The Monster is Already in the House! Reading Judges 19 as a Horror Film

The history of interpretation of Judges 19 is almost as horrific as the story itself. Commentators blame the victim and excuse the men who betray her. A Rhetorical Genre Studies approach is used to understand how assumptions about genre condition certain kinds of ‘uptakes’ and not others. To resist the tradition while retaining the text requires a disruption of these automatic uptakes. Reading Judges 19 alongside Psycho and Night of the Living Dead suggests other possibilities for what kind-of-thing the text is. It highlights the role of incongruities and occlusions in generating tension and disrupting normality. The ambiguous morality of the characters is central to its depiction of the darkness. Reading the story as if it is a horror film suggests new ways the text might be received, and opens up new ways that we can respond.