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.
‘She had it coming’: text, tradition and trauma in Judges 19
The horrific story of the rape and murder of a young woman in Judges 19 ends with a dismembered corpse and a call to ‘Get on top of it! Take counsel! And speak out!’ (19:30). In Shelly Rambo’s terms, her death haunts the life that follows, and the narrator seems to be calling us to ‘witness’ to the reality of life after the storm of this traumatic event.