The recent horror movie Heretic, which opened in November, received much attention because of its exploration of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) theology. In this at times deeply terrifying film, which will forever rescue Hugh Grant from his association with romantic comedies, two LDS missionaries knock on the door of a potential convert, played by Grant, who tries to prove their doctrines silly by, well, scaring them and then torturing them to death. If The Book of Mormon made Mormonism fun and tuneful, Heretic makes it a very dangerous game indeed.
Critics made a good deal of the fact that this is a specifically Mormon horror movie, which is indeed a bit of a novelty; the handful of previous Mormon flicks, like the 1922 Trapped by the Mormons and its sensationalist 2013 remake Missionary, feature threatening portrayals of crazed missionaries as monsters and kidnappers. That’s the opposite of Heretic, in which the missionaries are intelligent, cool, beautiful, female, and very much up to engaging their atheistic tormentor intellectually, until the genre kicks in and blood replaces dialogue. But this widely discussed dearth of LDS horror got me wondering: is Mormonism the only faith deprived of good horror films? Are there good Lutheran horror movies? Methodist? Muslim?
When one thinks about it, Catholics seem to be having all the good scary fun.
With The Exorcist they created the cinema template of devil possession. They got The Omen series, in which they cornered the market on the Antichrist. They got Rosemary’s Baby (a Catholic movie made by a Jew, based on a novel by a Jew). They got demonic sisters in The Nun and slashers at First Communion in Alice, Sweet Alice. In The Rite, the fine points of eliminating devils are explored at the Vatican school of exorcism.
And then there is Rose Glass’s 2019 psychological horror flick Saint Maud, which explores terrifying ecstasy, soul-saving, flagellation, and repentance through the use of spugna—sponge-like devices with metal studs that you put in your shoes. One of the striking features about Saint Maud is how the horror uses the mortification of the flesh so well, but not the mortification of the mind.
All of which is to say, with its colorful theology and foundational struggle between good and evil, which descends to us on earth in demons and angels and strange satanic births; with its codes and mysteries; and with, in particular, its gruesome death of Jesus as the central image of the faith, along with the world-ending cataclysm as a requirement for the Second Coming, it’s hard to out-horror Catholicism.
When one thinks about it, Catholics seem to be having all the good scary fun.
So where does that leave the rest of us? Jews like me, Mormons (like my brother), and all my friends from other traditions?
Judaism and Islam are less death-centered than Catholicism, and they are traditions that generally emphasize the invisible, whereas Catholicism is highly visual. As a rule, Jews don’t portray God, and we don’t have saints as visual stand-ins. Also, djinns (Islamic sprites or spirits mentioned in the Koran that, unlike dybbuks, are capable of possession and more worrisome hijinks, because they are essentially forms created by God) and Talmudic demons notwithstanding, Islam and Judaism have fewer possessed children and not many witches.
Even a Jewish dybbuk, a dislocated soul back on earth, will cause little auxiliary damage or death, because it has zero connection with the larger powers. Dybbuks are not confederates of the devil; in both Islam and Judaism, the devil plays a very minor part. The dybbuk resides in an unlucky host person and, though apparently dead, is fully human; it has returned to finish personal business, often matters of love.
Yet the dybbuk, nearly always descending from S. Ansky’s 1936 play and a subsequent film, has appeared in numerous works of art. The Hindi language Ezra and its sequel Dybbuk, by director Jay K., feature a dybbuk/djinn—in a box. Because the djinn is not a lost soul but a separate, non-human force, it causes more expansive damage and distress than its dybbuk cousin. And there’s a nasty dybbuk stabbing that unfolds in the Coen brothers’ deliberately puzzling opening sequence of A Serious Man (2009); but no one can agree on the connection to the very Jewish, un-horrific satire that follows.
Maybe the supernatural horror drama really hasn’t taken off for Jews because there are so many monstrous things to deal with on earth. When I first caught up with the popular zombie apocalypse genre, in The Walking Dead and all its unofficial franchises, the bald, filthy, bloody, skeletal figures approaching the fence reminded me not of anything otherworldly but of the genuine living dead: concentration camp survivors being liberated.
And the Muslim horror film?
Turkish filmmaker Orhan Orguz launched a modern cinematic use of djinn in his 2004 film Buyu. Because djinn are connected directly to God, they have far more potential power to cause mischief, evil, and destruction. And yet, perhaps because of the dearth of Muslim filmmakers working in English or in countries with large film industries—not to mention the prohibitions on depicting the prophet Muhammad—there is no Muslim horror tradition to compete with what the Catholics have.
Most important, for the production designers of religious horror cinema, Catholicism has the full surgical kit of instruments of torture: the cross, the nails, the hammer, pincers, and a thorough anatomy of wounds out of which crimson blood can flow. There is little in Judaism or Islam that compares with the specific physical suffering in Catholicism that makes for rich, visual horror.
What about the other non-Catholic Christians? The one Protestant-themed film that scared the yarmulke off of me was Robert Eggers’s 2015 The Witch. Set in a black-and-white, wintry, 1630s New England, there’s a witch in the forest where a hardscrabble Puritan family has been exiled. The devil takes the form of a nasty billy goat, the only creature thriving on the farm that’s been scratched out on the edge of the wilderness. And of course it makes noise in the night, wreaks havoc, and embodies the teenage girl’s alienation, and her anger at her family, especially her religiously dogmatic father.
It is that rigidity about doctrine, too much even for the dogmatic Puritan elders in the film, that results, in the gripping religious court sequence that opens the film, in the family’s expulsion from the community. The father will not recant a heretical belief or alter his position, and so the family is excommunicated, and now apparently there’s little food to eat, or wood to keep warm by; the cold snow keeps falling, and there’s the devil to pay.
In fact, the religious debate in the opening sequence of Heretic reminded me of the opening in The Witch, which addresses how spiritually-minded people need their faith, especially when life gets demanding, yet how clinging to it—instead of accepting alterations and living with attendant doubt—can lead to horrors.
In Heretic, when the trembling Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton stand before the demanding doors of Belief and Disbelief and must choose, they already know their panicked cell phone calls have not gotten through the steel-lined walls of the house; they know that no Mormon elder is coming to rescue them. They also know that, no matter which door they choose, it will lead to Hugh Grant’s basement of horrors.
At this moment in the movie, something notable happens: Grant’s voice drops an octave, and the creepy soundtrack—locks grinding, water dripping, sudden shifting house noises—all that ceases for the first time, in a genre film dependent on sound for its effects. The movie is saying, right here, Pay attention. Also gone for an instant is the manipulating, honeyed tone in Grant’s voice, as he says, in a tone that actually reveals his humanity for the first time, “Yes, to choose is horrible.”
Call me an aficionado of cinematic theological horror, of a kind in which the writer and director take enough time to limn religious positions, so that spiritual certainties can become unsettled. Such films don’t make it easy for you; they respect and elevate both faith and doubt and also suggest, strongly, that unless you can find a way to embrace a bit of each, you’re headed for the basement. And except for Heretic, I can’t think of another film, certainly not in the horror genre, that has all these pleasures. So bring on the Latter-day Saint horror movies (and the Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, and Shaker). Somebody has to rescue horror from the Catholics.