What makes a creepy movie creepy

The Devil Rides Out, one of the classic Hammer Studios horror films, is supposed to be scary. It’s based on a novel by occult-horror writer Dennis Wheatley and stars Christopher Lee (Saruman in Lord of the Rings). I watched it recently, and I learned that the main attribute of British ceremonial magicians, “black” and “white,” is that they spend much time driving from one country house to another in vintage Rolls Royces and Morgans. It’s a yawner.

Then there is Brigham City, a low-budget but taut thriller from Zion Films, a company serving a largely Mormon audience.

On one level, it’s a modern “Western,” with a rural sheriff confronting a baffling string of murders. Richard Dutcher plays the sheriff with one sustained weary expression. No doubt he is weary, because he is also the producer, director, and screenwriter.

Because of his LDS religious convictions, Dutcher created a PG-13 movie without gratuitous sex and violence and not one curse word–even in the bar scenes. Some other directors might profit by watching it: violence that is barely off-screen or understated can still be chilling. But something else was more chilling than the killings.

The sheriff, you see, is also a Mormon bishop. At one point, he summons all the men in this mostly Mormon town for a house-to-house search for one of the victims. To paraphrase The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no search warrants. I don’t have to show you any steenkin’ search warrant!”

Merely to lock out the civilian searchers brings down the sheriff’s wrath. When one man does so, he is thrown against the wall of his house. The searchers do find something embarrassing in his home–but it has nothing to do with the murders. In fact, none of the house searches turns up any useful evidence at all.

I don’t think that Dutcher intended this lesson of what happens when spiritual and temporal power are identical to be the scary part of the movie, but it is.

At the end, the man whose secret was disclosed is shown sitting in a pew at the Sunday sacrament meeting. He has nowhere else to go. And of course his secret will be known to everyone via the gossip grapevine. Oh well, what’s a little Inquisition on the ward? It’s not like he questioned the archaeology of the Book of Mormon.

“The Gods Return to Olympus” part 2

I Still Worship Zeus, the documentary film on contemporary Hellenic Pagans, which I referred to earlier, may be preordered at their Web site.

Joe’s World

More seasonal thoughts:

Consider the Holy Family as the prototype of the typical television sitcom where everybody is smarter than dumb ol’ Dad. Let’s call the show Joe’s World

Joe is this hardworking contractor. He drives a pickup truck with tool boxes and a ladder rack. He stops off after work at The Palms bar for a beer with his friends.

Then he comes home to his bright, perky, upwardly mobile wife, Mary, who could be played by someone like Helen Hunt in Mad About You or DeLane Matthews (my choice) in Dave’s World. Her ally in getting Joe to do whatever she wants is her charmingly bratty, verbally precocious kid, Jesus.

You can read a typical episode in Luke 2: 39-53.

“Amazons” in Roman Britain

Via Cronaca: the Times mentions a new archaeological find suggesting that Roman auxiliary forces in Britain included at least some female fighters.

It’s all about birds

Things found while Web-surfing. Snopes.com debunks the story that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” contains hidden references to Christian doctrine, adding that the “five golden rings” are ring-necked pheasants. If true, that would establish an earliest date for the song: when were those birds first imported from Asia? (They were brought to the Willamette Valley of Oregon about 1881, I think–their first North American importation.)

And while we are debunking, Snopes says “Ring around the rosie” does not contain any reference to the English bubonic plague outbreaks of either the 14th or 17th centuries.

Midnight (imagistic) Mass

A few nights ago, M. and I were sharing reminiscences of Christmases long past, including the experience of Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. It wasn’t the content of the service that mattered, but the experience: the waiting all evening, driving to the church through quiet streets, the explosion of lights in darkness, then walking out from the church into the cold, crisp night air.

It was one of few times when modern Christianity–at least in our churches (hers Roman Catholic, mine Episcopal with High Church touches at the holidays)–felt like a mystery religion. Watching the stripping of the altar on Good Friday was another such time: it could actually seem deathly scary.

Neither of us could understand the Protestants–people just sitting passively and being talked at. No altar (at most a vestigial table), but a dominating pulpit that turned the church into a lecture hall.

A year ago I was introduced to the work of Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist of religion who divides religions depending on which tendency they embody most: the “doctrinal” or the “imagistic.” Once you have had an imagistic experience, such as an initiation into a mystery, it stays with you, whereas doctrinal teaching must be reinforced with constant repetition.

Whitehouse has developed this idea in several articles and monographs; his new book, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission is on my current reading shelf. I may have more to say about it later.

“The gods return to Olympus”

Thus the title of an article in the January/February 2005 issue of Archaeology magazine on Greeks re-creating their ancient religion. An abstract is available here, but to my mind it leaves out a key quote, from reconstructionist leader Tryphon Olympios, who left the country for political reasons during the junta years of the 1970s and taught philosophy at Stockholm University:

We argue that Christian ethics, based on apocalyptic truth, are incompatible with Greek ethics, based on philosophical, scientific knowledge, a product of rationalism.

No mystoi here then? A documentary film about the reconstructionists, I Still Worship Zeus, is supposed to be available, and I am looking for it.

Seasonal confusion, hard feelings, and so on.

Evidently the struggle over who gets to define the solsticial holiday continues. The Bureaucratic Mind, confronted with competing claims, tends to retreat to blanket negativity . . . and is then accused of promoting “secularism.”

Punditry ranges from ramblings about “druids” to curmudgeonly rants like this one from Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, muttering that everyone should “just leave Christmas alone.” (Registration required.)

To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel “comfortable” not only understandably enrages the majority but commits two sins. The first is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions.

He is right about one thing: no one has a constitutional right not to be made to “feel uncomfortable.” But in my experience, while some Pagans might feel that Christmas is “shoved down their throats,” others are more likely to take the approach of Asatru blogger Robin Runesinger and “take back Yule,” enjoying the Pagan roots of the whole celebration, from the fir tree to Santa’s possible relationship to Odin the shaman god.

Even a novelist whose main qualification is that she wrote a thriller about Catholics versus “The Goddess” (and guess whose side she was on?) gets to pontificate on the reason for the season. (Registration required.)

Regardless of how we feel, I am afraid that the impulse to bureaucratic blandness is winning. Rather than think deeply about American tradition, as Krauthammer suggests, mayors, school principals, and the like are more likely to forbid anything that looks “religious.”

And some Christians are able to talk out of both sides of their mouths: America, they say, is a “Christian nation,” yet somehow these Christians are the victims, no less, of secularism (whatever that is), the so-called liberal media, the Hollywood film industry, and so on.

Yet the admittedly Christian bloggers at GetReligion remind us that Christmas used to be a low-key holiday, when it was celebrated at all. (Seventeenth-century Puritans banned its observance when they could.)

Lucky for us Pagans, trees are religious symbols, as are five-pointed stars.

PS: Why newspapers make online readers is pointless to me. Protect your privacy and get an instant login and password from BugMeNot. Thanks to Wildhunt for a couple of the links above.

The Passion but not the Code

The Religious Newswriters Association’s top 10 religion news stories list of 2004 leads off with Mel Gibson’s Passion.

Some Year-End Roundups

1. Top cryptozoology stories of 2004 by Loren Coleman. Those Southeast Asian “hobbits” lead the list.

2. Top stories involving Paganism, from the Wildhunt blog. Start with “Drug dealers, religious intolerance, court battles and a possible trip to the Supreme Court!”