CronenDrome

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David Cronenberg is an auteur.  Even before I knew his name I’d watched a couple of his films and I’ve been trying to do some backfilling as I can.  Videodrome finally became available at no extra cost, and I wish that I’d been able to see it before writing Holy Horror.  Before I get to that, however, maybe a little explanation is in order.  Videodrome is a broadcast signal that alters reality when someone views it.  Max Renn runs a sleazy television station and he finds Videodrome while looking for new salacious content.  After that, reality and hallucination and new reality become confused.  With Cronenberg’s characteristic body horror, Max’s abdomen becomes a kind of video player and he’s sent to kill a rival of Videodrome.  At least that’s what I think was going on.  He then begins working for New Flesh.

There’s slime and blood and bodies.  Parts of it reminded me of Cronenberg’s later eXistenZ, and even The Fly.  Guns that become bodies and bodies that become weapons.  There’s also a fair amount of philosophizing and social commentary over the role of television.  Specifically, the role sex and violence on screen has on viewers.  (Televisions turn into bodies too.)  The biblical angle comes in after Max has been programmed and reprogrammed, for and then against, Videodrome.  He becomes “the video word made flesh.”  This modified quote from the opening of John’s gospel is significant in his conversion experience.  The plot is a bit confusing, but we see Max transform from a man in control of his own destiny into the pawn for a sinister organization that claims to be trying to do away with those who are inspired by onscreen sex and violence.

Videodrome is a movie that has re-become strangely relevant in the era of scrolling.  One of the characters, Brian O’Blivion, believes marathon viewing makes television replace everyday life.  Ironically, many people experience this with their phones now.  The movie came before cell phones, or at least cell phone popularity.  Certainly before they had screens built in.  Videodrome was well received in the early eighties, and interestingly, my own viewing of it had to await various streaming deals to align.  (And who doesn’t subscribe to a streaming service or two these days?)  The main service I use was charging $15 for it the last time I’d looked.  Then on a weekend after chores, suddenly you could watch it for free, with commercials.  Like a fly, I’m easily drawn into the trap. Perhaps I’ll be scrolling before long.

Pick Up

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Although it came recommended by streaming services, I’d given The Black Phone a pass.  Seeing it mentioned a few times in a book I was reading, I decided I’d better give in.  Since it was an unexpected success, I suppose it got a lot of press.  In any case, it is scary but the violence is off-putting, at least to me.  The gritty story matter, however, doesn’t make it unexpected.  So, a serial killer is abducting boys in North Denver.  Finny’s best friend is taken.  His sister has dreams that reveal something of the truth, but their alcoholic father tries to beat the belief out of her.  (Not that it’s an excuse, but her mother also listened to her dreams and that lead to her suicide.)  Then Finny is abducted.  The killer keeps him in an escape-proof basement.  Then the kids who’ve died start calling him on the eponymous telephone.

The instructions the kids give him don’t always directly help with his escape, beyond giving him courage.  Meanwhile, his sister has dreams (except for one night when her profane prayer in the morning is sure to make some viewers blush).  The dreams are taken seriously by the police, but her father is less-than-pleased.  Although he’s repentant at the end, the punishment he gives his daughter is about as severe as the killer doles out to the boys before killing them.  And there’s kid-on-kid violence.  Finny and his sister both get kicked around, literally.  In other words, there’s a lot of threat of, and actual violence.  There’s also a fair amount of religion involved.

Finny’s sister has a ritual that she uses to invoke the significant dreams.  It involves, you guessed it, a Bible.  A Gideon New Testament.  Also a prayer card of the Virgin Mary and a cross.  This makes the movie worthy of Holy Sequel.  And, of course, appropriate for the scary movie season.  I think there may be a spiritual lesson here, but I prefer horror with supernatural monsters.  The supernatural characters in this film are all good guys.  After they’re dead, that is.  In life some of them were also violent individuals.  So, for people like me there were a few triggers with the alcoholic father and the way that children are beaten around.  As well as a psychopath.  The movie was well made, however, and the mask of the villain is decidedly creepy.  Horror that taps into religion often has a depth that makes people take notice.  And if done well, it shows at the box office.

Demeter at Last

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Now that official scary movie season is here, and now that I’ve had a chance to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, well, I guess I can share my thoughts.  First of all, it immediately went into Holy Sequel.  There’s a lot of religion in this vampire film.  If you’re not familiar with Dracula, as written by Bram Stoker, or its many adaptations, the Demeter is the ship which carries the vampire from the Balkan peninsula to England.  Dracula has purchased Carfax Abbey and since he’s traveling alone he has to ship himself there.  He has crates of his native earth loaded on the Demeter, along with his coffin.  Along the way he snacks on the crew until the fateful Demeter arrives at Whitby as a ghost ship, no crew anywhere.  Anyone who knows Bram Stoker’s story knows that nobody survives aboard the ship.

That conceit makes this an interesting angle from which to tell the story.  Critics were unkind, but the reason, it seems to me, is that you pretty much know how it will play out from the title.  Personally, I’m more generous than the majority of critics.  This is a perfectly serviceable horror film, well made, and with a message.  Not only does the Black man not die first, he’s also the sole survivor.  The fact that Drac picks off the crew one-by-one will come as no surprise.  You need to guess who’ll go last and the successful escape of Clemens is, in some ways, unexpected.  I did wonder, apart from the inclusion of the Bible right out there in the open, at the name Clemens and the dog Huckleberry.  Was there a Mark Twain subplot going on here as well?  I found Anna’s presence a bit strained but having a strong woman aboard was a nice touch.  She almost survives too.

André Øvredal directed a couple of other horror films I enjoyed: The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Having seen three good horror films from him made me add Passengers to my list of movies to watch.  There are a number of directors that are making horror that I’m starting to follow.  Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Damian McCarthy, Osgood Perkins, Zach Cregger, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Ti West, and Ari Aster, among others, are taking horror in some interesting directions.  If I didn’t have to work for a living, and if I could afford all the horror movies I wanted, I have a feeling that the future would be pretty bright.

Slip Sliding

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The world is quiet here.  The Baudelaire orphans have been reunited by the end of The Slippery Slope, but Quigley Quagmire gets separated from them at the denouement.  As a friend of mine once said regarding movies, it’s difficult to watch people who long to be—and belong—together being separated.  Indeed, it is one of the saddest of plot points.  Count Olaf and his band of villains kidnap Sunny while, they think, sending Violet and Klaus hurtling to their deaths.  The orphans were on their way to the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Draughts. They eventually arrive to discover that the schismatic group of V.F.D. has already burned it down.  And we get a strong inkling that Volunteer Fire Department is what stands behind the mysterious initials.  Reading this again as an adult also reminds me that this is where we caught up with the series since we began buying the hardcovers for my daughter as they came out.

This segment of the Series of Unfortunate Events once again has the orphans wondering if they’re becoming as bad as the villains.  They decide that instead of fighting fire with fire they need to work to make the world a quieter, more peaceful place.  And two of Count Olaf’s associates, the women with white faces, leave his troupe.  A pair of criminals that have even Olaf nervous show up in this episode as well.  Lemony Snicket’s humor remains intact, despite the darkness of the tale.  There are laugh-out-loud parts in the last two chapters.  And some memorable quotes/ideas: “Count Olaf, like any good businessman, has committed a wide variety of crimes.”  The idea that somebody well-read is potentially trustworthy is repeated throughout the story. I mentioned a biblical connection (of course I did!) for The Carnivorous Carnival, but here there’s an explicit one as Snicket categorizes Adam and Eve’s decision to put on clothes “to leave the snake-infested garden” as an impulse passion.  After drying my tears, the cleverness of all this sank in.  Typically the impulse passion in Eden is precisely because the primordial couple is unclothed.  There’s much to chew over in these books ostensibly for children.  The message of what distinguishes good from evil wasn’t lost on me.

I recently discussed with my daughter how some authors are able to bridge from children’s, or young adult, novels into those for adults.  There’s kind of an invisible line there.  Adult life can be serious business, and it often is.  There are some great funny novels as well for the adult crowd.  And sometimes they can even be disguised as books for young readers.

Bible Movies

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I’ve noted elsewhere that no database exists, that I know of, where every movie showing or featuring the Bible is catalogued.  I used clips from films that had the Bible in one of my Rutgers’ Jan Term classes (four hours is a bit long of a stretch to talk).  The years have worn away some of the memories, but while thinking about The Sheep Detectives I thought of Nell.  Not because the movies are similar at all, but because they both use the Bible.  I’m not discussing horror here, since I do that plenty elsewhere.  I single out Nell because I remember it.  Since I tend to keep things, my notes from the class—probably on some unreadable disc—may preserve the movies I used.  Absent the notes, I’m having trouble with my recollection.  I may have discussed them on this blog but even the search function grows weary with so many posts.

It was in that class, however, that the seeds for Holy Horror were planted.  Two of the movies were Sleepy Hollow and An American Haunting.  Those I remember.  (It helps that I met the author of the novel on which the latter was based while at Rutgers.)  I do wonder, apart from Nell, which non-horror movies I used.  There was a good handful of them.  Since that class was over 15 years ago, instant recall is lacking.  For purposes of understanding how the Good Book is understood, however, having a comprehensive list would be useful.

I excluded movies based on the Bible.  These are the kind of thing that make a web search useless.  All they bring up is The Ten Commandments and its ilk.  What struck me at the time was that the Bible occurs quite frequently in movies.  Typing this out reminded me that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was also among the cohort.  Who can forget the cyclops Bible salesman Big Dan?  But what were the others?  Constantine was probably among them.  And Pulp Fiction.  I’m sure a couple more weren’t of the scary sort.  Ah yes, Muppet Treasure Island had to’ve been among them.  Was Footloose?  Probably.  I may not remember all the movies whose clips I used, but I do remember doing web searches even then and finding them frustrating.  The Bible appears in tons of films.  As far as I’m aware, nobody has thought to catalogue all of them.  Were I still a professor, I’d be suggesting a research project for some eager doctoral student.  And, of course, I’d still have ready access to my notes.

Thriller or Horror?

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Shutter Island is a movie my wife often suggests when a kind of autumnal day puts you in the mood for a certain kind of film.  There are surprisingly few of them (films, that is).  What I call “October movies.”   I’ve written about Shutter Island before.  It’s not really horror.  “Psychological thriller” fits better, although, if it were horror it’d be in Holy Sequel.  More on that soon.  So the movie—spoiler alert!  The following gives away the ending!  So the movie follows an inmate at Ashecliffe Hospital on the eponymous island.  He has delusions that he’s still a US Marshal investigating an escaped patient who is really an anagram for his dead wife.  His partner is actually his psychiatrist.  Andrew Laeddis, the patient, is really there to find himself.  Thinking he’s Edward Daniels, another anagram, he’s on the island when a hurricane hits.  The staff play along with a massive role play to try to get him to face the truth that he killed his wife for drowning their kids.

So far, so good.  I’ve seen the movie probably half-a-dozen times.  In the most recent viewing I finally spotted the Bible in it.  In the scene where Laeddis is really coming to grips with what he did to his wife and she did to their kids, when he arrives home the television is playing in the background. Someone’s saying, “rise, take up your bed, and walk.”  (Or similar; I didn’t quite catch it—it’s in the background, after all.)  The quote is from the gospel story of Jesus healing a paralytic.  That got me to thinking about how the warden tells Laeddis that violence is God’s gift.  That God loves violence.  A former military man, he says, “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.”

We’re pretty far into Holy Sequel territory here.  Some of the movies discussed in Holy Horror were perhaps better labeled as psychological thrillers rather than horror.  The line is thin.  Although I’d watched Shutter Island in time to have included it, that quote from the Good Book eluded me until I watched the film to fulfill the need for an October movie.  It doesn’t feature the fallen leaves and pumpkins I like in my seasonal films, my October movies.  But watching it again brought something to the surface like an island newly rising in the sea.

Found Unfound

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I think I need to swear off found footage films.  My first horror attempt this October failed with Hell House LLC.  I was watching at the behest of a friend.  Hopefully one who isn’t aware of my very low dizziness quotient.  Extreme camera motion!  I was determined to try to make my way through because the Bible was introduced early on, earning it a place in Holy Sequel, but I could only make it half-way through by watching about half of that first half out of the corners of my eyes.  Even that wasn’t enough to help.  I understand they’re going for “authenticity.”  I know that walking with a camera makes it difficult to keep still, but hey, Steadicam was invented for a reason.  But instead of enjoying my weekend, I’m lying absolutely still in a darkened room.

I’m guessing demons are involved, from what I’d been able to see.  Demons that move a clown dummy around.  From the Wikipedia summary it sounds like I’m not far wrong.  So let’s step back a bit: Paul, with his girlfriend Sara and a staff of three, are setting up a haunted house attraction for Halloween at Hotel Abaddon.   The property is a fixer-upper, but sufficiently creepy that they don’t need to do a ton of work on making it unsettling.  Since it’s a hotel, they stay on site while getting it ready.  They hire scare actors and things are progressing, but the cameraman (especially) is getting freaked out, mainly at night.  That’s as far as I got.

The framing story is that a mysterious accident occurred on opening night leaving 15 people dead.  The “found footage” explains what happened.  They do make reference to Abaddon as a demon who guards Hell.  The Good Book actually uses the term as a reference to Hell itself also.  One of the scare actors informs Paul that the hotel really had the reputation for being haunted before they started setting it up as a haunted house.  Of course, the movie spawned a franchise.  Perhaps my condition is getting more acute as I age—I watched Blair Witch without any trouble—but as I write this a few hours later I still have to be careful about moving my head too much.  I can scratch it, though.  And I wonder as I do so if a little less camera motion would’ve ruined the effect they were going for.  To me the most frightening aspect is being nauseous for the remainder of the day, especially when weekends are precious free time.

Serious Series

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The Carnivorous Carnival continues to reveal more of the Baudelaires’ unanswered questions.  At the Caligari Carnival the orphans disguise themselves to fit into a freak show, and meet Madame Lulu, who reveals important information—the V.F.D. has split into two parties.  The children still don’t learn what the initials stand for, but they discover that some of the influential adults in their lives were part of it.  The story grows quite gripping and more seriously dark than I remembered it being when I read it to our daughter many years ago.  One of Count Olaf’s associates isn’t mentioned after The Hostile Hospital, where presumably they died.  In this volume, another of his associates is thrown to the lions that give the book its title.

I couldn’t help but think of Daniel in the lion’s den as I read this one.  And Olaf’s plan is only too eagerly lapped up by the crowd wanting to see violence (and sloppy eating).  The reference to Daniel here can’t be coincidence.  The story also has the children questioning their own motivations.  Are they villains too?  Madame Lulu was a good member of V.F.D. who’d turned bad.  The children helped her reform, but in the end she betrayed them to Count Olaf.  Were their motives really pure?  For the first time in a Series of Unfortunate Events, the orphans end up separated at the end.  Neither Mr. Poe nor the Quagmire Triplets appear in this part of the tale.  It does seem, as noted, darker than usual.

Daniel Handler continues his subtle talking over the heads of children, though.  When explaining “déjà vu” for children, he gives other examples such as “ennui” and “la petite mort.”  The latter he explains that it’s a feeling that part of you has died, but Handler certainly knows that the common usage for the phrase is a circumlocution for “orgasm.”  Something many adults know as well, I suspect.  And there is humor for younger readers as well.  The “freaks” with whom the orphans share their job at the carnival provide some comic relief.  As an adult reading the books for myself, I get the feeling that, by this far into the series the story—while remaining pure fantasy—is aimed more at older readers.  It’s amazing what you can forget over the course of a couple of decades.  I trusted Lemony Snicket all those years ago, not to write anything that would seriously disturb our child.  I still trust him as an adult as I look forward to book ten.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

Not Really

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Some horror films just have trouble finding their way.  Blessed is one such movie.  The writing is one problem.  The misunderstanding of religion is an even larger issue.  Samantha and her novelist husband Craig can’t have children.  When he gets a large advance for his first book (dream on) they visit a fertility clinic in upstate New York where Samantha becomes pregnant with twins.  The lake scenery in a light winter (actually in Romania) is the best part of the film.  It’s quite evocative.  The clinic, in any case, shares facilities with a cloning company.  And Craig gets introduced to a tycoon who works in multiple industries, including publishing and, hmm, cloning.  As Samantha grows visibly more pregnant Craig becomes more focused on his writing, neglecting her and visiting the tycoon in the city whenever he can.  It’s implied that they have an understanding, but that doesn’t hold with the ending.

An Italian priest starts to warn Samantha about the evil at the clinic.  Not only that, but the tycoon tells her about his fascination with saints, including Ambrose who killed an angel—Lucifer—whose blood was sealed in a vial recently stolen from the monastery in which it was kept, as per the Italian priest.  That blood made its way to the cloning clinic and so, yes, Rosemary, Samantha’s carrying twin children of the devil.  The priest kidnaps Samantha and prays with her, insisting that she take poison to banish the evil.  He then tries to burn her to death and he also drives into the clinic and sets it on fire.  Samantha survives the fire and her twin girls kill another child at a Halloween party a few years later in Manhattan.

This is one of those movies that tried to improve on Rosemary’s Baby and although some of it is eerie, it’s not really scary and many elements are simply dropped or stuck in for no apparent reason.  The novelty was twin Antichrists who were both girls.  They, like Adrian, appear only late in the movie and the visual cues for what is happening are off.  It’s an interesting attempt to bring science and religion together in horror, but it has trouble understanding the religion it represents.  Quite often in horror, and perhaps other genres, a veneer of religion is used without any kind of research into what any tradition actually believes and/or does.  The, presumably, Catholicism here is strange.  There maybe a scene with the Bible, so I’ll add it to Holy Sequel, in the maybe category.

Wooly Sleuthing

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The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly movie (for the most part) and a sweet story.  I’ll try not to reveal whodunit.  George is a vegetarian shepherd.  He raises sheep for wool, not meat.  He lives just outside the small village of Denbrook, in England.  One night he’s murdered.  The local policeman (singular) doesn’t seem very bright and has to be shown that it’s murder.  The sheep, who loved George, decide to investigate.  (The sheep talk, among themselves.)  George used to read them detective novels in the evening, so they get quite good at deducting things.  Led by Lily they investigate.

One day the sheep head to town.  They can roam freely with nobody suspecting them.  They initially decide on the wrong suspect.  They help the detective come up with a method of investigating by leaving hints for him.  Lily was George’s smartest sheep.  Sebastian is the most world-wise.  And Mopple is the sheep who never forgets anything.  As Sebastian leads Lily and Mopple into the churchyard for the first time, they have the following conversation:

Sebastian: This is the church, where someone named God lives.

Lily: Who’s God?

Sebastian: It’s a bit confusing, God is a shepherd.

Mopple: So he could be our shepherd?

Sebastian: No. Because he’s also a lamb.

Lily: What?

Sebastian: And he’s also invisible. And he’s made of bread. And he damns things.

Lily: Dams things? Like a beaver?

Sebastian: Yes.

Lily: So God is a big invisible lamb beaver, made of… bread?

Sebastian: Yes. And they eat him on Sundays.

The movie is a comedy, of course, but this passage should be exegeted.  Many people believe God lives in churches.  The 23rd Psalm is invoked (“the Lord is my shepherd”), but is complicated by Jesus—the lamb of God.  Of course, God can’t be seen and is therefore invisible.  Made of bread?  Communion, of course.  And the homonymous nature of “damn/dam,” which confuses kids, lead to the conclusion that God might be like a beaver.  This is a fair bit of theological humor for a lighthearted movie.  

The film was based on a novel, written originally in German, but I’m tempted to read it to see if this conversation comes from the book.  In any case, the movie is about acceptance and finding your place in the flock.  And learning not to be mindlessly led to your slaughter—one of the darker themes in the story.  I even enjoyed the good-natured use of “vegetarian” intended as slander.  A fun movie that leaves you with green pastures, it seems to me.  And a message worth considering.

Who’s Calling?

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I learned of this movie from Victoria Jaye’s Hell, Horror and Despair.  (She discusses several movies that I’d missed.)  The Calling immediately went into Holy Sequel.  Not because it was a great movie, but because it uses the Bible.  Indeed, it begins with a quote from “Revelations”—the plural is always a sign that someone hasn’t done their homework—and concerns the birth of the Antichrist.  It goes down like this: a young American woman falls in love with a wealthy British television personality and they get married on the Isle of Man.  She gets pregnant on their wedding  night, the same day a young boy is murdered.  As their son grows, he excels at speaking backwards and has an ability to harm others he dislikes without touching them.  And he’s cruel to animals.  Kristie, the mother, is sent away on business to London a lot so the boy, Dylan, is left with her husband Marc.

Kristie notices that Dylan is very close to Marc and she is being excluded from the family.  On her way home after missing Christmas with her family—when Marc crucified Dylan upside-down to prepare him—the taxi driver starts to reveal that Dylan’s father is Satan, not Marc.  Kristie thinks he’s crazy but soon learns her best friend was murdered while she was away.  (Man is an island with a population well below 100,000.)  She begins to suspect something’s not right.  By discovering a piece of another Bible—this is so Holy Horror!—from the taxi driver, she learns that Dylan is not what he seems.  The taxi driver convinces her to kidnap and drown this son of Satan before he becomes the Antichrist.  A spoiler follows.

When she emerges from the Irish Sea after drowning Dylan, Marc shoots Kristie.  In the hospital (she survives) she tells the story to a priest.  Then on television they see that Dylan, three days after his death, and not coincidentally Easter Sunday, is resurrected.  The news tells of how both the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury are becoming convinced Dylan may be the second coming of Christ, but Kristie flees with the priest as they know he’s the Antichrist.  Now, this isn’t a great movie.  It came out just at the millennium, capitalizing, as Jaye suggests, on the end of the world mania.  Nevertheless, despite the poor acting and inexplicable elements (a parish priest willing to miss Easter Sunday mass to sit with a possibly insane woman in the hospital?) it is a very good example of the way the Bible appears in horror.  I should’ve watched it years ago.

Stone Wood

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Each rock has a story.  (If you’re not into rocks, don’t worry.  I’ll only indulge my passion from time to time.)  In this case, I was looking for an artifact that I’ve had since I was a child.  Back in the day when visitors to the Petrified Forest National Park took souvenirs without too many stabs of conscience, a former minister of my childhood church gave my mother two pieces.  Of course, she had three sons at the time and the two elder ended up with the heirlooms.  I’m not certain they were from the National Park, I would add.  I was only about five at the time.  When I got to college I found this ironic because, as I outgrew my fundamentalism I realized the fossil trees are about 225 million years old and the Bible the minister so fervently believed implied that God created everything merely 6,000 years ago.  In any case, this piece of petrified wood became one of my treasures.

At Nashotah House my geology gene awoke.  I recall having had this fossil on display.  Then tragedy.  That job, and my full-time teaching career, ended.  Most of my books and all of my rocks (the collection had grown considerably) were packed in boxes and were in storage.  They moved to New Jersey with us, still boxed up.  They came to Pennsylvania with us as well, still in boxes.  Talking to my older brother one day, the pieces of petrified wood came up.  I realized that I had no idea where mine was.  It’d been packed twenty years before and although I’d opened most of the boxes from our move, that particular tree cum rock now seemed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

While doing weekend chores, one of which involved straightening out things in the garage, I found an unopened box.  Inside the box was a set of smaller boxes.  Most of them had seashells we picked up while living in New Jersey, but the very bottom box, unopened for decades, held my long lost piece of petrified wood.  I picked it up, feeling a piece of my childhood again.  An innocence lost repeatedly and lost especially loudly at Nashotah House.  It was like reaching back to the Triassic Period from whence this tree had originally come.  Dinosaurs roamed Arizona at the time.  This tree was older than the Good Book claimed any artifact had a right to be.  I don’t know that the minister took this from the Petrified Forest itself, or some other location that has fossilized trees.  Of what I’m certain is that this rock has a story.

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Disclosure Day may not be Steven Spielberg’s best movie, but it is a good one.  Part of his space trilogy after Close Encounters and E.T., it too comes back the the theme of aliens and posits what it might be like if those holding the secrets ever release them.  Although not a horror film, it makes use of the Bible—not surprisingly since real-life discussions about disclosure often ask about its effects on religion.  In the movie, the Wardex Corporation, part of the military-industrial complex, is the keeper of the secrets.  They reverse-engineer alien technology, and get to keep what’s found from recovered UAP wrecks.  More powerful than the police, they stop and kill without compunction.  They control the highest level of secrets that the government has—even those beyond the president.  (Spielberg clearly did his homework here, even working in the bit about Jackie Gleason making the claim to have seen alien bodies.)

A couple of Wardex employees, Hugo and Daniel, smuggle out the video proof of the nearly eight-decade cover-up and they plan to release everything to the media.  A weather reporter, Margaret, sudden becomes psychic and receives an alien message while on air.  Wardex has kidnapped and roughed up Daniel’s girlfriend, former novice nun Jane, to force him to return the stolen data.  (Religion plays a big role here.)  Noah, the head of Wardex, uses advanced technology to track Daniel, Jane, and Margaret, as they are trying to meet up.  When Margaret and Daniel finally do connect, Hugo reveals that they’re both “experiencers”—they’d been abducted as children and had been given extraordinary gifts.  Margaret’s abilities are such that she can break into and walk out of a secure military base with Daniel in tow.  As they prepare to show the evidence at Margaret’s Kansas City news station, Wardex shuts them down but Jane delivers a device that allows the broadcast to take place.  The world, which is on the brink of Armageddon—World War Three—stops to listen and begins to realize that we need to work together to save the human race.  

The plot is a bit complex to summarize fully, but this gives the general picture.  Disclosure Day is a hopeful movie.  The theme has been addressed by proponents of real life disclosure before: sharing this kind of information might well save us.  And the religious community, represented by Jane’s former monastery, is perfectly okay with this development.  There’s a lot to say about such a film, and I try to constrain my word counts here.  It’s the kind of movie that grows better with reflection—the writing is a bit trite in places—and the alien tech is a bit hard to believe.  Of course, we don’t know what off-world tech can really do.  But at the end of the day, religion plays a major role in the truth being revealed.  Worth thinking about.