The Lord asked Cain, 'Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high! But if you are not doing right, Sin is crouching at the door hungry to get you. You can still master him.' — Genesis 4:6-7In the Hebrew, the word translated here as crouching is related to a Chaldean name for a demon that crouches in doorways waiting to devour its prey. Thus, the imagery of the language can be translated thusly:
There is a demon crouched ready to devour you, sin is the means by which you let him in. Despite this, you can still master him.Sans Christ, in the immediate wake of The Fall, Cain had the power to overcome demons. With Christ and the power of His Cross, demons don't stand a chance. The only way a demon can possess a person or a house is if we let them. Therefore, when it comes to all this supernatural horror stuff, I have a very difficult time suspending my disbelief.
Therefore, it might surprise you that I have a reputation among several of my players of being one of the most successful Referees for bringing horror and terror to the game table. The secret is figuring out who the real monsters are.
The last time I was really scared at the movie theater was when I went to see Silence of the Lambs (which, by the way, demonstrates two truths: 1) I have three kids and have neither the time nor the budget to go see movies in the theater anymore and 2) the overall quality of movies in the last twenty years has so dramatical gone into the tank that Hollywood has utterly failed to make me miss going to the movie theater). Hannibal Lector is one of the truly terrifying movie monsters of all time, because he forces us to realize that we have seen the most horrific monster in the universe and it is us.
The best horror merely holds up a mirror. Whether or not intended, the work of HPL is a marvelous critique of secularism, atheism and scientism* because it holds up a mirror to the terrifying reality of a world without God. This terror and horror has been loosed upon the world every time atheism has been writ large upon a society, any society.
There is a reason why the big bad guys in my campaigns tend to be human. There is a reason why my monsters personify sin. There is a reason why RPGs and not movies are the best medium for telling horror tales — we must confront the horror of our own choices (and kick butt when we make the right ones).
*Scientism is the (false) belief that science is capable of answering questions that it is not designed to do — things more properly answered by philosophy and theology.