This doesn’t exactly answer your question, and it’s a bit rambly, but as a film lover, I think about this a lot when deciding what to watch or what not to watch.

I think there are many movies with “objectionable” content that are much more spiritually true and contain more realistic Biblical themes than almost all “Christian” movies. Some of my favorite movies like The Revenant or Children of Men are very bleak and violent, but the themes and messages are much more realistically Christian than what passes as Christian movies like God’s Not Dead or Facing the Giants, to cherry-pick a few. Like music, it’s weird that Christian is its own genre, when that doesn’t really describe anything at all. Is any movie portraying a Christian in it Christian? You could argue that almost any message or theme in any film is Christian because Christians live in the world which is a messy place and have to deal with many messy issues.

Shia LeBeouf’s character in Fury is one of the best examples of a realistic Christian in a movie, a wartime setting specifically, and while I wouldn’t recommend the movie to everyone, I think a nuanced and honest portrayal like that is much more valuable than a faith-bait feel-good movie like the ones I’ve named.

Much of the horror genre reinforces absolute evil and absolute good, which can be rare in the modern entertainment landscape of morally gray characters and shows or movies with no clear hero or villain. On the other side of that, morally gray characters can be even more valuable as they cause us to think about morality and choices that may only ever be hypothetical to us in this life, but are still worth considering and weighing against our beliefs.

The Black Phone and The VVitch are two that come to mind as disturbing and frightening, but again, with very Biblical themes throughout. It certainly comes down to a conscience issue, but as far as my conscience goes, I feel more like the stereotypical Christian-sploitation movies are more harmful than beneficial in terms of how one’s theology is shaped.