Psalm 90:5
that's no (blood) moon
His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night. (Psalm 90:5 DR)
Of all human fear, perhaps the most vexing is that which we cannot see. It is no coincidence that most horror stories—whether they be books or film—take place in the dark, or have intense elements of darkness in them. For while we may be terrified of that which we can see, it is still something perceivable and circumscribed by our perception. But that which is unseen and yet feared can be limitlessly expanded in our minds, even if the danger was never greater or even present.
In the spiritual life it is the temptations and sins which crouch in the dark which can be the most fearsome, even though they are—to some extent—the less pressing and lighter. St. Augustine in commenting on this passage draws a distinction in parallel between the sins of the night and those of the day. He does not mean the stereotypical sins of the night as we may conceive them, but rather those done in ignorance and weakness which are, on this account, actually lighter:
What ought to be feared by night, and what by day? When any man sins in ignorance, he sins, as it were, by night: when he sins in full knowledge, by day. The two former sins then are the lighter: the second are much heavier; ... He calls the light temptation, which the ignorant yield to, terror by night... (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 90, 7.)
These are, in St. Augustine’s mind, relatively light temptations because they “do not press upon us so urgently, as to overcome us, but may pass by quickly if declined.” (ibid.) In other words, they are temptations which are presented to us in moments of weakness or through ignorance and do not come as a full assault; they tempt us into compromise on relatively smaller matters or—for our purposes— cause us to fall because they present the specter of greater suffering or fear than they warrant. Just as we might fear a noise in the middle of the night that we cannot see but would otherwise be shrugged off in the light of day, so these temptations impress upon our mind a terror and urgency that with greater faith would scarcely concern us.
These temptations cause us to lose faith in God’s promises and to focus on the temptation itself and the suffering that would result from not relenting. In the early maturing of faith such trials and temptations strike at ignorance and weakness, seeking to get us to lose faith or hope:
If the persecutor threatens, and frightens the ignorant grievously, I mean those whose faith is as yet unstable, and know not that they are Christians that they may hope for a life to come; as soon as they are alarmed with temporal ills, they imagine that Christ has forsaken them, and that they are Christians to no purpose; they are not aware that they are Christians for this reason, that they may conquer the present, and hope for the future: the matter that walks in darkness has found and seized them. (ibid.)
The terror of the night thus also includes the temptation to despair and lose hope in God’s mercy. We can fear that our temptations are too strong for God’s grace to overcome or our failure for him to forgive. And like the things that go bump in the night we can enlarge the face of the demons that assault us over the grace of God, until we become like those in the words of the Psalmist:
They have not called upon God: there have they trembled for fear, where there was no fear. (Psalm 52:6 DR)
But God has not created us for fear, and thus we need not fear the terror of the night. His grace provides remedy for temptation and strength to overcome it, and even our ignorance and those temptations of the night are no match for his love, for when he pours his charity into our hearts it crowds out our fear:
Fear is not in charity: but perfect charity casteth out fear, because fear hath pain. And he that feareth, is not perfected in charity. (1 John 4:18 DR)
For this animation I wanted to make it feel a bit like a horror movie poster, but animated obviously. I found this great script on aescripts.com called Bleed! which, well, basically creates flowing blood. I’ve manually created effects like this before, but this one basically automates it and so I picked it up knowing that it would also be useful for future projects involving moving fluids.
I found an image of a moon on Unsplash and basically created a blood moon with flowing blood using that script, spending probably an inordinate amount of time on coloring and such. I also added in some light fog in the background using the Fractal Noise effect and setting it to loop.
The font was crucial to pull off the look, and I found a great ne on Adobe Fonts called Monster Mash which captured the retro horror poster effect perfectly. I then added in a bit of camera shake using an Adjustment layer with the Transform effect and some wiggle hold on the Position of that effect. The last part was to create some vintage grain and such with some color corrections and grain using Red Giant Looks.
Enjoy.
His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night.
(Psalm 90:5 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: