Refiner’s Fire: Of Heroes and Devils: The Supernatural on Film

The devil, it seems, is upon us. That is, if the mass media is to be believed. The resurgence of interest in satanism and the occult, begun several years ago, shows no signs of abating. Recently film producers have given us The Omen, the first in a projected series on the anti-Christ, Carrie, a repressed high school student with murderous secret powers, and Exorcist II, the sequel to The Exorcist. These themes have made an impact on our cultural and moral climate.

What is an appropriate Christian reaction to all this? It is easy to ignore it by withdrawing to a cloistered Christian community. Peter shows this tendency on the Mount of Transfiguration; he wants to stay up there. But Christ will not live on a mountain top. He returns to the world; Paul tells us to take up God’s armor; Peter warns us to be vigilant. Clearly we are called to battle.

But a battle demands a strategy. Too often evangelicals condemn something without knowing the facts. Before we react to this trend in the theater we need to recognize that the interest in the occult began with the Church.

The origin of the modern treatment of satanism dates back to the Middle Ages. Confronted with a largely illiterate laity, church leaders had to devise a means of teaching that did not depend on reading. One way was the medieval mystery play, a drama often performed in front of the cathedrals. These plays dealt allegorically with the conflict between God and Satan, Christ and anti-Christ. Characters represented saints, angels, and demons. The seven deadly sins were personified. The purpose of these dramas was to show God’s eventual victory. The theology of medieval Christian Europe formed the background for legends of vampires, werewolves, and other demonic forces.

In the late eighteenth century the Gothic novel became popular. Our modera witch tales grew from that genre. At first these stories only hinted at the presence of the supernatural; the mysterious events were rationally explained at the end. The most famous Gothic novel, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is the prototype of the modern thriller and detective story.

Two years after Radcliffe’s book was published the Gothic novel took a new turn with Matthew Lewis’s spectacularly popular book, The Monk. The story reworded the Faust theme, and returned to the theological premises of the medieval supernatural legends. The book represented a major development in rejecting the secular ideology of the Enlightenment and offered a basically Christian, if overly sensationalized, rendering of the God/Satan conflict. The value of The Monk is its ability to present in a popular, symbolic form essential truths about the nature and fall of man. The Monk is the prototype of the classic Victorian horror stories: Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The modern horror story is essentially a Christian art form. We should not be put off by the often degenerate popular forms these symbols have taken more recently. Anyone who carefully reads Dracula or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cannot miss the symbolic presentation of the biblical conflict between good and evil. Dracula introduces a modern version of a key medieval character: the wise and spiritually pure Christian warrior whose task it is to defeat the forces of Satan in God’s name. Such a character has his roots in Charlemagne, St. George, and Sir Galahad. In Dracula he emerges as Abraham Van Helsing, metaphysician and doctor, who uses prayer and Christian symbols to defeat Dracula, symbol of the anti-Christ.

Like their medieval mystery counterparts, these classic tales have unquestioned value in dramatically portraying a Christian view of good and evil. At the time of its publication Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the subject of countless sermons that drew on its fanciful but gripping imagery of man’s struggle with temptation. In our own day, Charles Williams has used fantastic literature to communicate Christian truth; All Hollow’s Eve and War in Heaven are written in a style that clearly evokes the Gothic novel.

But most people know the Gothic story line more through films than books. Several critics think that Gothic films serve as an index to a nation or culture’s ultimate hopes, fears, and beliefs. Siegfried Kracaur, for example, in his book From Calgari to Hitler argues that the German fantasy film of the twenties shows the mind set that surfaced in the thirties as Nazism. From 1920 to 1926 the Germans filmed popular versions of Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as specific German legends such as The Golem and The Student of Prague. A film like The Golem already contains the idea that the Jews traffic in occult forces, an idea that Hitler could transform into the “Jewish world conspiracy.”

Interestingly enough the Van Helsing hero is not really found in these films, not even in the Dracula of 1922. Much more evident is his Victorian first cousin, Sherlock Holmes. Though not a “Christian warrior” Holmes does reflect a Christian moral world view. Despite being a rationalist hero, he does have brushes with apparently supernatural figures out of medieval legend, especially as his creator Arthur Conan Doyle became more interested in spiritualism and psychic phenomena. Holmes’s most supernatural adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles was filmed numerous times in Germany during the rise of Nazism and a copy of the film was found in Hitler’s personal library.

The Gothic film has usually surfaced in times of national distress. After post-war Germany the next wave appeared in the United States during the depression (1931–1936). The most significant films of this era, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are quite theological. The 1932 Jekyll presents the futility of justification by good works more graphically than any church-produced film. The Van Helsing of this era was the fine character actor Edward Van Sloan. Slow and deliberate in manner, he gave the impression of a wise old teacher. People have objected that the Dracula films present Christian symbols as little more than white magic talismen. And there is some truth to this. Nonetheless, with Dracula and the rest of the Gothic tradition we are dealing with folklore and symbolism. Since Dracula is only a symbol, Christianity, too, is presented in symbolic form through the cross, the Bible, or Holy Water. Symbols cannot present all biblical truth, but they can communicate certain truths and for this reason they are found in Scripture itself. The effect is lost when we try to be literal about such imagery; this is like asking the date of “once upon a time.”

From 1936 to 1939 very few Gothic films were produced. The outbreak of World War II brought another wave of them. Sequels to the earlier films were produced (Son of Frankenstein, Son of Dracula). Earlier classics were refilmed in spectacular fashion: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1944). Smaller productions with penny dreadful titles like The Return of the Vampire (1944) dealt effectively with Satan, temptation, and redemption and used medieval symbolism.

After World War II the Gothic film lay dormant until the late fifties when it reappeared in Great Britain. Terence Fisher, considered by some people the greatest director in the history of film, graphically used Christian symbols. No one has ever done it so explicitly, and that occasionally flawed his films. Still, Fisher gave film one of its greatest Christian warriors. His Van Helsing, played by the distinguished actor Peter Cushing, is a virile crusader against satanic forces. New Testament scholars would be astounded to hear Fisher’s Van Helsing tracing the origin of vampirism back to the second-century mystery religions. Peter Cushing also played a metaphysically oriented Sherlock Holmes for Fisher in a fine remake of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Fisher’s heroes are practical men who realize the satanic nature of evil and the need to combat it on a spiritual level. Despite some misfires Fisher produced a series of minor masterpieces: Dracula (1958), Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) (Fisher’s Frankenstein films were about the scientist, not the monster, and represent an attack on secular science’s more grandiose assumptions), Brides of Dracula (1960), Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and The Devil Rides Out (1967). Fisher’s successes were widely imitated throughout the sixties.

That brings us to the present Gothic film. No longer appealing only to a select audience, these films now play to a general public that is often ignorant of their roots and their long history. The current wave of Gothic films began in 1967 with Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (or Fearless Vampire Killers), a spoof of Fisher’s Dracula films. This film introduces two themes that break with all Gothic film up to that point. The first is the eclipse of the Gothic hero. The second is the triumph of evil. Polanski’s film portrays Van Helsing as a blundering dolt whose misguided efforts actually aid evil. Polanski further developed these themes the following year in Rosemary’s Baby. Here the closest thing to a Van Helsing figure is Rosemary’s actor friend, portrayed by Maurice Evans. He falls victim to a witch’s curse and Rosemary is left alone with the witches. She gives birth to the anti-Christ and evil triumphs. That same year, 1968, young British director Michael Reeves made a remarkable film dealing with the seventeenth century witch hunts. Witchfinder General shows good and evil feeding off each other; the distinction between the two is blurred.

The Exorcist (1973) borrowed heavily from Fisher and Polanski. Father Merrin is an old and infirm Van Helsing figure. At first he shows strength in combating the demon, but his heart gives out before the exorcism can be completed. Perhaps the best adjective to describe this film is ugly. The symbolic character of the old Gothic films is gone. Whereas the older films caught something of the cosmic nature of evil, this realistic approach reduced satanic activity to the possession of a small girl in an otherwise secular world. The metaphor is mixed and it is not surprising that the ending is ambiguous. Fisher went to see The Exorcist reluctantly and was appalled by it.

Current films such as The Omen and Carrie continue this trend. The fairy tale quality of the earlier films, often their saving grace, is missing. The Omen is filled with classic Gothic trappings, but the book of Revelation is treated like a medieval werewolf legend. The primary effect of the story is to suggest that the anti-Christ is a myth, not in the sense of a symbol that stands for a greater reality but as a fable that has no reality. The Van Helsing figure once again is old and weak; evil triumphs. Brian De Palma’s Carrie is another step down. Its Christian symbols are a hodgepodge of Baptist fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism. The extreme viciousness of many of its characters is never adequately explained and their general fiendishness makes the last half hour of the film an unrelenting blood bath. Here the lines of good and evil are so blurred that it’s impossible to speak of a conflict between them.

If Van Helsing has fared poorly of late, Sherlock Holmes has done no better. Portrayed by Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing, Holmes could serve as a symbol of Christian morality. Few films in the present Holmes revival have anything to do with the Conan Doyle stories. Holmes, like Van Helsing, is weakened and compromised. Film directors reject a strong moral symbol. At the same time people seem fascinated by the character. The symbol may no longer stand for a moral reality but people somehow wish it still did.

While we should criticize the current excesses of the Gothic film, we should also heed its warnings. These films may only be reflecting our present moral climate. Why has the triumph of evil apparently become a resounding symbol of our time? The question is not easy. Part of the answer lies with the incessant accounts of war, corruption, and torture that seem destined to dominate the news for the remainder of this century. The symbol of a “Christian warrior” is only intelligible if in fact there are Christian warriors visibly “putting on the whole armor of God.”

Paul Leggett teaches at the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano in San Jose, Costa Rica.

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