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.

Hollow Singing

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Since it’s Sleepy Hollow season I suggested to my wife that we watch the Disney version of the movie last night, rainy weekend evening that it was.  I discuss in my book Disney’s strange pairing with “The Adventures of Toad,” but one of the points I emphasized in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that Disney is largely responsible for making the story what it is in our culture.  It doesn’t stand alone, of course, but most people I’ve asked learned of it through the Disney film.  Except my wife.  She learned of it through the Disney record based on the Disney film, released in 1971.  My wife didn’t grow up with monsters the way that I did, but her parents got their kids the vinyl version.  She found it online to play for me—I’d more or less overlooked it in my book, which deals primarily with movies and novels.

First of all, the record more naturally pairs Sleepy Hollow with Irving’s other hit, “Rip Van Winkle,” on the B side.  Narrated by Billy Bletcher, it includes two songs from the film, “Ichabod Crane” and “The Headless Horseman,” the latter sung by the formidable Thurl Ravenscroft.  A shortened version of the story is narrated and, of course, the showcasing of Bing Crosby is missing.  The cartoon itself is only half an hour, and the record cuts the telling to twelve and a half minutes.  As my wife read the comments of others who’d rediscovered the recording online, I pondered how many people might’ve discovered “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” through Disney’s record.  The story as written by Washington Irving isn’t aimed at children.  Despite its early nineteenth-century language, it’s kid friendly, but not the kind of thing children seek out.

I don’t want to give away too much of my book, but I would point out a couple of things.  Disney borrowed the idea of making a movie with Sleepy Hollow from Ub Iwerks, the co-inventor of Mickey Mouse, who began his own cartoon studio after working with Walt Disney.  The second point is that Disney made it an explicitly Halloween tale.  Whenever autumn and its pumpkins roll around thoughts turn to Sleepy Hollow.  The Disney song “The Headless Horseman,” by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, does most of the heavy lifting for inventing a new mythology of said Headless Horseman.  Even though my book was published last year, there’s more digging to be done around the origins of America’s ghost story.  I’m reading another book about it right now myself.

Monster Mash

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You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.

Burton on Mars

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Tim Burton’s aesthetic falls outside of my own by only a matter of degree.  Some of his films I really enjoy—Sleepy Hollow remains his best—while others leave me in an uncanny valley.  Mars Attacks! came out when I was just starting my teaching career at Nashotah House and before I’d really knew much of Burton’s work.  I’d seen Batman and Edward Scissorhands, and probably Batman Returns.  These I felt were all good, but were outside my scope of films that really did it for me.  I found Mars Attacks! on a streaming service on a rainy weekend and was immediately surprised by the level of the ensemble cast.  These were big names!  Why wasn’t the movie more talked about in the day?  I guess because the story fails to impress.  I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or not.

PœN

Like Burton, I grew up with the B movies of the fifties and sixties.  I still have a soft spot for them.  The mean and deceitful Martians of this movie were mostly fun to watch, but the human actors failed to elicit much sympathy.  The invaders experiments on the bodies of captured humans evoke Burton’s fascination with disturbing mixtures, but it’s the aliens themselves that stay with you long after  the credits roll.  Reading about the film afterwards, clearly some cinematic import clings to it, and its many head-nods to other movies are numerous.  Coming out the same year as Independence Day, however, meant that it faced a contender taken more seriously.

The plot is fairly simple: technically superior Martians surround the Earth with flying saucers.  They broadcast messages of peace but zap the party out to greet them.  They issue an apology and when they come to meet the president, attack again.  They kidnap some high-level people and experiment on them.  The movie focuses on Washington, Las Vegas, and rural Kansas.  A bullied teen in Kansas figures out, with the help of his grandmother, that a Slim Whitman song makes aliens’ heads explode.  That part was actually pretty funny.  The integration of computer-animated aliens and people is pretty well done.  The movie feels like maybe one of the cylinders isn’t firing properly, but it’s the kind of film I could see myself coming back to on another rainy weekend, if the mood is right.  Of course, Tim Burton’s next movie hit it out of the park and I did watch seven of his next eight productions after that.

Thorny Path

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Although we’ve all heard “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we all do.  An image, or artfully done cover design, speaks to us.  I admit I bought A. G. Slatter’s The Path of Thorns because of the cover.  I don’t remember exactly where, but it was in an independent bookshop, probably either in New Hope or Lititz, or some town in-between, and it was face out on the shelf.  I noted it was somewhat thick, and I have a penchant for shorter novels, but the thorns, werewolf, and hand of glory on the gothic cover spoke to me.  I have to confess that it took quite some time to get into it.  Asher Todd is an unreliable narrator.  And she keeps secrets.  It took several chapters to be grabbed by the story.  But to be honest, I’m finding lately that stories that take their time building are frequently worth the wait. Trust the author.

Placed in a setting that a couple of the blurbs classify as “fairy tale,” Path of Thorns is told by Asher, a mysterious woman who we know is a witch.  She’s on a shadowy mission not revealed until quite late, to the Morwood estate.  There she uses her magic discreetly to help both members of the family and some people on the grange.  Witches are still hunted and killed.  She introduces the priest, called a “god-hound,” and it turns out that he has a minor, but important part to play in the story.  The Morwood estate is run by a vain, self-centered son Luther, while the matriarch, Leonora, technically in charge, is more or less an invalid.  Until Asher, out of pity, cures her blindness.  From there the story unfolds.

There is a werewolf, and the hand of glory has a role.  It’s not really a horror novel, though.  It does have a gothic, dark fairy tale feel to it.  And once the major turning point in the plot is revealed, it’s difficult to put down.  This is made even easier because the chapters are uniformly short, which means you can pick it up and reach an obvious stopping point without committing half an hour.  In the end it’s quite a well-told story that I’m glad to have read.  Whenever I go to a bookstore, I do so with a list.  Given the nature of my interests, I often have trouble locating anything on said list.  Those of us who prefer not to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed frequently benefit from judging a book by its cover.

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.

Losing My Head

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It must be the season.  The same day two friends sent me articles about headlessness.  I sometimes feel that way myself; my book on the Headless Horseman has proved my worst-selling title, although some have told me it’s my best book.  No matter.  It’s headless season and I’m glad for the information.  One story came from an image in an Early Modern book from Amsterdam, showing an encounter between a man and a headless person, both on foot.  The article notes how Kabbalistic tradition includes seeking the answer to the question of whether one’s name is written in the Book of Life.  Nachmanides, a rabbi from the 13th century, suggests going outside on the last night of Sukkot and looking at your shadow cast by the moon.  If it’s headless, you’re in trouble.  This tradition is at least medieval in age, and it may have circulated when Washington Irving was traveling around Europe, working on The Sketch Book.  (Curious?  It’s discussed in my book.)

The second story is about the Irish Dullahan, or headless rider.  The piece traces the earliest written version to 1828, too late to have influenced Irving.  The Dullahan, according to the article, is a piece of Irish folklore.  The author, Irish around the World, points out that there’s no evidence that Irving knew of this tradition.  Irving didn’t invent the Headless Horseman, but his story brought it to popular consciousness.  Every year as October nears, I start seeing Headless Horseman on Halloween pages.  I do explore this connection in the book as well.  I still read about the Sleepy Hollow version of headlessness.  In fact, the book next on my pile (the one I just finished will be posted soon; I’m in the middle of another one at the moment) is J. W. Ocker’s new book on Sleepy Hollow.  (We exchanged emails about it last year.)

Being associated with the Headless Horseman, unlike either the Dullahan or the headless person in the Early Modern Jewish book is an honor.  Very few people may have purchased the book, but I’m glad to have had the chance to participate in the discussion.  Lindsey Beer’s novel Hollow is due out next fall and apparently the movie based on it is moving forward.  Perhaps it will reignite some interest in the headless fellow that was my companion for the years I was working on the book.  I don’t have a ton of free time, but I’m always glad for tips on mentions I miss.  Hints that the Headless Horseman is still relevant in a world dominated by those with much louder voices.  After all, October is when he rides.

On October

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October has come quickly this year.  September was quite transitional.  Mostly pleasant, but we shivered through the recent sunless days of the nor-easter around here.  Between work and full weekends, I wish the approach of my favorite month could feel more regal.  I know die-hard horror fans watch movies in that genre every night of this month.  My schedule won’t allow it, and I’ve been so busy that I’ve fallen behind on movie watching.  Most of the time the movies I discuss on this blog are ones I’ve seen the previous month or two.  It seems I have lots of other things to write about.  And I’ve been trying to step up my reading this year.  Goodreads tells me I’ve finished sixty books so far in 2026.  And so October snuck up on me.

For scholars of religion, and those of us who pretend to be such, October starts in earnest the planning for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting.  It will be in Denver this year.  Last time it was there I shivered the whole time.  A colleague recently asked me to contribute to a volume on Ugarit.  I had to decline, being so out of date.  I could’ve said, “My mind is preoccupied with October.”  Horror movies and Halloween.  The changing of the leaves.  Jacket weather and reading gothic novels.  Pumpkins and apples. October is the month when many in this climate feel that they come alive, just in time for the darkness and cold of winter to settle in.

For many years I’ve been pondering the spirituality of the dark.  I don’t mean “dark powers” or Satanism or anything like that.  I mean the restorative, contemplative nature of being in the dark half of the year.  Since the equinox it’s been more dark than light.  We spend half of each year in this way.  Instead of cursing the dark, it seems to make sense to try to find its spiritual benefits.  In the Middle Ages monks used to awake in the night to say their prayers.  Even today spiritual writers occasionally venture into the realm of asking what we might learn to appreciate in the dark.  October’s a good time to think about such things.  Others have also begun to explore the spirituality of horror films.  This began to occur to me, in rudimentary ways, when I was a student in seminary.  So suddenly October is here.  Hopefully it will have some time tucked away for reflection.  Between watching horror movies, of course.

B’s and Q’s

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A friend who read my review of The Stuff recommended Q: The Winged Serpent.  The former was the first Larry Cohen movie I’d seen, one that I stumbled upon while looking for something free to watch.  I was favorably impressed—it was a comedy horror that worked.  Q was earlier and was more of a low-budget horror, but with elements of satire in it.  As well as social commentary.  If you can handle stop-motion animation, and you want to see the inside of the Chrysler Building dome, you might enjoy this monster flick.  And there was a good deal of theology in it.  It’s certainly worth talking about in the context of horror and religion.  One warning in advance: if you’re like me, all the camera motion—many aerial shots of Midtown Manhattan, it might make you a little woozy.  It did me.

The movie follows a petty criminal who discovers the lair of Quetzalcoatl inside the Chrysler Building.  Meanwhile, a priest of Quetzalcoatl is sacrificing willing victims in Manhattan to bring the deity back.  A cop who’s willing to believe (Detective Shepard) researches beliefs in the Aztec god and tries to connect the sacrificial murders with people who are disappearing—often from Manhattan rooftops.  The question arises: is this a god or just a monster?  That’s a freighted question these days.  This idea is that if it can be killed it’s just a monster.  If not…

The story has its shortcomings and the direction isn’t great, but overall it’s not bad.  A creature-feature with some thought.  As Shepard chases down experts he starts to understand that even if this is just a monster, there are devotees of Quetzalcoatl in Manhattan killing (willing) victims.  At one point Shepard says, upon seeing a victim with his heart cut out, “All we have to do is eat the bread and drink the wine,” or something similar.  This is fairly sophisticated coming from a B movie.  Religion is also behind some of the humor as well.  When the Aztec priest comes after the petty criminal he can’t kill his victim unless he says a prayer.  The criminal refuses, and in doing so saves his life.  Interesting thought.

While having the trappings and feel of a B movie, Q gives the viewer of religion and horror movies something to think about.  The movie doesn’t reference the Bible or quote it, so it can’t make Holy Sequel, but it’s worth a lazy weekend afternoon to give you something to think about.

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.

Early Romance

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One of the more recent fascinations for me has been the fateful meeting of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori that took place in the summer of 1816.  That gathering famously led Mary, later Mary Shelley, to write Frankenstein and Polidori to compose “The Vampyre,” based on an idea of Byron.  Daisy Hay casts her net a bit further in Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives.  Particularly, Hay considers the often unsung role of Leigh Hunt, a young journal publisher, who brought together a coterie of creatives that included Byron and Shelley (although those two met later), but also John Keats and a host of others.  Romanticism pervades this group with Keats, Shelley, and Byron all dying young.  (And Polidori as well, but he’s not really much in Hay’s narrative.)  These three poets threw a very long shadow.  As recently when I was in school, we still learned about them.

In my reading over the past many months Leigh Hunt’s name had naturally come up, but I never considered looking more into him.  He never achieved the fame of his circle, and he fell out of favor by writing an account of Byron that was unkind to the poet, even as his posthumous star was in the ascent.  This account makes for fascinating reading.  Shelley and Hunt shared the scandal of marrying and having the sisters of their wives live with them.  Victorians would, of course, assume something improper was happening.  Byron, it was well known, had many affairs, including one with his half-sister.  People love gossip and even though Hunt’s sister-in-law, Beth Kent, made a name for herself publishing books on plants, both she and Claire—the other women—have largely been ignored.  Claire outlived everyone in the circle apart from the late interloper Edward Trelawny, who cast himself as a fast friend of Shelley and Byron.

Hay does an excellent job of pulling all of this together.  The lives are indeed tangled.  Of course, relationships in general are quite tangled.  This book begins with Hunt and pretty much ends with him.  Hay provides some previously unpublished notes from Claire and has to bring the story to a close with Trelawny.  Historically he was the last survivor.  He was also known in his lifetime for making up incredible stories about himself.  I’ve read his account of Shelley and Byron’s deaths.  That book, with its dark academia vibes, may have been the first I read on this fascination.  It’s been with me, however, at least since 1987.  And it will likely continue.

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.

Haunting the House

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Although it starts off a little slowly, the premise of The Haunting of Ashburn House keeps you reading.  I don’t mind taking the time for a story to unfold.  I know many people want action to draw them in, but I’ve been reading about quiet horror and since it often takes its time, I know to appreciate it.  I’ve not read Darcy Coates before, but as this tale unspooled itself it grew gripping.  Even before the action took off, the situation was intriguing enough to draw me in.  I do quite like a haunted house story.  So, Adrienne has inherited a big old house from a great aunt she only vaguely remembers meeting once as a child.  A writer a bit down on her luck, she’s glad to have a place to live, but she knows nothing of the recently deceased relative who lived there.

Ipson, the town outside of which Ashburn House sits, is peopled with citizens who remember, often incorrectly, the tragedy that took place in Ashburn decades ago.  An entire family, apart from a young daughter, had been slaughtered there.  The daughter, sent to a foster family, returned as an adult to care for the house.  It has many secrets.  The people have been kept away from the house during the aunt’s long life alone there.  Adrienne arrives with little money and no acquaintances, and no knowledge of the history of the house.  She soon discovers that it’s haunted.  Not one to believe in ghosts, it takes some time to convince herself that the occurrences are supernatural.  Once that’s confirmed in a very stark way, much of the rest of the novel unfolds over the course of another day and night.

I don’t remember where I learned of this novel, but I do recall it was on a list of gothic literature.  Indeed, it is gothic.  And it’s a horror story.  The monster—“ghost” is a bit mild—has to be explained, but it fits within the context.  These days to make horror stories work you need to isolate protagonists from phones or “signal.”  Putting Adrienne in a small town, in a house with no wifi, and even partially without electricity, serves this end quite well.  Making her more or less penniless raises a bit of anxiety—such things can happen far too easily in real life.  The story is nevertheless well told and once the monster attacks it becomes difficult to put down.  I don’t remember where I learned about The Haunting of Ashburn House, but I’m glad that I did.