context that is, in many ways, already horrible. An angry, gun-toting white man gets enraged at the community meeting, and I feel my anxiety rise, knowing that he could blow up at any moment. The everytown of Maybrook is a quaint suburb not unlike my own, but that doesn’t insulate it from evil.
Why do I love these films so much?
I think the answer has to do with the original meaning of catharsis: katharsis, in the Greek, which literally means purification or cleansing. Aristotle argues that such ‘cleansing’ can only happen when the troubling thoughts or emotions are confronted or expressed. For Aristotle, tragedy offers katharsis because it causes an upwelling of “pity and fear” – and thus the release of it. It feels good to feel bad.
On one level, the catharsis is intellectual. In the last six months, horror films are the only forms of fiction that reflect what America feels like today, in which masked men seize innocent people of the street, in which millions of people are set to die because of cuts to foreign aid, in which we are committing mass climatic suicide.
Period pieces seem quaint. Contemplative art films feel oblivious to reality. Horror films, even though they are highly unrealistic, seem the only realistic films right now.
But catharsis is never merely intellectual, of course; it’s visceral, emotional, even primal. Nearly all of my friends report feeling angry, overwhelmed, anxious, and powerless. We are infurated not only at the president or his pathetic enablers in Congress, but at the massive failures in education, civics, media, and politics that brought this period of American history into existence. We know how this all happened, but we still ask how this could happen.
For two hours, give or take, the protagonists of these films do what I cannot do: they slash through evil, cutting it to shreds. Obviously I am not wishing that would come to pass in real life, and obviously the innocent die too; that is the whole point. But for a brief few minutes, there is the fantasy that we can fight back and win.
All of this is katharsis, which interestingly has the same connotations as the Hebrew word kapparah, as in Yom Kippur. The most frequent translation of that word — “atonement” — misses the visceral, embodied, emotional parts of reflecting on how we fucked up over the past year. Before their is release, there must be forgiveness; before there is forgiveness, there must be an honest revelation of the difficult truth. Like katharsis, kapparah involves cleansing, scouring, and purifying. The same word is used to describe the cleansing of the Temple after it is defiled.
Though perhaps Aristotle did not have the shooting of zombies in mind when he wrote of catharsis, these films, and others like them, have given me the opportunity to feel it. They have offered me the sense of reality in unreality; the evocation of rage and fear; and, at least temporarily, a release.
It’s been a strong week here on Substack. Since I’ve not been writing directly about politics for a few weeks — though each of these last few newsletters has been haunted by it — here’s some of the best takes I’ve been reading on the destruction of liberal America.
- produced an equally useful and hilarious piece on how, “somehow, DC Republicans are always the victims of every crime that never happened”. Bookmark this. Like immigration, wokeness, (most) university antisemitism, the trans menace, and government “waste,” the pretext for the military occupation of DC is completely false. Like I always say, remember when Republicans were obsessed with Ebola.
- once again does a devastating job in this panoramic view of the GOP’s (not just Trump’s) attempt to convert this country from a democratic republic to a one-party-dominant authoritarian state.
- has done an excellent summary of the anti-democratic debacle in Texas, involving law enforcement threatening and confining legislators in order to rig the 2026 election. Kuo also did a great expose of a villain you probably haven’t heard of, DOJ official Ed Martin.
I think a lot of media-bashing is lazy. But
’s devastating take on how the new Washington Post, in particular, has completely failed to stand up to Trump’s DC takeover. It’s so tragic what Bezos has done to this once-proud institution that is now carrying water for Trump in its opinion pages. Sorry, WaPo, but I won’t be restarting my subscription.- reminds us, in a hype-free way, that AI is soon to change how we experience and understand representations of reality.
Finally,
reports, “Trump Freaks Out After Nobel Peace Prize Form Asks If Applicant Ever Used Troops Against Own Citizens
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