October Challenge

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There’s a popular October challenge—watch a horror movie every night of the month.  I’m neither a young person nor retired, so this is not something I’ve ever been able to do.  It’s been quite a nice October around here, but adulting requires so much time.  Even for those of us who enjoy horror films.  I have tried to catch up on them, and I went on a Tim Burton kick for a while, but his movies often fall closer to weird on the meter than they do towards horror.  Still, they often have visual appeal and a kind of gothic sensibility.  I do enjoy a good gothic tale.  When I read about gothic fiction I often wonder why it has such a draw for me.  My childhood was in the context of a broken family and I found solace in monsters.  That hasn’t changed.

I’m sure that my wife often wonders what she got herself into.  When we first decided we belonged together (and clearly we do), I’d entered an enthusiastic academic stage.  Pop culture was considered shallow at the time, and although we occasionally watched a scary movie together, it wasn’t an obvious part of my personality.  It was when I became a dark academic, having lost my long-term teaching job and finding myself functionally unemployed, that horror came back to me.  My wife and I had been married for almost twenty years by that point, and even then horror wasn’t a major focus for me.  Our daughter loves Halloween, as do I, but trying to find work, moving to New Jersey, then having to commute into Manhattan all took their toll on my Octobers.

Writing Holy Horror was probably the defining moment in my current October mindset.  At the time religious studies in horror were in their infancy.  I could count the books on one hand.  Since I’m between worlds—I still rely on light academia for a paycheck, but I live in dark academia—I take whatever encouragement that I can get.  It’s not easy to come by when your books are priced for an “academic readership.”  I still get people asking when Nightmares with the Bible will be coming out in paperback.  Now that publishers have latched onto the teat of ebooks, that’s not likely ever to happen.  I still watch horror movies when I can.  My October challenge, however, is to appreciate as much of the season as I can with a 9-2-5 and some very expensive books on my hands.

Picking on Poltergeist

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It’s not nice to pick on the elderly, I know, but Poltergeist is one movie where I disagree with the critics.  One of my “old movies,” I saw it sometime back in the eighties and although there were scary scenes, it felt rather lackluster to me.  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t watched it several times, of course.  As one of the horror films that my wife will see with me, we pulled it out this October and it just felt silly to me.  Part of the reason is that it doesn’t seem to have the style of either Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper.  The story is a bit too protracted and apart from the over-the-top ending it’s not clear what the “poltergeists” are.  I’m probably forgetting what it was like to see it in the eighties when it was new and fresh.

Or maybe it’s just that far scarier movies have come out since then.  Reading about it afterwards, it was strange to see how highly rated Poltergeist is among critics.  For me, the problem  was partially the illogic of parts of it.  A tree tries to eat a kid and the authorities aren’t called?  The neighbors didn’t see anything.  If the whole development was built on a graveyard, why does only one house show it?  And after many years have passed?  Naturally, the movie does have some classic moments.  When Marty (who is a rather silly character, along the lines of scientists in a John Carpenter film) pulls off his face, that was shocking the first time.  And Zelda Rubenstein does a great job as the psychic.  Much of the rest of it doesn’t make sense.  Why decide to stay that last night, given what’s happened before?  Of course, without that night there’s no climax.

The fault must be my own.  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen enough movies now that the input of two directors with different visions seems to’ve pulled the film in too many directions.  It feels much more like a Spielberg movie than it does a Hooper film.  Where’s the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (also an old movie) subtlety and social commentary?  Of course, Hooper’s next film was Lifeforce, which, although fun to watch, also seems not to know where it wants to go.  I know that Poltergeist was a formative movie in the horror genre.  It was a big budget success.  Perhaps the relative dearth of religious explanation hurts it.  There’s plenty of talk of when happens when we die, but it doesn’t have the backing of the conviction of a Fr. Merrin or even (God help us!) Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Or maybe I need to let go and just watch it for fun.

Exorcising Emily

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Perhaps after The Exorcist, the demonic possession movie cited with the greatest respect is The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  This 2005 movie is based, in part, on the true case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died after undergoing several exorcisms, beginning in 1975.  Sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop, but after reading about The Exorcist the timing of all of this struck me.  Somehow reading about it in Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson’s “The Exorcist” Effect, hadn’t stuck with me.  William Peter Blatty published the eponymous novel in 1971.  This was based, in part, on a case from 1949, over twenty years earlier.  The novel was a bestseller and, of course, adapted into William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973.  That movie was a blockbuster, and is probably the single biggest influence in the current perceptions of demonic possession.  What caught Blatty’s attention in the first place was how rare exorcism was.  And one was held in 1949?

Anneliese Michel had been undergoing psychiatric treatment since 1970.  It was only five years later, after the release of both the novel and movie, that exorcism was suggested as a possible cure.  It may be impossible to know if the priest whom the Michel family approached had read the novel or seen the film.  One thing is certain, however.  The Exorcist brought the topic back into popular consciousness in the western world by then.  Yes, in the United States it was pop culture, but the film was taken with such seriousness that it filtered into everyday consciousness as well.  Although banned in parts of Britain, that consciousness had entered Europe as well.  Was the idea to treat Michel by exorcism part of what Laycock and Harrelson termed “The Exorcist Effect”?

Media is incredibly influential.  Fiction can create reality.  It can cost someone their life.  And not just for being in an accident in the film industry (although such tragedies do occur).  Humans are intrigued by ideas.  We tell stories about them.  Sometimes our own life stories become fictionalized in our recollections.  My memories have been corrected more than once by my siblings.  Culturally, we were shown what demons were and what they could do in The Exorcist.  Even if Michel’s priest hadn’t seen the movie, he lived in a culture already altered by it.  I really need to go back and read Laycock and Harrelson’s book again.  Being invited to a podcast about demons back in August made me think about Emily Rose again, after years of pursing The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow.

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.

Old Man Country

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As a movie fan, you eventually come to trust certain filmmakers.  The Coen Brothers produce consistently good work.  I’d missed No Country for Old Men and was somewhat reluctant to see it.    Films about sociopathic killers bother me, and I knew that the Cormac McCarthy novel was about a drug deal gone bad (and made him a household name).  Drugs are another of my triggers, having grown up in an alcoholic household.  But still, the film won the Academy Award for best picture, and it was a rather glaring hole in my viewing of Coen Brother major movies.  While the film isn’t horror, it is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in some time.  The ending is devastating, and sad, and reflective.  It’s easy to see why it appealed to the critics.  Nothing is neatly tied up at the end.  I haven’t read the novel, but I hear the film follows it closely.

Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad.  He finds a couple million in cash and takes it to the trailer park so he and his wife can retire.  A hit man, Anton Chigurh, pursues him and eventually Moss realizes that a transponder has been hidden among the cash, giving away his location.  Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, does what he can to protect Moss’ wife and tries to save him from what he realizes is an unstoppable foe.  Chigurh proves as tenacious as his reputation suggests, and viewers learn that Moss is as equally tenacious, but has both a conscience and morality, both of which Chigurh lacks.  The scenes where Chigurh appears to be fair-minded are the scariest in the film.

The log line “There are no clean getaways” about sums up the outcome.  Often classified as a western, the feel is more of a thriller.  “Coen Brothers movie” might be a genre all its own.  The relative lack of humor puts it much closer to Fargo than to O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona on the Coen Brothers scale.  The unrelenting violence also brought Pulp Fiction (different director, different feel) to mind.  The bleakness of the outlook of Sheriff Bell, as well as the look in his eyes, is haunting.  His conversation with Ellis near the end stirs thoughts of Ecclesiastes and the reflection on just how violent people can be toward each other is profoundly disturbing.  I’ve seen many horror films that didn’t scare me half as much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.