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Posted on August 26, 2020

Burnt Offerings: What’s in a Name?

Guest Post

While mostly overlooked now, the horror film Burnt Offerings, directed by Dan Curtis, won six awards in 1977, the year following its October release. The movie doesn’t rely on jump startles as much as on a pervasive mood of menace. Its pace is leisurely, fitting for its summertime setting, as it slowly builds to the real horror near the end. While it isn’t the best haunted house movie ever made, it embraces some sophisticated concepts that draw from religious tropes. The very title, borrowed from its eponymous 1973 novel by Robert Marasco, suggests as much. Making a burnt offering is, by definition, a religious act.

Needing a break from city life, the Rolf family moves to a very affordably-priced mansion available for rent during the summer. Parents Marian (Karen Black) and Ben (Oliver Reed), their son David (Lee Montgomery), and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (played by irrepressible Bette Davis) try to settle in, but strange things start happening. Keeping in mind that The Shining was still four years away, the elements of the unstable father falling apart in isolation play throughout the background in anticipation of Jack Nicholson’s famous performance, as Ben questions his sanity. And Marian loves—really loves—the house. That’s the set-up, of course. Roz (Eileen Heckart) and Arnold Allardyce (Burgess Meredith), the apparently eccentric owners, move out in the summer so the house can repair itself. The renters must include someone who truly loves the house because, in perhaps the creepiest premise of the plot, the aged Allardyce mother never leaves it. The renters must take her food up to her, but will never see her. Small price to pay for a summer away, right?

Posted on August 11, 2020

The Christian Worldview of Annabelle: Creation

Guest Post

At the start of Annabelle: Creation (David F. Sandberg, 2017), the Mullins family is introduced as a typical, Christian American family in the early 20^th Century. They live happily together, play games together, and, most notably for the film’s plot, attend church together. Their faith forms the backbone of the movie’s backstory, as the parents, Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) and Esther (Miranda Otto), pray to see Annabelle again after her untimely death, beginning the hauntings revolving around the Annabelle doll. Ultimately, the Mullins are not the focus of the film, however; rather, it is the two orphans, Linda (Lulu Wilson) and Janice (Talitha Eliana Bateman). In being shifted to the periphery, however, the Mullins become representative of the average person in the film’s setting—one who does not have plot armor to carry them through; instead, they are caught in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, God and Satan.

Posted on August 22, 2019

Horror’s Exotic Religion? The Marked Ones & Curse of La Llorona

Guest Post

The Conjuring universe had a bumper crop this year with two films being released within four months of each other. The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves, 2019) is technically a spin off—and quite far spun out at that—from the diegesis established in the main Conjuring series and its popular Annabelle sub-series. La Llorona came out in April and the latest chapter on said doll, Annabelle Comes Home (2019), was released in late June. Having grossed nearly $2 billion dollars, the Conjuring franchise shows no sign of slowing down.

A certain intertextuality has long been recognized as a hallmark of horror cinema. The genre is notoriously self-referential. Even so, those who spent a few years drinking in the Paranormal Activity films (2007–2015) beginning in the middle of the last decade will perhaps notice some distinct similarities to The Conjuring franchise. Indeed, The Curse of La Llorona stands out from other films in its universe–similar to the way in which Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Christopher Landon, 2014) relates to the main story of its series. Both involve Hispanic communities, feature a botánica and even involve some of the same rituals associated with Hispanic folk tradition. This could reflect nothing more than the fact that religions that used to be called “syncretistic” bear certain similarities. Nevertheless, this particular form of religion in horror is a form of exoticism for the white mainstream, and it draws on very similar motifs in these two films. Some backstory might be useful right about now. Read more

Posted on March 16, 2016

“Raised up from the Dead”*: The Walking Dead and Religion

Dawn Keetley

There is much to say about the role of religion in AMC’s The Walking Dead, but here I want to focus on the three crucial church scenes that have punctuated the series so far.

1. In season two, episode one, “What Lies Beneath,” the group is searching for Carol’s (Melissa McBride) lost daughter. They hear church bells and are drawn to the Southern Baptist Church, where, after killing the three walkers sitting in its pews, Carol and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and even Daryl (Norman Reedus) ask God to help them.

Season 2, “What Lies Beneath”

2. In a much different scene in the season five episode, “Four Walls and a Roof,” the group lures those remaining survivors from Terminus who had captured Bob (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) and eaten his leg into Father Gabriel’s (Seth Gilliam) church and brutally slaughters them.

3. And finally, in the season six episode, “Not Tomorrow Yet,” Rick stands at the front of Alexandria’s church and exhorts the survivors that their very lives depend on a preemptive attack on Negan’s Saviors—that they must find them and kill them.

The most obvious point to make about the trajectory of these scenes is the dramatic increase in brutality on the part of Rick and his group, which goes hand-in-hand with Rick’s movement from supplicating Christ to taking his place.