Religious Horror Flicks, or Your Left Behind
There seems to be a relatively new genre of Christian religiously-themed horror movies. The phenomenon reminds me a bit of things like Christian rock in that a medium that was considered inherently un-Christian a generation ago has been incorporated more recently. Certainly, horror cinema wasn't considered an appropriate realm for Christians to enter even twenty years ago. While there were a good number of films in the genre that used Christian motifs before then (e.g. The Exorcist and The Omen), the films only used the motifs as a milieu for horror itself. More recently, there have been a spate of films that are specifically conceived as a medium for a religious message and which are intended to propagate a Christian-centric moral worldview.
This probably started with the Left Behind series; I can't recall such films before 2000, in any case. Left Behind is essentially a horror film, albeit very much in keeping with Christian millennialist dogma. In 2003, a movie called 13 Seconds was released by conservative Christian director Jeff Thomas. In this movie, a drug-addicted rock star is essentially punished for being sinful and, in the tradition of Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, we learn that the whole story has taken place in the last 13 seconds of the character's life as he dies from an overdose and is in the process of being shunted off to hell. He tries to accept Jesus at the very last second, but it's already too late. The moral of the story is clear; you could die at any second, so better repent and be saved now, kids!
Just last night, I saw another film in the same vein — a dreadful flick called Evil's City. 
In this one, a mysterious ghost town in the High Sierras of California, Acheron (from Greek mythology; a river that flows into Hades and also an alternate name for Hades itself) is the setting for a morality play. While the writing is far too confusing to figure out exactly why it has happened, apparently the people in this town were so awfully sinful that, as we're told by the characters numerous times, God has abandoned the place. It's now overrun with demons, and these demons know about the sins of anyone who enters the place. Throughout the flick, the demons inform both us and their victims what the divine charges are against them right before chewing into their throats and releasing great gouts of blood and gore. Everything else in the movie suffers for the agenda of warning people not to break the Ten Commandments. The story itself makes very little sense and characters all appear to exist in different time frames; it's night for one character when it's day for another, even when events are supposed to be occurring simultaneously. Sometimes day turns into night and back again during the course of a single conversation! The main "sin" that seems to be railed against throughout this z-grade Christosplatterfest, though, is modernity and reason. Acheron is not some ancient ruins; scenes are set in very modern-looking (and suspiciously clean) buildings where abandoned desktop computers rest on abandoned desks that could have easily been bought from your local Office Depot. One main character, a cameraman for a college newspaper or TV station (it's rather unclear which) always appears wearing clothing branded with a Ripstik logo and is spared from being dragged into hell because he's a believer (unlike all the other sinful, unbelieving characters) and winds up carrying around a reliquary with him. This, he explains to us, provides the bearer with a special "grace" that protects him/her from evil. The whole thing is extremely preachy and heavy-handed, regardless of the fact that the story is incoherent and the editing makes it nearly impossible to follow in any case.
This is true of 13 Seconds as well. Both of these films have very poor production values (those of Evil's City are marginally the better of the two), terrible writing and amateurish acting. Despite that fact, the directors of such terrible flicks still seem to come up with funding from somewhere to increase their budget for another film. In the case of Jeff Thomas, he managed to somehow scare up enough money to create a film called Fallen Angels. While it was completed in the summer of 2006, it has so far failed to find a distributor and been shown only at a few local horror film festivals. From descriptions of the film on various horror web sites, delivered by Thomas himself, it's abundantly apparent that this is another Christian moralistic film, the core of which is the "seven deadly sins," which are embodied as demons haunting an abandoned prison. It's worth noting that while the film hasn't found a distributor, Thomas did manage to get a few actors whose names are at least marginally recognizable, including Star Trek: The Next Generation's Michael Dorn (Worf), Phantasm's Reggie Bannister, and 1970's comedienne Ruth Buzzi. While none of these people likely command top dollar, one can only assume that they do expect to be paid a good deal more than the amateur actors who appeared in Thomas' first film. Jeff Thomas himself appears to exhibit a few traits of something like a messianic complex and is certainly the loudest expounder upon his own "genius," and this supreme self-confidence may have had a hand in his securing funding for yet another poorly-crafted moralistic film, and it may also explain why he has been unable to find a distributor. Ultimately, that won't matter; like many low-budget horror film makers, he'll undoubtedly self-distribute when all else fails.
The rationale behind these and other Christian horror films is probably best explained in this 2005 article by minister and film-maker David Taylor. To quote from the article:
True horror reminds us how profoundly moral our universe is. It reminds us, refreshingly, of simple things like good and evil, justice and mercy, courage and cowardice. True horror massages our intuition of the Divine. It reminds us of the great powers we possess to choose and to procreate, and by these choices either enhance or dull our moral intelligence.From the context of the article, it's clear that by "true horror," Taylor is referring very narrowly to horror films that carry a particularly Christian moral message (he's quite clearly against bothering with films that don't take a black-and-white, Biblical view, and mentions some examples of these by name). What's clear is that there is some audience for this particular genre of horror, although I have no idea how large it might be, how much money such movies make, or how they may or may not fit into the "family values" framework (is it OK to depict sinful activities graphically if those engaged in them are graphically punished by divine agency?)
True horror, finally, makes possible an experience of grace. It suggests that we too are misshapen, we too are duped by evil...
Personally, the thing I have a problem with is that these films don't tend to be honest. Everybody knows what they're getting when they buy a Left Behind film, and that's fine, even if I disagree entirely with the message the movie is pushing. Freedom of artistic expression covers things I object to, however strongly, outside of some very specific circumstances. On the other hand, films like 13 Seconds and Evil's City aren't so honest; they seem to want to operate by stealth to diffuse their message into the viewing audience. This goes to extremes; I've had online interactions with Jeff Thomas, for instance, and he refuses to acknowledge that his films are religiously-themed, even though anyone who watches one can clearly see them, assuming the viewer has even the most rudimentary awareness of Christian evangelical/fundamentalist ideologies. One aspect of those ideologies does seem to be that dishonesty is acceptable if it's engaged in for the sake of spreading the "good news." That seems to me the covering principle for the films I've been talking about here... and really, how stupid would one have to be to not understand that movies in which demons recite litanies of the sins of characters, or in which characters are punished explicitly for not accepting Jesus as their personal savior are engineered exactly to push a message that there is such a thing as "sin" in the first place, that the concept is defined within the religious system being presented, and that salvation through Jesus is necessary to avoid the eternal punishment being displayed right there on the screen?
That's the thing about fundamentalism pushed through horror films as much as in any other medium (according to Taylor's article, the medium is neutral, anyhow). All fundamentalism relies exactly on ignorance of anything outside of a particular literal domain consisting of nothing more than a narrowly delimited set of texts and the word of authorities as to how those texts should be viewed. Without a larger context, how could one distinguish "Christian horror" from the horror genre in general? In fact, how would one even be able to judge just how terribly executed these films are because they're not about making good horror films, but only exploiting a neutral medium to push an entirely non-neutral message. Who cares about the actor's performance if he's only a vehicle to deliver a lesson — particularly when your intended audience isn't supposed to be distracted from the message and critical thought isn't to be fostered? There's the difference between The Exorcist and Evil's City at the root; The Exorcist was all about making a terrifying film; it was a work of artistry. Evil's City, and others like it, are about proselytizing, not about craftsmanship.
