You may know the Bible as a testament of faith. But within this sacred book are also the world’s first horror stories.

Conventional wisdom has it that the origins of the horror genre are found in the nineteenth century, in works like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this paradigm-shaking new book, Bible scholar and cultural historian Brandon Grafius argues that the Bible is, among other things, the world’s first work of horror literature.

The tropes and themes that we find in slasher movies, body horror, folk horror and zombie apocalypses were kickstarted by the Bible. Before Godzilla, there were the monsters arising from the sea in the book of Daniel. Before The Wicker Man, there was the folk horror violence of the book of Judges. And before The Fly, Leviticus and Paul understood that our bodies are untrustworthy. Sometimes, the Bible has decided that the best way to help us understand the world in new ways is to scare us.

Grafius’s book is a revelatory work of biblical scholarship as well as a cultural analysis of the contemporary horror genre. It is a book that will make readers revise how they see the Bible and impact how they consume horror literature and cinema. It is guaranteed to make them wiser consumers of both.