Cowboys & Aliens

I laughed when I saw the trailer of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) - IMDb the other night. It looked like yet an other B movie to watch for a few laughs when there is nothing else on TV.

But actually it didn't turn out to be quite as bad as that. District 9 it wasn't, but it wasn't bad as a piece of no-brain-strain entertainment. And in the end we didn't even laugh at it. Though it was a blending of genres, unlike District 9 and Avatar, it didn't satirise either genre. It just combined them.

And it was the combining of the genres that seemed to make it worth blogging about. When I saw the trailer it seemed as if it would be anachronistic and a kind of "jump the shark" thing. Westerns are set in the 19th century, and space aliens are set in the mid-20th century, and that's where they belong, in human culture anyway. But if you think about it, if there are intelligent races from other planets or other galaxies, whiy should they visit Earth just at the time when we, or some of us, are culturally ready to think that they might? They could conceivably visit earth at any time. One could just as easily make a movie about Vikings and Aliens, or Aztecs and Aliens, or Julius Caesar's Alien wars. And then there are people who are convinced that the prophet Ezekiel was describing an alien spacecraft in Ezekiel chapter 1.

Give a dog a bad name

"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."

Such was the reply often given to playground taunts and insults in my youth.

But a recent discussion on the alt.usage.english newsgroup puts a new slant on it.

People were discussing the remake of the film The Dam Busters, a true story of how the British attacked German dams in WW2 by using an ingenious technique to drop bombs where they would be most effective.

Apparently the remake hit a snag.

Squadron Leader Guy Gibson, who led the raid, had a pet dog, a black Labrador called "Nigger", and it was decided to use the dog's name as a code name to indicate that the first raid had been successful.

The WikiPedia page on the film, and the proposed remake, describes the problem as follows The Dam Busters (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The British Channel 4 screened the censored American version in July 2007, in which the dialogue was dubbed so as to call the dog Trigger, this screening taking place just after the planned remake was announced. For the remake, Peter Jackson has said no decision has been made on the dog's name, but is in a "no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenario", as changing the name could be seen as too much political correctness, while not changing the name could offend people. Further, executive producer Sir David Frost was quoted in The Independent as stating: "Guy sometimes used to call his dog Nigsy, so I think that's what we will call it. Stephen has been coming up with other names, but this is the one I want." In June 2011, Stephen Fry mentioned in an interview that the dog would be called Digger in the remake to avoid offending modern audiences. In September 2007, as part of the BBC Summer of British Film series, The Dam Busters was shown at selected cinemas across the UK in its uncut format.

The discussion on alt.usage.english was mainly concerned with the issue of the dog's name. The original name is now regarded as offensive in America, so using it might harm the film at the box office. But changing the name of the dog would be historically inaccurate.

Discussion went back and forth for a while, and eventually someone said:

I don't see what harm it does to change the dog's name consistently in the dialogue, just so people don't repeatedly cringe until it gets run over. (I haven't seen the original film; I'm trusting what someone else said in this thread.) They could put a note up at the beginning or end of the film briefly explaining the deviation from historical accuracy.

And Peter Brooks of Cape Town made a comment that put the whole discussion in perspective:

Cringe? There's a film showing people getting ready to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians by drowning and people watching it cringe because of the name given to a dog? What kind of perverted system of values could lead to that?

Another Wikipedia article describes the results of the first raid Möhne Reservoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The resulting huge floodwave killed at least 1579 people, 1026 of them foreign forced labourers held in camps downriver. The small city of Neheim-Hüsten was particularly hard-hit with over 800 victims, among them at least 526 victims in a camp for Russian women held for forced labour.

District 9 versus Avatar

Last year I blogged about two science fiction films that had been nominated for Oscars: Oscar battle: District 9 versus Avatar |Khanya, though in the end neither of them won and the winner was a film that had a meaningless (to me) title The hurt locker.

I had seen District 9 when it was first released, and blogged about it here, but had not seen Avatar until it was shown on TV a couple of nights ago, so now, for the first time, I'm in a position to compare them, though I should probably watch District 9 again, as it's 18 months since I saw it.

I hadn't realised that Avatar was satire until I saw it. Most of the descriptions I'd read suggested it was a kind of parable of colonialism, and that while it was science fiction, and so broadly in the same genre as District 9 I didn't realise how directly comparable they were.

I enjoyed Avatar, but I think District 9 was better.

In District 9 the satire works at multiple levels, not least because it satirises the genre itself. In one scene, where the protagonist Wikus van der Merwe is driving a robocop-type machine, it could even be satirising Avatar. In District 9 there are no good guys, there are wheels within wheels and plots within plots and the satire is liberally splashed on everyone.

Spoiler altert - if you haven't seen Avatar, what follows gives away the plot

Avatar, by contrast, is much more simple. It is like an old-fashioned Western, where the white hats fight the black hats, and the white hats always win.

The plot can be summarised in one sentence: Redskins fight Palefaces; Redskins win and send Palefaces home.

Only in this case the redskins are blue, and "home" is another planet.

In District 9 the aliens are stranded on earth, in an anything but beautiful environment. In Avatar the earthlings themselves are the aliens, out to rape the planet of its mineral wealth and exterminate any natives that get in their way. The natives, Na'vi, live in a beautiful environment that the alien earthlings destroy, and it is an environment that earthlings cannot even live in. They can only enter it by creating remotely controlled avatars, using alien DNA - another parallel with District 9, where Wikus van der Merwe becomes contaminated with alien DNA, which makes him a desirable property to corporate and Nigerian gangsters.

On another level Avatar has parallels with C.S. Lewis's novel Out of the silent planet, which has the same theme of science and high finance in an uneasy partnership to exploit another planet, Malacandra (Mars). In Lewis's book the natives have a similar relationship to a planetary deity, the Oyarsa, as the Na'vi in Avatar have with their deity Eywa. But Out of the silent planet doesn't end with the same shoot-'em-up scenes as Avatar.

Avatar is entertaining and has a moral message, and no doubt deserved the Oscar it got for special effects, but it falls a long way short of District 9

Film remakes

My wife says there's a movie on TV that's just starting -- The taking of Pelham 123. I ask her if it's the real one or the remake, and she says it's the remake, so I say I'll give it a miss.

I'm not sure why I have such a strong aversion to films that are remakes. Perhaps it's the lack of imagination that gets filmmakers to do remakes of films that were either quite good, and didn't need remaking, like The flight of the Phoenix, or else were rather mediocre, and the remake was no improvement, like The Poiseidon adventure.

The taking of Pelham 123 was one of the former. If they showed the original on TV, I'd like to watch it. It they showed the original on one evening and the remake on the following, I might watch both for purposes of comparison, but if they show the remake on its own, I'm not interested.

I can understand a remake if there have been technical advances that make a difference -- such as a remake with sound of a previously silent movie, or a colour version of a previously black and white one (one of that category that I did watch was Titanic, though it wasn't, in my view, an improvement on A night to remember). But remaking The taking of Pelham 123 seemed entirely unnecessary on all counts.

But perhaps I'm just funny that way, and getting old and curmudgeonly. I didn't watch the original Ocean's 11 because it had Frank Sinatra in it. And I didn't see the remake because it didn't.

Fascist digital technology in "The Priest" movie

It seems there has been quite a spectacular anachronism in the film The Priest

Interfax-Religion:

Fascist digital technologies in The Priest movie


Scene from The Priest film about the WWII.
Look at German soldier's camera.
In the evening, he will go to his barrack with an Internet access terminal, post it on his page in the German Classmates and write to Fuhrer in Twitter…

This is England

I've just been watching a flim on TV, This is England.

It was made a couple of years ago, but was set in England in about 1982, during the Falklands War. It's about a boy who is bullied at school and befriended by a gang of skinheads, and begins to hang out with them, and enjoys their friendship, but then an older former leader of the gang is released from prison, and a darker side emerges, as he is an English nationalist, and the gang splits as racism and xenophobia intrude.

I won't say more about the plot in case anyone reading this hasn't seen it, and don't want to add plot spoilers.

But I was very conscious of it being an England I had missed entirely.

I visited England twice. Once in the mid-sixties, when I spent two and a half years there, mostly studying in Durham, but also driving buses in London, described, in part, in another blog post on Swinging London in retrospect. The second visit was about three years ago, much shorter, a three week holiday visiting old friends and relations.

After nearly 40 years there were many changes. One of the most noticable was that in the 1960s there had been an industrial working class. There were factory workers, coal miners and others. Forty years later most people seemed to be employed in service industries.

Nowadays the transition seems to be marked by the jokes on motoring programmes on TV -- about the Japanese failure to make proper motorbikes that leaked oil, or proper cars that broke down.

But the film showed something I had missed, that marked the transition -- the Thatcher years.

I'm sure that the film does not tell the full story of those years, and that there were lots of other things that happened. But during both my visits to Britain there was a Labour government, and it seemed a little bit more sunny and cheerful and optimistic.

I'd be interested in knowing if people who lived through the Thatcher years and saw the film think it is true to life.

Catching up on the blogroll and tying threads together

December has been a somewhat broken blogging month.

A couple of weeks ago there was a storm that knocked out our phone lines for a couple of days -- a cable struck by lightning or something. No sooner had that come back than we lost web access -- run out of bandwidth again, halfway through the month! No I don't do YouTube and podcasts, so it must be someone else in the family -- perhaps my son downloading updates to his graphics program, which he's using to draw fleas.

Then it comes back, and then it's off again. Telkom has a thing that lets you buy extra bandwidth now, but it doesn't seem to work. There's a problem, they apparently didn't like my credit card, so I report the problem but there's no feedback. They simply don't reply. Later my wife tries with her credit card, and that works, so we are back on the web, but for how long I don't know.

So I try to catch up with blogs I read -- starting first by checking on visitors to my blogs who have either left comments, or who have left a record of having visited through MyBlogLog. Then I go on to my blogroll, and so eventually discover several others who have been blogging on similar topics to me, so here is some of the catchup, and linking similar threads together. Some of them have been on my other blog, Khanya, which I use for afternoon and evening blogging, since Blogger works only in the morning. If it were afternoon now, I'd be blogging this on Khanya too, but since it's before noon, I'll use Blogger while it's working.

Christian responses to witchcraft and sorcery

This is a topic that has long been of interest to me, and I recently blogged about it on my Khanya blog, noting an apparent difference between Christian responses in Southern and Eastern Africa, and those in Western and Central Africa, notably in Nigeria and the DRC. And this seems to be spreading to the Western world as well, through the African disapora.

In my catchup, first through MyBlogLog and then through my blogroll, I discovered that some of my blogging friends have also been blogging on this topic:

• Yvonne Aburrow (Nemeton) in Save the witch children
• Phil Wyman in Square No More: The Children of Pentecostal Theology and Square No More: Persecution of "Child Witches" in Kinshasa

If you're interested in the topic, those are well worth a read.

We've also been discussing it in the AIC mailing list. One things that strikes me about all this is that it seems to point to a significant divergence between Pentecostal and Neopentecostal theology, and between the attitude of Zionist and other "Spirit-type" African independent churches (AICs) on the one hand, and Neopentecostal AICs on the other.

I say "seems to point" because there does not seem to have been enough research on this topic. It's something that needs urgent attention from African and Pentecostal theology researchersbecause people are dying, and so far the reasons are mostly based on guesswork.

For me there are at least three big questions, probably more:

1. What is the reason for the apparent differences between Eastern and Southern Africa and Western and Central Africa?
2. What is the difference between Pentecostal/Zionist theology on the one hand, and Neopentecostal theology on the other?
3. What is the link between Neopentecostal theology and Neoliberalism? How far have Neopentecostals bought into the Neoliberal ideology, and is Neopentecostalism simply a contextualisation of the gospel in a Neoliberal worldview (thinking of economic liberalism rather than political liberalism here).
   

The Golden Compass

Before the film The Golden Compass (based on Philip Pullman's novel Northern Lights) was released, there was an SMS campaign by some people in South Africa urging people to boycott the film. I blogged about this at The Golden compass -- to boycott or not to boycott. When the film was released I went to see it, and enjoyed it, but found it rather over-simplified. But once again, I've discovered some of my blogging friends had written far better reviews than I could:

• Yvonne Aburrow at Northern Lights
• Iambic Admonit at Golden Compass review

The first is from a neopagan, and the second from a Christian perspective, and both are well worth reading. Lots of people have written reviews of the film, but these are two of the best.

Iambic Admonit: review of "The Golden Compass"

A very good review of the film The Golden Compass, and also the books on which it is based.

Iambic Admonit:

Now, let’s move to the next phase of discussion: The Golden Compass as a film adaptation of the book.

This is definitely one of the most satisfying book-to-movie adaptations I have seen. There was a lot of plot streamlining, some character merging, and a good deal of simplification that happened in the transition process. However, these simplifications are necessary in order to adapt a novel of 350 pages into a 2 hour movie. I would have been happy had the filmmakers decided to go the Lord-of-the-Rings-three-plus-hour-epic route. The book deserved it. But I’m happy that there were no shocking plot changes (like in Frankenstein--the 1931 version, which I saw recently) or character destructions (like Faramir) or ridiculous additions (like the atrocious riding the ice scene in LWW!) or pervasive alterations of tone and emphasis (like in the beautiful new Pride & Prejudice). I have only two criticisms.

Well worth reading.

Pan's Labyrinth

Having read a great deal about Pan's Labyrinth on other blogs several months ago (for example Theofantastique), I had to wait impatiently for it to be released in South Africa, and wondered if it ever would be.

I finally got to see it last night, and it lived up to expectations. Even my wife enjoyed it, and she is not normally a fan of horror films, and this one, as those who have seen it will know, is a blend of fantasy, horror, and stark brutal realism.

It probably had a greater impact on me because I'm in the middle of reading George Bizos's Odyssey to freedom, a memoir of his time as a human rights lawyer in the apartheid era. Pan's Labyrinth is set in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, where Franco's fascist forces are mopping up the remaining groups of Republican insurgents hiding out in the woods.

The villain of the film, Captain Vidal, could stand in for just about any of the police witnesses that George Bizos had crossexamined in court, when any evidence of torture of political detainees was denounced by prosecutors, and sometimes by the flagrantly biased judges, as attempts to besmirch the good name of the South African Police.

I wonder if the release of the film in South Africa wasn't timed to coincide with the release of Bizos's book. In the torture scenes in the film I kept thinking of the lonely death of Steve Biko, or the defenestration of Phakamile Mabija, a church youth minister who was being interrogated by the Security Police in Kimberley. The day we heard the news of his death, I was with a group of people who were saying Anglican Evening Prayer, and the Psalm set for the day was Psalm 94, which seemed most appropriate, especially verses 20-21:

You never consent to that corrupt tribunal
that imposes disorder as law
that takes the life of the virtuous
and condemns the innocent to death.

About 10 years ago I tried to write a children's fantasy novel set in the apartheid era, with a similar blend of fantasy and reality. It wasn't very good, and was probably too dark for a children's novel, so I abandoned it. But one thing different about Pan's Labyrinth was that the this worldly and other worldly realms appeared to have different agendas, which coincided quite coincidentally, as when the little girl's ailing mother gets better following the advice of the faun who sets her tasks for the other world. In this there are echoes of Narnia, where the young Digory Kirk is seeking an apple from Eden to heal his sick mother.

But there are also sharp contrasts with Narnia. In Narnia the faun, Tumnus, regrets and repents of his role as a Security Police informer, and ends up being detained himself, but in Pan's Labyrinth the faun turns out to be not much different from Captain Vidal, demanding unconditional obedience in the same terms and in the same tone of voice.

I go out to see films about once or twice a year, and Pan's Labyrinth was well worth seeing. Thanks to all my blogging friends who wrote reviews of it and made me want to see it. If it weren't for that I would probably have missed it.

The image of Christianity in films - synchroblog

I'm approaching this topic from a personal point of view, commenting on the influence that some films have had on me, bearing some relation to the Christian faith.

Perhaps I should begin by saying that until the age of 11 I was a heathen. My parents were atheist/agnostic and we never went to church as a family. The first time I went to church was with a friend who took me to the local Anglican church on Christmas day. The next year I went to a Methodist school, but the maths teacher, who was also responsible for teaching us "scripture" did not believe much either, and fulfilled his responsibility by getting us to read the Bible aloud in turns, starting with Genesis 1:1.

By the end of the year I'd developed a taste for it, and surprised my mother by asking for a Bible for my birthday, and read it through in about 16 months, and started again with a new edition that had the Apocrypha. We also got some new teachers, ardent evangelicals, who organised voluntary Bible study groups and placed what I'd read in an evangelical framework, and convinced me of the need to make a conscious personal commitment to Christ as Lord and Saviour, which I did at the age of 13.

A couple of years later I went with my mother to see a film called Lease of life. She wanted to see it because Robert Donat was in it. I had never heard of Robert Donat, but went along anyway because I had nothing better to do. It was about a school chaplain, and when it began I prepared to be bored. I was at a school that had a chaplain, and didn't find any of them inspiring or interesting. I've forgotten most of the film now, but this chaplain bloke had some kind of incurable disease, and knowing that his time was short inspired him to preach more interesting sermons to the kids. That bit stuck with me, and I could say influenced my choice of career, a choice that horrified me every time I thought of it, and then images from the film would pop up in my mind, and I'd calm down.

The next one that made an impression was Dracula. This was a straightforward horror flick, and I'd read the book first, and enjoyed it. I've seen the film a couple of times since then, and read the book 4-5 times. One scene from the film and the book always returns to me whenever a certain theological point comes up. As C.S. Lewis points out, when considering the devil, there are two opposite errors to be avoided. One is to believe that he does not exist, and the other is to be excessively concerned about and afraid of demons and the devil. The devil has power over us only if we let him. Since the death and resurrection of Christ the final result of the conflict between good and evil has not been in doubt. The devil is an oxymoron, a powerless force. And whenever I discuss this point the image of Lucy Westenra in the house at Whitby comes to mind. Dracula is powerless to enter the house unless one of the inmates invites him, and Lucy Westenra does, partly because of the overprotectiveness of her friends and family.

I'll now jump ahead, from my teenage years to middle age, when I was teaching missiology (the study of Christian mission) at the University of South Africa. There were two films that I recommended by students to see, both about Christian mission in South America. One was The mission, about Jesuit missions in the 17th century. The second was At play in the fields of the Lord, about Protestant missions in the 20th century. Between them these two films raised about half the issues that students were expected to deal with in the course, and write assignments on -- mission and colonialism, mission and culture, inculturation. Ideally I would like to have had the students at a camp in the bush for a weekend (in South Africa we call that a "bosberaad" -- bush council), show them both films and then get them to discuss them, then watch the films again and discuss them some more.

The Jesuit method, shown in The mission, was to create utopian Christian communities for their converts, where they were protected from the wicked world of both their pagan compatriots and those of the missionaries, the colonial capitalist exploiters. It was in some ways a magnificent vision, but also a misguided one. The new Christians lived a communal (and communist) life in an environment in which Christian virtues could be nourished -- until the outside world, in the form of the colonialist exploiters, intruded. The power of secular businessmen got the Jesuits suppressed, and it was the Jesuits who resisted the genocide of the local people. But when the Jesuits were suppressed, the flower of Christianity they nurtured wilted and died. And the reason is not far to seek. They failed absolutely to raise up local leadership. Everything was under the absolute control of the Jesuit missionaries. When the missionaries left, the vision could not be sustained. They had failed to pass on the vision. They had failed to do what St Paul recommends in II Timothy 2:2 - find reliable men they could teach who could in turn teach others.

Their ideal Christian communities were ruled by an authoritarian paternalism. And the name of these communities has come down to us in the 21st century with more ominous connotations. The name reducciones has been translated as "protected villages", but another name for them is "concentration camps". They were used by the British in the Anglo-Boer War. They were used by the Portuguese in the Mocambique liberation war, and have been used by various 20th-century dictators to control their opposition.

At play in the fields of the Lord is based on a novel by Peter Matthiesen, but I only managed to find a copy of the novel to read long after I had seen the film. Two American Protestant missionaries are trying to evangelise indigenous people of the Equatorial jungle. One is more culturally sensitive than the other, which leads to tensions between them. Civilisation, in the form of the government, is encroaching, and wants to dispossess the indigenous people so they can exploit the land, and the missionaries, who understand a great deal less than the Jesuits, are torn between having to please the government officials, whom they depend on for permission to stay there, and loyalty to their home mission society and the people they are sent to, all of whom have conflicting interests. Into the equation comes a charter pilot, who had been involved in various activities of dubious legality. He is descended from North American Indians, and finds himself called to what he sees as his cultural roots by the South American Indians.

An interesting difference between these two films is the way Christianity is presented. The mission presents Christianity in a very positive light, as the protector of the indigenous people against the cruel capitalist exploiters. The negative aspects are played down.

At play in the fields of the Lord tends to accentuate the negative aspects, and the Christian missionaries are shown as largely ineffectual, unable to comprehend what is going on. They are a bit more savvy in the book than in the film, but that, if anything, makes it worse. But I must say I have met missionaries like that, and the ones shown in the film were quite true to life. The only thing is that they are not all like that.

So there you have it. Four different films, of different eras, each saying something about the Christian faith, yet quite different from each other in many ways.

See what the other synchrobloggers have to say on Christianity and film:

• Adam Gonnerman pokes at The Spider's Pardon
• David Fisher thinks that Jesus Loves Sci-Fi
• John Morehead considers Christians and Horror Redux: From Knee-Jerk Revulsion to Critical Engagement
• Marieke Schwartz lights it up with Counter-hegemony: Jesus loves Borat
• Mike Bursell muses about Christianity at the Movies
• Jenelle D'Alessandro tells us Why Bjork Will Never Act Again
• Cobus van Wyngaard contemplates Theology and Film (as art)
• Tim Abbott tells us to Bring your own meaning...?
• Sonja Andrews visits The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:Christ in Spaghetti Westerns
• Steve Hollinghurst takes a stab at The Gospel according to Buffy
• Les Chatwin insists We Don't Need Another Hero
• Lance Cummings says The Wooden Wheel keeps Turning
• John Smulo weaves a tale about Spiderman 3 and the Shadow
• Josh Rivera spells well with Christian Witchcraft
• Phil Wyman throws out the Frisbee: Time to Toss it Back
• Sally Coleman rushes up with Making Connections- films as a part of a mythological tradition
• Kim Paffenroth ponders Nihilism lite

And a couple of late entry honorary synchrobloggers:

• Crystal writes on Movie recommendations for the Pope
• Elizaphanian writes on Apologia pro video sua

Christianity and horror

Thanks to Elizaphanian: a Christian perspective on horror for pointing to this very interesting interview: FilmChat: Scott Derrickson -- the interview.

Speaking of film, Derrickson says that the horror genre "distinguishes and articulates the essence of good and evil better than any other genre" and when asked about the fantasy genre, Derrickson said:

The evil within the fantasy genre tends to be threatening to the heroes within the story, but not to the reader -- or not to the viewer, in the case of cinema -- and that's why I think it's more palatable, and something that is more easily embraced for a lot of people. Because it does deal directly with good and evil, but it doesn't serve to actually render feelings of fear and terror within the reader, in the case of literature, or within the viewer, in the case of cinema.

I've enjoyed horror films and horror literature since my youth, a taste perhaps fostered by two English teachers I had when I was about 9-10 years old, Murray Bissett and Wilfred Noriskin, both of whom encouraged creative writing and imagination. Murray Bissett, in particular, read us ghost stories, and the boundary between ghost stories and horror stories is often hard to determine. One of the first stories he read us was The ash tree which sounded considerably more horrific to our ears than the author intended, since we pictured a ghostly undead revenant tree, which had resurrected itself from the ashes in the grate, or a forest fire, and planted itself, grey and ghostly with blackened branches, outside a house to haunt the inhabitants. It was only much later that I learnt that there were living, green and growing trees called "ash".

When I was in high school I discovered a two-volume collection of short stories in a book case at home, edited by Dorothy Sayers, called Detection, mystery, horror. The detection section went unread, the mystery section I read once, but the horror section I read again and again. Two stories in the collection stood out, The Wendigo and Couching at the door..

Not long after that I discovered Dracula, and The devil rides out, by Dennis Wheatley, both classic horror stories of their time. But after leaving school I read very few horror stories, mainly because they were so difficult to come by. There was a film, The innocents based on Henry James's ghost story The turn of the screw.

The genre has various names, or perhaps there are overlapping genres -- horror, supernatural fiction, ghost stories. "Supernatural fiction" seems to cover most of them. And in that category most of Charles Williams's novels seem to fall, with All Hallows Eve and Descent into hell being ghost stories, and Many dimensions having elements of classic horror.

But as I got older, perhaps my taste got jaded, and most of the "horror" stories ceased to horrify. There was a sort of "I've heard it all before" feel. Horror films were even less effective, with too much reliance on special effects and distracting one from the plot with "I wonder how they did that" thoughts.

Of these authors, Charles Williams was Christian, and so was Sayers, though she was an editor rather than an author when it came to horror, and did not write much herself.

Among more recent authors associated with the horror genre is Stephen King, but many of his books are thinly disguised science fiction, where the source of the horror seems to be something that came from outer space (Desperation, It, The tommyknockers). His Pet sematary, Needful things and Salem's lot are closer to classic horror in the sense of supernatural stories. But even these seem to be nihilist rather than Christian, as far as the examination of evil is concerned. The supernatural evil is just there, as in H.P. Lovecraft's Chthulu mythos. The actual struggle between good and evil takes place at a much more mundane and human level, in the lives of the characters. And when one sees it in that way, it can actually throw some light on the Christian understanding of spiritual warfare, as discussed in the recent synchroblog. So, for example, in Pet sematary the family of the protagonist is visited hy evil revenants, but the battle is not fought primarily between the protagonist and these, but within the heart of the protagonist himself. It is the devices and desires of our own hearts that lead us astray.

This can also be seen in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The vampire, for all his evil powers, cannot enter the house and harm the inhabitants unless one of the inmates invites him in. Or, as St Peter puts it, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you."

But for all its value in showing the battle between good and evil, horror is limited, because one becomes sated. Myth and fantasy go deeper, despite Derrickson's reservations. But I would like to issue a challenge to Derrickson: make a film of a Charles Williams novel. That would be a real achievement.



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