Ira Levin

The Argument

Ira Levin wrote two of the most theologically loaded horror novels of the twentieth century — Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives — and their enduring power comes from the precision with which they identify the specific fears each era most needs to confront. Rosemary's Baby is a horror novel about the violation of the sacred — the corruption of motherhood, the betrayal of trust, the use of an innocent for a demonic purpose — and it works because it takes the demonic seriously in a culture that had decided to stop taking it seriously.

The Stepford Wives is a horror novel about the replacement of persons with simulacra — the substitution of the compliant image for the real, difficult, irreducible human being. Its feminist reading is the obvious one, but the theological reading runs deeper: the Stepford husbands have done what the demonic always does — replaced the real with a comfortable imitation, the person with a thing, the image of God with an image of their own desire.

For literary apologetics, Levin is the writer who used the conventions of horror fiction to ask questions that secular culture preferred not to ask: whether the demonic is real, whether innocence can be violated, whether persons can be replaced, and what it costs when they are. Horror fiction, at its best, is the literary form that keeps open the questions a comfortably secular culture wants to close.