Richard Walsh

Abstract

The Apocalypse, its interpreters, and apocalyptic films make much of monstrous evils and violent ends. Apocalyptic does so in order to prevent community members’ failure/apostasy. The fear of such failure is Apocalypse’s first horror feature. Because its final fantasy is of an absolute Empire, the Apocalypse is also inseparable from cinematic horror. This end—or its seductive preview in text/vision—is the horror of possession/absorption, a common trope of religious horror and the Apocalypse’s second horror feature. The first horror feature so terrifies that one easily succumbs to the second; however, some films raise salutary questions about such scripted lives.

A Double Feature

[1] The simple answer to this article’s titular question is that the Apocalypse is a double feature, hence “the horror, the horror,”¹ but that simple answer requires explication. The most memorable and popular features of the Apocalypse are the woes of the final days, including the spectacle of monstrous beasts, and the violent end of the “world,” but the following article tries to demonstrate that apostasy/failure and the overwhelming, divine Empire are two deeper horrors. The article does so by joining the Book of Revelation with apocalyptic and horror cinema. Like the Apocalypse, apocalyptic film often exhorts its audience to avoid catastrophic internal weaknesses. The second sometimes explores supernatural possessions, which are in individualistic versions of Revelation’s overwhelming divine Empire. Thus, film casts light upon the apocalyptic horror of apostasy and the horror in the Apocalypse’s imagination of the absorbing divine. Thereby, film raises questions about the wisdom of conforming to such infinite scripts.

Apocalypse as Community Maintenance,

From Final Catastrophe and Revelation 12-14 to Revelation 2-3

[2] In common parlance and in popular film, the apocalypse signifies “the mother of all catastrophes,” the world’s tragic finale. However, in the Greek in which the New Testament was written, an apocalypse is a revelation; therefore, the last book in the New Testament is The Revelation or Apocalypse. While that book forecasts the calamitous end of the kingdoms of the earth, those kingdoms are no friends to the communities of the Apocalypse.² More importantly, the Apocalypse also predicts the arrival of the New Jerusalem as the imminent replacement of the kingdoms of the earth. In contrast to apocalyptic films, the Apocalypse does not fear this end (see Walsh forthcoming). It is the text’s glorious hope.

[3] The Apocalypse’s present is another matter. Most historical-critical scholars situate the Apocalypse in cities and kingdoms in first-century Roman Asia Minor whose elites were trying to advance emperor worship to win political and economic favour with the Roman Empire. Most of these critics also see the dragon and the monstrous beasts of Revelation 12-13 as an imaginative, allegorical extension of this situation. While no Christians have died because of their refusal to participate in emperor worship (except possibly for Ananias; see Rev 2:13), the Apocalypse imagines that possibility and exhorts its readers to become martyrs, if need be, to avoid such idolatry (e.g., Maier 2002, 1-39; Frilingos 2004, 117-18).

[4] The Apocalypse’s revelation of the divine kingdom’s imminent replacement of this evil empire supports this call for perseverance, for costly loyalty to the community’s (religious) traditions. This ethic is most evident in the warnings to the communities in Revelation 2-3 (cf. Rev 14:12; 16:15; 22:11). While most popular and cinematic interpretations ignore that section in favour of apocalyptic woes, monsters, and catastrophe, the “perseverance of the saints” is a major concern of the Apocalypse. If the thrill of apocalyptic lies in knowing that one is among the elect few in the right in the instant before the end (Derrida 1982, 84), the horror of apocalyptic is the fear that one may be lost at the very last moment or that one may not be special and/or messianic. Surely, then, one of the reasons that apocalyptic imagines martyrdom, woes, monsters, and catastrophe is to enjoin its readers to avoid losing their place among those finally chosen and to warrant its ethical call for steadfastness.³ Any external threat, which is, not incidentally, clearly limited by the larger divine sovereignty, is incidental to this ethical concern.

[5] If Revelation imagines the empire and its lackeys watching to see and then to dispense with those who will not worship the emperor, it also imagines heavenly characters who oversee this empire’s crimes.⁴ But, this heavenly cast also sees and judges the intimate details of its readers’ lives (see the repeated “I know” in Rev 2-3). Further, its God records all deeds and will ultimately expose them (Rev 20:11-15). While the Apocalypse offers its readers the hope of a glorious end, it also repeatedly reminds its readers that they are known and seen. For its readers, the Apocalypse imagines a society of surveillance, which far surpasses the aspirations of the societies of the eras of McCarthy or of the Patriot Act.⁵

Feature One: Apocalyptic Film and the Enemy Within, Revelation 2-3

[6] It is not immediately obvious that popular apocalyptic film acts similarly. Evangelical apocalypse films, however, do seem similar to the Apocalypse on this point. John Walliss asserts that such films “provide sites where a contemporary form of evangelical identity may be articulated” in the midst of fears about technology and about being “left behind.” Such films enjoin their audiences, then, “to undergo a born again experience now before it is too late” (34) or confirm their audiences’ “place in the spiritual economy” (35).⁶ They reveal to their audiences their special place in the instant before the end.

[7] At least, in terms of content, popular apocalypses tell similar stories. In End of Days (1999), for example, Revelation’s monstrous dragon returns to earth and takes over a hapless human’s body in order to sire the Antichrist before midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999, to usher in his kingdom. While an evil millennial kingdom supposedly hangs in the balance, the film offers no Armageddon (Rev 14-20). Instead, the matter collapses inward to become the lone human hero’s struggle against the prospective evil Empire.

[8] Moreover, End of Days concentrates not on its hero’s (Jericho Cane) struggle with the monstrous dragon⁷ but on Jericho’s spiritual transformation (or, his anger management training). Thus, as the film opens, Jericho is in the midst of a suicidal depression because of the slaughter of his family. After Jericho becomes the protector of Satan’s bride-elect Christine, Satan accosts Jericho in his home and tempts him to betray Christine by appealing to the anger within Jericho. Jericho’s anger connects him with the demonic (or provides the demon access to Jericho). Later, when Jericho searches for the kidnapped Christine, a Satanic henchman allows Jericho entrance to the depths beneath a derelict theater where the Satanic “marriage” is about to take place because that henchman also recognizes the hatred and vengeance within Jericho that makes him part of the demonic team.

[9] Jericho’s demonic anger is the enemy within or the film’s equivalent of apocalyptic apostasy. In the climactic scene in the ruined church, however, Jericho leaves his anger behind (or channels it to a more appropriate target than himself or God). At least, after contemplating the altar’s religious images, he throws down his large automatic weapon. Jericho does not apostatize. He does not become the traitorous insider. He is faithful.⁸ In cinematic terms, he becomes heroic.

[10] Nonetheless, in that climax, the unarmed Jericho soon finds himself facing the monstrous Satan who, having lost his previous human host, possesses Jericho in order to impregnate Christine. After dragging Christine to the altar for the unholy consummation, Satan-Jericho contemplates the religious symbolism yet again while Christine pleads with Jericho to resist Satan. Amazingly and heroically, Jericho does. Uncertain, however, that he can continue to resist Satan, Jericho throws himself upon the sword of the broken statue of Michael in order to deny Satan a body with which to impregnate Christine. Howling in rage, the monstrous dragon falls back into the abyss. Actually, demonic fire (Jericho’s anger again?) leaves Jericho and is sucked back into the abyss.

[11] Twice, then, Jericho defeats the demon within—his anger, which threatens to make him demonic, and, then, the possessing Satan. End of Days highlights this internal, subjective victory, not the struggle with and the defeat of the monstrous dragon. Far more clearly than in Revelation, the fundamental struggle is that against apostasy, the insider’s identification with the evil other. Thus, the real monster/horror in End of Days is the satanic Jericho, not the monstrous dragon.

[12] Despite its adventure/horror conventions, End of Days visualizes this horror so clearly because it belongs to a culture that privileges individual subjectivity. Although Jericho proves his “faith/loyalty” at an altar replete with religious symbols, his faith is quite modern. Michael and Christ do not arrive to help (their arrival would be a horror too great to consider).⁹ Michael, in particular, is but a broken statue (symbol).¹⁰ Jericho’s victory is a turn inward, a victory over his (lesser) self. Relying on himself and coming to terms with his anger, despair, and resentment, he routs the possessing demons and finds peace within (and a vision of his restored family). The monstrous dragon is, then, but a foil for Jericho’s “salvation” or, more accurately, for his heroic apotheosis. As in the ancient Apocalypse, the monstrous other¹¹ is there to catalyze insider’s fears of failure, of not being the chosen/favored/successful, of the awful possibility that messianic exceptionality is an illusion, and to inspire heroism.

[13] Although Jericho is nothing but a film hero and although End of Days but escapist entertainment, the story meshes with the individualistic culture of which it is a part and, therefore, represents its myth or ideology. In fact, such heroes appear ad nauseum in film (and in the mass media generally), and the fact of their endless repetition also indicates their mythic significance (see Miles 1996, 186-90; cf. Barthes 1972, 129-59). Another pertinent apocalyptic example is the lone fighter—deemed insignificant by the Empire—who takes down the evil Empire (or, at least, its Death Star) nanoseconds before the Empire can destroy the rebel world and gain uncontested control of the entire universe in Star Wars (1977). This hero also triumphs only after an internal struggle. He, too, finds the divine (the Force) or the hero within that allows him to become heroic and triumph.¹² Not incidentally, some critics have claimed that the pattern of the lone hero’s struggle against such evil empires replays the American story of self-creation as a rebellion against an evil Empire (see, e.g., Babington and Evans 1993, 9-14, 50-57).¹³ On multiple counts, then, Jericho’s story has, at least, potential mythic significance for the film’s audience. His ethical struggles are to some extent those of his audience.

[14] Matters are much clearer in Apocalypto (2006). The film opens with an epigraph from Will Durant that announces its ethical intentions: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Surely, then, the story that follows is an exhortation as well as an entertainment.

[15] The film opens with a happy village Eden. Ominously, people from a destroyed village cross the hunting grounds of this village in search of “a new beginning.” Flint Sky, the head of the village, declares that the hunting ground is his, but he permits the respectful villagers to pass. The traveling villagers frighten Jaguar Paw, Flint Sky’s son, but Flint Sky reprimands Jaguar Paw by telling him that he did not raise him to live in fear.

[16] Soon, thereafter, brutal slave traders destroy the village and kill Flint Sky, whom Jaguar Paw almost saves. Before he dies, Flint Sky warns Jaguar Paw yet again not to fear. Having killed Flint Sky, one of the raiders renames Jaguar Paw “Almost.” The raiders, then, march the remaining adult villagers off to slavery or to sacrificial death in a nearby fertility Empire (the Mayans). On the forced march to the captives’ certain end, the brutal captors encounter a plague-stricken girl who predicts their horrible demise. As in apocalyptic, her prophecy structures the future:

You fear me? So you should … all you who are vile. Would you like to know how you will die? The sacred time is near. Beware the blackness of day. Beware the man who brings the jaguar. Behold him reborn from mud and earth. For the one he takes you to will cancel the sky and scratch out the earth. Scratch you out. And end your world. He’s with us now (she hisses). Day will be like night. And the man jaguar will lead you to your end.

[17] Her incredible words come true in providential detail, and Jaguar Paw, in fulfilling them, escapes the sacrificial altar, a murderous gauntlet, hunters in the jungle, and various jungle terrors in order to return to his ruined village and save his family. For the present purposes, the crucial moment comes after Jaguar Paw has leapt from a towering waterfall. As he rises from the river below, he turns to face the pursuing raiders. Shaking his fist, he declares, “I am Jaguar Paw, son of Flint Sky. My father hunted this forest before me. My name is Jaguar Paw. I am a hunter. This is my forest. And my sons will hunt it with their sons after I am gone. Come on.” In the jungle, thereafter, when he rises from quicksand (reborn from mud), he repeats, “I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest. And I am not afraid.”

[18] Thereafter, Jaguar Paw is the hunter, not the hunted. “Almost” no more, he has internalized his father’s traditions/lessons and now strives to maintain them. Most importantly, he has conquered the internal enemy of fear. By contrast, as the prophetess suggests, those who pursue him do have reason to fear. Not surprisingly, Jaguar Paw makes it back to his village in time to save his wife and children from the cistern in which he had left them just before it fills with rain water. In the film’s final moments, his last two pursuers simply ignore him as he leaves them on the beach because they are awe-struck by the ominous portent of Europeans arriving by sea. Jaguar Paw and his family, by contrast, turn away from the Europeans and their mighty ship—despite his wife’s suggestion that they go to the foreigners—and slip into the jungle “to seek a new beginning.”

[19] Despite the ominous presence of European colonizers, Apocalypto is not about the end of the Mayan Empire at European hands. It is not even about the horrid, slave-trading raiders. Rather, it is about the (small) community maintenance possible in faithfulness to traditions (again, apocalyptic is fundamentally conservative) and by conquering internal demons. In sum, Jaguar Paw’s struggle with fear is equivalent to Jericho’s struggle with anger, which is itself equivalent to apocalyptic fears of apostasy.

[20] Although, once again, the film is an entertainment, the film’s epigraph clearly invites the audience to see Apocalypto and its various fallen civilizations as warnings. The effect is not unlike that of Revelation 2-3 on the imaginations which follow. The epigraph invites its audience, too, to forsake fear or other weaknesses that would lead to their Empire’s end. The epigraph demands that the audience monitor themselves on behalf of their Empire. They cannot afford to be demonically angry, fearful, weak, or apostate. Put more simply, they cannot be losers. Clearly, the real horror of apocalyptic film, like that of the Apocalypse, is not an external monster; it is rather the fear of the hero’s (and community’s) weakness and/or failure. The issue is not death. The issue is the danger of failing to die for the cause because of internal weakness. End of Days and The Passion of the Christ (2004) may be more instructive here than Apocalypto, whose protagonist does not die, but the ethic is similar in each case.¹⁴

Feature Two: Religious Horror and the Fear of Supernatural Possession,

From Revelation 2-3 to Revelation 20-22

[21] Unlike Apocalypto and many other modern apocalypses (see Ostwalt 1995; Bendle 2005), End of Days imagines an apocalypse brought on by supernatural powers. Accordingly, one might think of End of Days primarily as a horror film or, at least, place it in a subgenre of apocalyptic films merging the horror and apocalyptic genres, which would include films like The Omen (1976, 2006) and its sequels, The Rapture, The Reaping, and evangelical films like Left Behind (2000). The horror in these films and Revelation’s own hidden horror is of a supernatural power too overwhelming for mere humans to thwart or survive.¹⁵ It is, as so often in horror, the horror of the possessing demon/deity.¹⁶

[22] End of Days and The Omen franchise¹⁷ mitigate this horror by having human action thwart the possession and/or the arrival of the kingdom of evil. End of Days further mitigates this terror by transforming the threat of demonic possession into (Jericho’s anger and) Satan’s mundane sexual pursuit of Christine.¹⁸ Nonetheless, by flirting with overwhelming supernatural powers, End of Days raises dangerous questions for modernity. The threat appears in a more pronounced form in possession stories, the classic of which is The Exorcist (1973). Both William Friedkin, the film’s director, and William Peter Blatty, the script writer and the author of the novel on which the film is based, have stated that they wanted to gesture at unfathomable spiritual evil (forces). In apocalyptic, these forces appear at Armageddon or the like. In religious horror, the forces surround and invade the subjective individual. Modernity, to which religious horror belongs, internalizes the clash of the apocalyptic titans.

[23] Accordingly, The Exorcist focuses on Regan’s possession and her salvation by the twin sacrifices of an archaeologist-priest, who has long struggled with Regan’s demon, and a psychiatrist-priest, who is beset by his own eternal demons, particularly by guilt over his mother’s institutionalization and death. Furthermore, the archaeologist-priest warns everyone that the demon will attack everyone nearby, psychologically seeking their weakest points and striving to drive them to despair. Clearly, as in End of Days, the important war is internal although visually illustrated here with facial contortions, projectile vomiting, abnormal profanity, and so forth. Regan’s body is a suffering receptacle for this mini-apocalyptic conflict.

[24] Possessed, Regan loses her identity. She speaks with various voices and takes on various appearances (e.g., the psychiatrist’s mother). At one point, during the exorcism, Regan declares, “I am the devil.” Eventually, her own mother refers to her as “the thing” upstairs and violently denies that “the thing” is Regan. Appropriately, the audience eventually learns that the demon which possesses Regan bears the name, “I am no one.”¹⁹ There, succinctly is the ultimate fear of individualistic modernity: the loss of the self to superior powers. Appropriately, Blatty names the section before the exorcism “The Abyss.”

[25] One of the classics of modern horror, the film is less optimistic about the defeat of Satan (or even a lesser demon)—and the corresponding defense of modern mythology—than End of Days is. The archaeologist-priest dies of a heart attack (yet another internal invasion) before completing the exorcism. The psychologist-priest substitutes himself for Regan and leaps from Regan’s bedroom window to his death, like the pigs in the gospel story of Legion (cited as an epigraph in the novel). Thereafter, Regan returns to normality.

[26] The finale, however, moves away from the unthinkable horror of supernatural possession. Regan and her actress mother depart the city (from the gothic shadows of Georgetown University) for rosier locales (the West Coast and/or Hollywood). Regan takes with her the religious medallion from the archaeological dig opening, which may promise talismanic security against the demon with which it was buried.²⁰ More importantly, Regan leaves her memory of the possession behind. In fact, in the novel, no one will admit that Regan was possessed. The trauma of possession is too great a horror to contemplate for long. Such gothic fears need to be left behind, to be repressed or buried in the uncanny. Indeed, one wonders if that is the reason for the archaeological dig beginning.

[27] In the film’s last scene (in its 2000 re-release), the detective, who has been investigating the mysterious death of a man who ill-advisedly visited the possessed Regan, and another priest, who has passed on the protective medallion to Regan, provide sly comic relief. The detective invites the priest to see Wuthering Heights, starring Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball. The priest, of course, claims to have seen the non-existent movie. Perhaps, the audience has just seen this gothic film too. At the very least, the scene writes a comic gloss over the horrors of The Exorcist.

[28] Not incidentally, ministers of the era dealt with fears about the film by using the horror to police their communities in a fashion akin to apocalyptic. They “rationalized” Regan’s possession by claiming that Regan was possessed because she trifled with the occult (Regan first talks about Captain Howdy while playing with her Ouija board). The implication, then, was that none of their flock would be possessed if they avoided the occult and the movie. Their followers should simply not grant the demon access by participating in illicit activities (cf. the function of Rev 2-3 and Revelation’s protest against emperor worship).²¹ Instead, they should draw the community’s mythic covers snuggly around themselves.

[29] Perhaps, the film’s name is another attempt to bury the modern horror of supernatural possession. The film so concentrates on Regan’s possession that one may forget that the film is actually titled The Exorcist, not The Possessed. While the title suggests victory, rather than victimization, matters are not simple. The film begins, like Blatty’s novel, with a mysterious archaeologist-priest locked in some ongoing, mysterious struggle with a monstrous, ancient demon (named Pazuzu in the novel). At a crucial moment in the exorcism, the audience sees both the haunted Regan and the statue of the demon from the dig, which possesses her. Furthermore, the demon is rather easily dealt with after the death of the archaeologist priest. Does this suggest that the demon was only after that priest and that Regan is a victimized pawn? If so, it is a frightening thought for modern individuals. Their insignificance and fragility would be overwhelming.²²

[30] Here, one should return to End of Days’ reluctance to imagine the arrival of a divine kingdom. A traditional God is absent from End of Days. A comparison of the film’s penultimate scene with that in Revelation makes the issue clear. That scene transfigures the once suicidal Jericho into a sacrificial hero who dies smiling with a vision of his once lost family. By contrast, in Revelation’s penultimate scene, heaven and its denizens come to earth. For modern audiences, the individualistic theophany is far preferable. A supernatural theophany, the uncontestable kingdom of God come to earth, is too great a horror for modernity to contemplate. For moderns, then, the real horror of Revelation lies in chapters 20-22, not in chapters 12-14. Incidentally, even evangelical apocalyptic films imagine the apocalyptic arrival of the divine kingdom primarily in terms of (the) horror of those “left behind.” They, too, seldom show the divine kingdom come to earth.²³

[31] Perhaps, End of Days parodies Revelation’s hope for the same reason that it substitutes Jericho’s anger for demonic possession. Perhaps, it is substituting a more manageable evil kingdom for the unthinkable divine horror of an absolute Empire like that in Revelation 20-22. Even heroes, like Jericho, cannot resist the overwhelming divine. Moreover, for reasons of decorum, it does seem more politic to resist the arrival of evil, than the arrival of God.

[32] While evil has always been more prominent in American film than God (see John May 1981, 81-100), Hollywood did once regularly feature religious spectaculars, which contained more obvious signs of the traditional divine.²⁴ Most histories aver that such spectacles effectively ended in the 1960s. Despite the success of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the biblical spectacle has not returned to Hollywood cinema.²⁵ In Hollywood, at least, the successor of the religious spectacle is religious horror.²⁶

[33] In horror, the supernatural is horrible. The possessing deity, whether demonic or divine, threatens the individual at his/her heart and illustrates the fragility of the myth of individualism, which, according to Rollo May (1991, 15-87), stands precariously between the twin fears of ostracism (horror feature one) and absorption (horror feature two).²⁷ The overwhelming divine is a terror that belongs to the depths of the modern uncanny.²⁸

[34] The fear of such a deity is even evident in late biblical epics like The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In the opening scenes of Last Temptation, Jesus stands in for the Regan of The Exorcist. The film opens with Jesus sprawled on the ground, asleep or overcome. In a voiceover, Jesus describes the “feeling” of his frequent attacks by divine powers. What begins as love turns to pain, to claws. He has attempted to escape these horrible voices by fasting and self-flagellating and, finally, by making crosses for the Romans. His last hope is that the voices are demonic, not divine, because he knows that no one (not even Jericho Cane) can cast out God. Ultimately, Jesus acquiesces to these controlling voices and makes his way to the cross, but he is the most tormented Jesus in the cinematic tradition. The tradition of artistic representations of Gethsemane pales before this film-long divine torment. The film finally presents a fairly orthodox, spiritual Christ, but that is precisely the problem. The spiritual (Christ or God) completely absorbs the frail, fragile human.

[35] The far more popular The Passion of the Christ is equally horrible. In fact, one might argue that part of the film’s huge success stems from its rewriting of a Jesus film in the more profitable film conventions of (action films and) religious horror (Walsh 2008). Apart from the film’s incredible level of violence and gore, the obvious connections between The Passion and religious horror are Judas’ tormenting demonic possession and the apocalyptic defeat of the monstrous, androgynous Satan.

[36] The film’s opening sequence moves back and forth between Judas’ greedy betrayal and Jesus’ temptation by the monstrous Satan in Gethsemane. Jesus defeats Satan by prostrating himself in prayer and, then, rising to stomp the snake, which has come from Satan’s robes/body and which threatens to possess Jesus, under his heel. Meanwhile, Judas sells Jesus and himself and falls into a hellish world. As a beaten Jesus stands trial, demonic children and the monstrous Satan harass Judas to his suicidal death beside a bloated carcass replete with (Beelzebub’s) flies. While Judas fails, falling to his inner weakness (greed), Jesus, like Jericho Cane and Jaguar Paw, triumphs over weakness, refusing to let Satan emasculate him with fears about the impossibility of his task.

[37] All this comforts because the appropriate people fall and the right people prosper. The crucifixion finale underlines these matters apocalyptically. After several agonizing looks heavenward from Jesus and a climactic “It is finished,” the film’s perspective shifts abruptly to a view from heaven as an apocalyptic raindrop/teardrop falls and begins the apocalyptic judgment. An earthquake terrifies everyone and splits the temple. Visuals display the terror of those responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. The defeat of Satan is particularly clear. For this, the perspective returns to a view from heaven that shows an anguished howling Satan in a visual that clearly echoes Golgotha. Thereafter, the subsequent resurrection appearance is not anticlimactic. It is unnecessary. The apocalypse has already occurred. Satan has been thrown into the abyss.

[38] From the opening garden to the apocalyptic finale at Golgotha, the whole film bespeaks a climate of horror. At least, for those not “right,” for the unexceptional, the God of The Passion, who defeats the monstrous Satan through Jesus’ suffering and a single apocalyptic teardrop, frightens. The effect of the potential arrival of this fearsome God (or the eerie, resurrected Christ) differs little from the threatened arrival of Satan’s kingdom in End of Days or of any possessing deity in religious horror. Such a God scares one straight. Choice vanishes before such an absolute sovereign. If this God does not horrify, it is only because one feels that the terrible God of The Passion has haunted the “right” people, Judas and Satan, while vindicating his messianic elect.

What Kind of Horror Movie is the Apocalypse?

Apocalypse as Double Feature, Scared Straight and Overwhelmed

[39] The Passion of the Christ reprises the first horror feature of the Apocalypse. Like Apocalypto and End of Days, it calls its viewers to maintain community boundaries. All of these films call their audiences to messianic exceptionality. The Book of Revelation, too, stimulates the horror of apostasy for similar purposes. It conjures up the horror that one might not be special, exceptional, messianic, chosen, etc. The events in Revelation might transpire (or not) and one might not be “right,” either because one belonged to the evil (wrong) Empire from the beginning or because one apostatized. Inherent in this fear of not being “right” is the trepidation that someone else might be “right” or chosen. The fear is common not only to ancient apocalyptic sectarians, but also to modern individualism. In fact, the fear may be endemic to said individualism. There, it is more than the fear of being alone; it is the fear of being alienated against one’s will; it is the fear of wanting to belong and failing (see, e.g., Donnie Darko [2001]).

[40] The less obvious, second horror feature of the Apocalypse is its imagination of the absolute divine Empire (Rev 20-22). This final fantasy is The Exorcist writ at a global level. More importantly, it is also The Exorcist perched upon the unassailable moral high ground and, thus, leaving no room for dissent. Its Empire has eternally open gates because no one is left to challenge it, all opposition having been violently eliminated. It is a rule so complete that cinematic horror and science fiction pillory anything remotely similar as a dystopia (see, e.g., Minority Report [2002]).²⁹

[41] For moderns disposed to democratic freedoms, Revelation’s imperial vision resembles the nightmarish, political dreams in Thomas Hobbes’ The Leviathan.³⁰ Not incidentally, Hobbes’ image of absolute sovereignty is a biblical version of the chaos monster. One watching the second feature of the apocalyptic horror show sees Revelation’s image of absolute sovereignty similarly. As everyone knows, Hobbes’ dark vision calls for security at any price. His vision is motivated by, founded on, and defended by fear. It is an aw(e)ful horror, a deification of fear. From the standpoint of modernity, Revelation works similarly. The epigraph of Apocalypto and the tear drop in The Passion of the Christ say it all.

[42] If one does not see (or stay for) this second horror feature, one’s messianic exceptionality, the conviction of being “right,” may have blinded one to this vision.³¹ If so, one successfully negotiates Revelation’s first horror only in order to deify the second horror (unconsciously?).³² Accepting the blissful security of knowing the final answer/end, one accepts a theodicy so absolute that it renders everyone pawns. Such deifying securities effectively deny one’s common humanity.

[43] Even if the apocalyptic finale of the absolute Empire never arrives, the prospect of such certainties invests the Book of Revelation (or some other oracle) with a determinative certainty that inscribes the future without any verification and without any possibility of error or deviation. As various critics have observed, the Book of Revelation offers its community a vision of the heavenly (Re. 4-5) and future (Rev 20-22) sovereignty of God, vis-à-vis the threatening Roman Empire. It is less often observed that this vision also threatens to consume the “ordinary reality” of its community.

[44] The idea of visions/dreams that overtake someone’s reality to their demise is a common horror trope/premise.³³ Thus, in Donnie Darko, Donnie’s apocalyptic vision “kills” the time between the vision and its consummation. The vision brings the end to the present, as the film’s end recapitulates its beginning, and eliminates all choice as Donnie remarks on more than one occasion. Appropriately, the music that opens the film is about “killing time.” In apocalyptic film, the idea of the oracle/book that determines the subsequent plot and characters’ fates is equally common. In End of Days and Left Behind, it is (an interpretation of) the book of Revelation itself that does so. In The Prophecy (1995), it is a book of Revelation with a twenty-third chapter. In Apocalypto, it is the plague girl’s oracle. And so forth.

[45] Such a text/vision is the advance guard—the talisman like the priest’s rosary in Stigmata—of the possessing/absorbing deity. It functions as such even if the absolute apocalyptic Empire never arrives because it renders its own prophecies self-fulfilling. Perhaps, then, such a text/vision exercises an even more absolute rule and absorption than the actual Empire. Like Apocalypto’s epigraph, such texts/visions invite one to consider oneself possessed/absorbed on the mere say so of the text/vision. At the very least, one is “watched” (see Foucault’s nightmarish Panopticon or imagine Freud’s civilization, without discontents).

[46] Ancient texts (and all messiahs) routinely tout such absorption as the blessed works of providence. When Hollywood films accept this premise, as End of Days, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and a host of other films do, they distract one from the imperial horror of apocalyptic with the delights of one’s just salvation and one’s enemies’ wicked demise. They invest one with messianic exceptionality. As Hollywood films serve an individualistic culture, they also often invest individuals with providential destinies. As Hollywood film serves an individualistic culture, however, it also has the potential to raise questions about such determinism. Thus, films sometimes make the terrors of absorption/possession the subject of their concern (cf. e.g., Pleasantville [1998], The Matrix [1999], The Truman Show [1998], Minority Report, The Number 23 [2007], Stranger Than Fiction [2006], etc.). Religious horror, in particular, has the potential to look into these uncanny fears of individualism (cf. Wood).

[47] A moment in Donnie Darko is instructive. As Donnie finally succumbs to the apocalyptic visions of Frank, the visionary rabbit, and begins the descent to his demise, he leaves a Halloween Frightmare Double Feature at his local theater. The marquee touts a twin bill including The Evil Dead (1981) and The Last Temptation of Christ.³⁴ The combination is the whole point. Seen together, the possessions and determinative books of both films are equally horrible. If one sees them together, religious horror begins to include ancient texts like the Apocalypse as well as recent films like End of Days and The Exorcist. If one ignores their salvific seductions, such works become flotsam of the Freudian uncanny, frightening one both with the possibility of ostracism (of not being “right”) and also with the possibility of one’s supernatural absorption (of the end of individualism). The horror, the horror, indeed.

References

Babington, Bruce and Peter William Evans. 1993. Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in Hollywood Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang.

Beal, Timothy K. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. New York and London: Routledge.

Bendle, Mervyn. F. 2005. “The Apocalyptic Imagination and Popular Culture.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 11 (Fall). http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art11-apocalypticimagination.html .

Campbell, Joseph. 1972. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Crossan, John D. 1976. Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. In Derrida and Biblical Studies, ed. Robert Detweiler. Semeia 23: 63-97. Scholars Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1958. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. Joan Riviere. Garden City: Doubleday.

______. The Uncanny. 2003. Trans. David McLintock. New York: Penguin.

Foucault. Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.

Frilingos, Christopher A. 2004. Spectacles of Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Fuentes, Carlos. 2003. Terra Nostra. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1958. Leviathan. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts.

Ingebretsen, Edward J. 1996. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Keller, Catherine. 2005. God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys. Minneapolis: Fortress.

Maier, Harry O. 2002. Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom. Minneapolis: Fortress.

May, John R. 1981. “The Demonic in American Cinema.” Religion in Film. John R. May and Michael Bird, eds., 79-100. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

May, Rollo. 1991. The Cry for Myth. New York: Delta.

Miles, Margaret. 1996. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon Press.

Moore, Stephen. 2006. Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism in the New Testament. The Bible in the Modern World 12. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix.

Ostwalt, Conrad E., Jr. 1995. “Hollywood and Armageddon: Apocalyptic Themes in Recent Cinematic Presentation.” Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, 55-63. Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr., eds. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Pippin, Tina. 1999. Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image. Routledge: London and New York.

Quinby, Lee. Forthcoming. “Southland Tales, The Film of Revelation: Richard Kelly’s Satire of American Apocalypse.” Apocalypse and Film. John Walliss and Lee Quinby, ed. Apocalyptic and Popular Culture Series. Sheffield Phoenix.

Runions, Erin. 2004. “Biblical Promise and Threat in U.S. Imperialist Rhetoric, Before and After September 11, 2001.” The Scholar and Feminist Online 2,2. Available from: http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/reverb/runions1.htm.

Schrader, Paul. 1972. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Walliss, John. 2008. “Celling the End Times: The Contours of Contemporary Rapture Films.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 19 (Summer). http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art19-endtimes.html.

Walsh, Richard. 2003. Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International.

______ 2008. “The Passion as Horror Show: St. Mel of the Cross.” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 20. Fall.

______. 2009. “The Bible in Film.” Continuum Companion to Religion and Film, ed. William L. Blizek, 222-30.

______. 2010. “‘Realizing’ Paul’s Visions: The New Testament, Caravaggio, and Paxton’s Frailty.” Biblical Interpretation 18,1: 28-51

______. Forthcoming. “Sanctifying Empire: Or the (Hopeful?) Paradox of Apocalysia.” Apocalypse and Film. John Walliss and Lee Quinby, eds. Apocalyptic and Popular Culture Series. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix.

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Notes

1. One might use Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to illustrate the double horror of the Apocalypse, Kurtz, whose last words are the famous “The horror, the horror,” represents the horror of apostasy. Marlow, who tells Kurtz’s tale, speaks begrudgingly for civilization’s policing functions. Postcolonial critiques of Conrad speak of the horror of absorption by the more powerful, imperial other.
2. That the Apocalypse imagines multiple communities and readers is evident from the various churches addressed in chapters 2-3.
3. While not an apocalyptic film, The Village (2004) provides a clear example of a society which creates monsters in order to maintain community boundaries. The titular village appears to belong to an earlier, puritanical era. It has no contact with the outside world and, in fact, much of the village’s energies are spent in maintaining strict borders vis-à-vis the surrounding woods, which are inhabited by “those of whom we do not speak.” When one transgresses the society’s rules, these monsters run amok through the terrified village. Finally, because of internal problems, the audience learns that the village is actually situated in a contemporary nature preserve and that the elders have deliberately isolated themselves from society because of the violence they had suffered in that larger society. Moreover, the elders have created—and sometimes act the part of—the monstrous “those of whom we do not speak” to police the village’s borders. That the borders also come undone because of the self-sacrificing bravery of the film’s (blind) heroine also speaks to modernity’s sense that there is something fearsome about such strict borders (see the discussion of the second horror feature below).
4. See Frilingos for a discussion of Revelation in terms of spectacle and in terms of those who see and those who are (and desire to be) seen.
5. For an argument that apocalyptic imagines external threats, like the monsters of Revelation 12-13, in order to police its own community, see Runions 2004; and Ingebretsen 1996. The former is concerned primarily with current imperial policies. Ingebretsen deals with the use of external evil in a historical survey of American literature from the Puritans to Steven King. He argues that such works create and manage fear and ultimately publicize the private to that end: “Thus it is that without force or coercive violence, a mythologized religious framework (a metaphysics) controls without seeming to control; shapes a political order while seeming indifferent to shape; relentlessly publicizes the smallest of personal details while valorizing the private in its rhetoric” (201).
6. Walliss (2008) admits that work with actual audience responses would be helpful and would indicate whether these films actually work this way (36).
7. In fact, the dragon appears only in the film’s opening and concluding sequences.
8. Two earlier scenes in the film prepare one to see this moment as Jericho’s move to “faith.” First, in the opening, the pope counsels faith, not violence, as the appropriate weapons against Satan. Second, at a later point in the film, Jericho’s mentor priest also calls for faith, not weapons, as the way to negotiate the end of days’ struggle.
9. See, e.g., The Prophecy (1995) where heavenly angels arrive and threaten humans as much as Lucifer/Satan does. Here, too, human’s own faith/self-reliance saves them (with an assist from a heavenly ray of light).
10. The crucifix stands untouched in the midst of the church’s the satanic destruction.
11. A host of critics have argued that the other is always the insider’s creation.
12. When the film was released, audiences knew that the filmmakers had worked with Joseph Campbell whose work on myth emphasized “the hero within.”
13. Scholars often see apocalyptic as a transference of creation through conflict mythology to the (present or) near future. Such creation myths were themselves often celebrated through New Year’s rituals. Intriguingly, as Jericho Cane defeats Satan’s evil plan at a church’s destroyed altar, the camera cuts repeatedly from this conflict to the New Year’s celebration transpiring outside in Times Square. For a discussion of this sequence as a sanctification of the present American Empire, see Walsh forthcoming.
14. The issue is more obvious in Donnie Darko (2001) whose protagonist sees various futures, almost all of which seem predetermined, until he elects to return to the beginning of his story (as far as the film goes) and to die a suicide in order to save the girl.
15. Super-alien aggression is another horror beyond human ken. Does the shift from gods/demons to aliens function like the shift from demon to anger in End of Days?
16. The siring of the Antichrist is the apocalyptic form of horror’s possession plot.
17. The franchise qualification is important in the case of The Omen (1976, 2006). In that film, its remake, and The Omen II: Damien (1978), the child Antichrist triumphs at the end. Finally, sacrificial human action subverts his kingdom (by assassination) in The Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981). Of course, in good apocalyptic and horror film fashion, it is not the final conflict. The child Antichrist returns, as a girl, in The Omen IV: The Awakening (1991).
18. Stigmata (1999) transforms matters differently. Although the audience does not learn it until the movie’s climax, a stigmatic priest, not a supernatural demon, possesses the stigmatic heroine Frankie. Instead of an unmanageable, supernatural horror, this device creates “comfortable” conflict between individuals. Further, even the “possessing demon” is in conflict with the (corrupt) institutional church (not Frankie) over that church’s suppression of the Jesus Gospel.
19. For some reason, the demon speaks this name backwards in English.
20. The medallion features St. Joseph and the Christ child.
21. Both novel and film deny such moral simplicities in favour of senseless evil. Horror film victims are often morally questionable, but possession victims are not typically so. E.g., in Stigmata, Frankie’s possession happens because she comes into possession of the rosary of the priest that possesses her. Moreover, when the priest investigating her case explains stigmatic attacks to her, he claims that such fates befall the intensely spiritual, not the immoral or irreligious. In The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), the young girl suffers possession because she is innocent (according to the priest responsible for her). If there is an explanation for the “possession” in the German Requiem (2006), it lies in the victim’s sensitivity, which is more a naïve suggestibility than a religious precociousness.
22. Cf. the secular version of this Zoroastrian-like pattern and the pawn-like nature of humans in No Country for Old Men (2007).
23. In private conversation, John Walliss, who has studied evangelical apocalyptic films in detail, claims that the arrival of God’s kingdom is rare even in such films, but he notes that The Omega Code 2 (2001) does show the returning Jesus’ feet and a brief shot of the New Jerusalem.
24. Even if one does not follow Schrader’s dismissal of the hierophanic quality of the epics, it is obvious that even the epics hesitate to display the divine. Typically, Christ stands in for God and that Christ is the absent center around which other characters’ stories develop, not a well-developed character (Walsh 2003, 21-43).
25. TV and franchise films are another matter. See Walsh 2009.
26. Modern film deals most obviously with mysteries beyond human ken and with issues of faith in horror. See Carroll 1990, 59-96.
27. See, e.g., The Reaping (2007) in which Exodus plagues beset a small Louisiana town. The heroine, an atheist scientist, discovers that the entire town is a demonic sect trying to sire a satanic child. Ultimately, the heroine refuses to sacrifice this child, but the final plague (the death of the first born) wipes out the sect. The heroine believes God has delivered them, but the prophetic child informs the heroine that she is pregnant with her second child, and the heroine remembers (and the audience sees) various moments in the film’s action where the prophesied demon child was to be a second-born child. Has God, then, or Satan acted? Clearly, it does not matter. The horror is the uncontrollable supernatural. The Rapture (1991) is even clearer. The heroine converts from a depraved, suicidal life to premillennial Christianity. Years later, she takes her daughter to the wilderness to await the rapture. When it does not occur, she kills her daughter to send her to heaven. When she cannot kill herself, matters turn surreal. Either the apocalypse occurs or the heroine imagines it. Refusing to participate in the rapture, she is left behind forever (the last word in the film) because she cannot love a God who let her kill her daughter. Here, stands the alienated individual of modernity before a truly horrifying God.
28. For Freud, the uncanny is the revival of ideas— including animism, magic, omnipotent thoughts, involuntary repetition, and ghosts—in anxious situations that modern rationalism normally represses. The ideas sound like a primer for biblical style, at the heart of which stands the overwhelming divine (or the divine sovereignty, if one prefers).
29. For Carlos Fuentes, “perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror” (253).
30. See Beal 2002, 89-101, for a discussion of Leviathan in the context of religion and horror. Beal, 71-85, also discusses the Apocalypse as horror as does Pippin1 1999, 78-116.
31. Derrida warns that “every language on the apocalypse is also apocalyptic” (1982, 90). In other words, critics often fall into an apocalyptic tone when writing of the dangers of apocalyptic.
32. To avoid this peril, Stephen Moore (2006, 119-23) and Catherine Keller (2005, 151) call for non-imperial visions of God. Cf. Crossan’s call for a comic, non-final eschatology (1976, 17-50, 146-49); and Walsh forthcoming.
33. Frailty (2001) displays the horror of consuming visions. The film’s protagonist offers to identify the God’s Hand Killer for an FBI agent and explains this serial killer’s creation by a father who believed God had appointed the family as apocalyptic demon slayers. Ultimately, however, the film reveals the protagonist to be the father’s successor in the demon-slaying business and the FBI agent to be the last demon (in the film’s action). While the audience may not accept the protagonist’s view of reality (it is only a horror movie), the audience has little room to deviate. See Walsh 2010, 39-49. With the Book of Revelation and its many true believers, matters are far more imperial and serious. See Walsh forthcoming.
34. The perplexing Southland Tales (2006), by the director of Donnie Darko, is more comic. Despite various apocalypses and a narrator who quotes Revelation repeatedly while standing guard on Southland’s borders (apocalyptically enforcing community borders), one character, who has dual personas (Roland and Ronald Taverner) because of a rift in time, meets and forgives himself in the film’s apocalyptic climax. Self-forgiveness subverts the guilt induced by the policing super-ego. Does self-forgiveness, then, subvert apocalypse? See Quinby forthcoming.