By Nick Mumejian
You might assume a guy who loves heavy metal enjoys a good scare. However, I cannot watch horror movies. One out-of-nowhere jump and I’m hiding behind a couch pillow, checking the locks, and sleeping with the sound machine cranked up so I can’t hear the house creak.
My wife, Virginia, is the opposite. For her, October is a month-long horror film festival, just about one movie a night until Halloween. When the screaming starts in the living room, I suddenly discover an urgent email that needs a long, thoughtful reply in some other part of the house.
Here’s the strange part: one of my all-time favorite bands is called, quite literally, Death. Put on a record of blast beats, guttural growled vocals, and songs about mortality and decay, and I am calm enough to fold laundry. Virginia finds this hilarious, and frankly a little suspicious. I’m not sure I can explain it either.
But I’ve come to think there’s a sermon hiding in that contradiction. Horror wants me to flinch from death. Death metal, at its best, wants me to stare straight at it, turn up the volume, and refuse to look away. As we move into the season of Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, and Día de los Muertos, I want to suggest that the church is called to be more like the second than the first.
Halloween is, at root, a church word. All Hallows’ Eve is the night before All Saints’ Day on November 1, followed by All Souls’ Day on November 2. For centuries Christians kept these three days as a single movement: facing the dark, celebrating the faithful who have gone before, and praying for all the beloved dead.
Día de los Muertos, observed across Mexico and in Latino communities here in Texas and beyond, shares those same days. Its roots run deep into Indigenous traditions of honoring ancestors that long predate the arrival of Catholic practice, which later blended with them. Families build ofrendas with photographs, marigolds, candles, and the favorite foods of those they’ve lost, and they welcome the dead home with laughter as much as tears.
Many of us in the free-church tradition were raised without most of this. We were good at funerals and casseroles, but the calendar of remembering was something “those other churches” did. I think we lost something there, and we have much to learn, humbly, from neighbors who never let it go.
If you want a movie for this season, skip the slasher flicks (I’ll be skipping them with you) and watch Pixar’s Coco. Young Miguel stumbles into the Land of the Dead on Día de los Muertos and meets the ancestors his family has honored, and one they have tried hard to forget.
The film’s most haunting idea isn’t a monster. It’s the “final death”: the moment when no one among the living remembers you anymore, and you simply fade. That fate nearly claims Héctor, a charming, down-on-his-luck musician Miguel meets in the Land of the Dead. Héctor turns out to be Miguel’s great-great-grandfather. He left home to chase music, was murdered before he could return, and was cut out of the family’s memory, his face literally torn from the photo on the ofrenda. What saves him isn’t a weapon or a spell. It’s his elderly daughter, Mamá Coco, who still carries his memory, and a great-great-grandson who refuses to let him be forgotten.
I’d call that a profoundly Christian insight. Our faith is built on remembering: “Do this in remembrance of me.” The thief on the cross didn’t ask Jesus for a blessing or motivational quip. He asked, “Remember me.” To be remembered by God is to be held in life, and to remember one another is to share in that holy work.
Here’s the challenge. Progressive Christians are often brave about the suffering of the living. We march, we organize, we call our legislators. But several of us get quiet and a little embarrassed when the conversation turns to death, to resurrection, to the communion of saints. It can feel too pious, too supernatural, too much like the faith many of us left behind.
So, we flinch. We say things like “a celebration of life” and hurry past the grief. We tend to treat mortality as a private matter rather than a communal one.
Yet our justice work depends on refusing the final death. When the movement for racial justice says, “Say their names,” it is practicing All Souls’ Day. When we read aloud the names of individuals who died in ICE custody, or of trans siblings lost to violence, or of the unnamed enslaved people buried beneath many of our cities, we are doing what an ofrenda does. Remembering the dead is not a retreat from justice. It is one of justice’s deepest forms.
So, what might it look like to face death with a little more death metal and a lot less horror movie? It can start with something as simple as saying names out loud. At Lake Shore, each All Saints’ service we read aloud the names of those in our church community who have died since the last one. Then we open the room, and anyone may speak another name they want included. Voices rise from every corner, and for a few minutes the communion of saints is something you can actually hear. And don’t stop at names; tell a story. One saint who shaped me is David Hendon. He served on my search committee, and he never missed a chance after worship to encourage me whenever I named bigotry from the pulpit, especially institutional racism. Every congregation has its David Hendons, and their stories deserve to be told.
We can also make remembering something people can see and touch. Invite your congregation to bring photos and small mementos for a shared remembrance table. A word of care here: a remembrance table in our sanctuaries is not an ofrenda, and we shouldn’t call it one. Día de los Muertos belongs to Mexican and Indigenous communities, and it is sacred to them, not décor for us. The better path is relationship before ritual. Accept the invitation when a Latino congregation or community center opens its celebration to neighbors, come to learn rather than to collect ideas, and support the artists, bakers, and churches who keep the tradition alive.
Widen the circle to include the names the world has tried to forget: those lost to state violence, at the border, to hate, to neglect. And let the kids in. Halloween costumes and candy aren’t the enemy, though a costume should never turn someone else’s culture or sacred tradition into a disguise. Let children help decorate the remembrance table and ask their questions about death. They are usually braver than we are, and they tend to have better questions.
None of this requires us to have death figured out. It only asks us to stop looking away.
I still won’t be watching many horror movies this October; Virginia can have the living room. But on All Saints’ Sunday I’ll be standing in a sanctuary full of voices calling out the names of those we love, after playing some very loud and heavy music in my car on the way there (as I always do).
May you have the courage to look death in the face this season, not with fear, but with the stubborn hope of resurrection. May you remember your beloved dead, and may you be remembered. And may the God who never forgets a single name hold all of us, the living and the dead, in one great communion of love. Amen.
Nick Mumejian is Senior Pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, TX, a Board Member of the Alliance of Baptists, and Interim Editor in Chief of The Muslim World journal, where he has served as an editor for over sixteen years.
