Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Church Potluck serves up thoughtful, friendly, informal conversation at the intersection of Christianity and contemporary culture. Just like a church potluck, we offer variety: a variety of topics, a variety of academic disciplines, and a variety of Christian traditions. Guests are friends and colleagues who are also experts in the fields of sociology, political science, theology, philosophy, divinity, and more.
Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Movie Review: "Sinners" and Other Horror Films with Christian Themes
The Core Four return for a post-finals horror-themed episode of Church Potluck! After a movie night together, Dale and his guests (Christy, Mike, and Michael) discuss Sinners, a new horror film with bold religious and cultural themes. They unpack everything from the film’s unexpected twists and theological metaphors to its commentary on colonial Christianity, music as sacred memory, and the seduction of "polite evil." Then, the group shares their favorite horror movies with spiritual themes—ranging from The Exorcist to I Am Legend. Plus, a game of "Vampire or Theologian?" that goes hilariously off the rails.
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
Okay, here we go. So Christy said that she does feel like it's summer already. Are y'all feeling like summer yet? Yeah, gradually it's becoming summer. I've been actually pretty busy, though I haven't got that real total freedom feeling yet. Well, welcome everyone to Church Potluck, where we are serving up a smorgasbord of Christian curiosity. I'm your host, dale McConkie, sociology professor and United Methodist pastor, and you know there are two keys to a good Church Potluck Plenty of variety and engaging conversation. And this is exactly what we are trying to do here on Church Potluck Sitting down with friends and sharing our ideas on a variety of topics, from a variety of Christian perspectives, from a variety of academic disciplines. And we have a fun show for you today. We've got the little nickname I have attributed to us. Now we have the Core Four. Love it, I like it? Oh yeah, okay, we're good. The Core 4. Love it, I like it? Oh yeah, okay. Well, good.
Speaker 3:The Core 4. This Core 4 actually competes with the Core 4 in my family, and that's when Lydia is away, then it's the other two children, and I don't know how that became the Core 4, but because she went off first to college, so yeah.
Speaker 1:How does Lydia feel about that?
Speaker 3:Do you think Lydia cares?
Speaker 1:I think she's just fine. That's good. Well, let me go ahead and we'll just get right into it by introducing the core four. We'll just go around the table here. First we have Dr Michael Bailey Greetings.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone. It's been a while, it has been.
Speaker 1:Partly because we haven't recorded, but then also we didn't have you on for any of the Pope stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, well, you know, I could provide a little comic relief, but not much more beyond that, maybe not even that much. So yeah, Just lameness is what I would provide.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great to have you here and you got your very summer shirt on.
Speaker 3:I got my Clint Peters shirt on Actually very much by design because Clint really is our horror movie expert, right, and I just did this in honor of him. So if this were a horror movie, I'd be probably haunted by clint somehow, or he'd be in my closet or something at this point, or if this was a video production of any kind, then it would be effective. Yeah, no it's you can. I got some beautiful leaves. I don't know what they are some sailboats to our sailboats.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't know if they're marijuana leaves, but I should probably be. No, I think they're palm trees. I should probably be able to distinguish between palm trees, doesn't everything look?
Speaker 4:like marijuana to you. I don't know You're tripping man.
Speaker 1:The shirt does lend itself to a marijuana feel, though I guess how would I know?
Speaker 3:Not on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Anyway, great to have you here, dr Bailey, and next we have Dr Michael Bapazian.
Speaker 2:It's good to be back, and I don't know if I'm ready, because we're not talking about the Pope.
Speaker 1:No, we're not talking about him, but you were ready for the Pope.
Speaker 2:If he comes up, I'm ready, that's right Well, he is coming up.
Speaker 1:and, christy, I haven't introduced you yet, but I'll just give you both a moment of thanks that we ended up doing three podcasts. One was in the reserve, but we did three podcasts and I listened back at those and I really may be too strong of a word, but I was proud of those. I thought that was good information and for a very timely subject, and so hopefully some people got some benefit out of those.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I really enjoyed doing them.
Speaker 3:When are they coming out?
Speaker 4:They're out.
Speaker 3:I'm going to listen to them today.
Speaker 4:They're going to be so good, I know.
Speaker 1:That's another thing I was proud of is we recorded one in the morning and I had it out in the afternoon.
Speaker 3:That's very good, dale, I'm impressed.
Speaker 2:That's why it hasn't felt like summer yet, but it's good because you want to be. You know. I mean the Pope was in the news.
Speaker 3:He's going to fade away, probably in the next couple of days he won't be as prominent. There you go.
Speaker 1:So you have to get the podcast out right away. That was on my mind, so yeah, we got. Pope fever is what we've got there, we go there, we go there we go, and there we go, there we go, and we've been holding off long enough. Our third and final guest, christy Snyder. Dr Christy Snyder, hello everybody, glad to be back. Well, good, well, what are we going to be talking about today, folks?
Speaker 3:Well, that's not what we're going to be talking about today already.
Speaker 1:That's right, we could do the game show, but it would be better to have the topic on. But here's the topic.
Speaker 3:Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:This is really one of the great musicals.
Speaker 1:It really is. It really is, except I've changed it here Jesus Christ movie star. Sure, do we believe what movies say you are Jesus Christ movie star? All right, it's time for an episode of Jesus Christ movie star, where we go to the movies and look at the religious themes. And today we are talking about the movie Sinners.
Speaker 1:And we turned in our final grades on Monday, the four of us and I put out a message saying hey, I've been told that I need to go watch the movie Sinners and I'm thinking about going. And so I put out an email to all three of you and, very graciously, all three of you said yes, and so we went and had a movie night together. And so we have seen the movie Sinners and we're going to talk about it and its religious themes. But then we're going to also just expand out to talk about some of our favorite horror movies that have Christian themes in them or religious themes in them. So I thought we'd go ahead and just open it up to the movie Sinners.
Speaker 1:Let me start off this way. Dr Bailey, we'll toss it to you first. When we walked out of the movie theater, you seemed like you did not like it. You kind of said that you didn't like it. I'll let you describe what it is, but the next morning the four of us had a pretty good discussion thread where it seemed like you were much more engaged and were interested in the themes that we were talking about. So did you shift at all, or what is your reaction to the movie?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I appreciate the movie more, which is not necessarily the same thing.
Speaker 1:I think I would agree with that.
Speaker 3:I enjoy it. So you know, it seems like how do you measure what a good movie is? And there's all sorts of. There's not one single objective way. But it seems like there's an objective way that you can be a bad movie and that is if you can. It can be unpleasant to watch and that can still be a good movie, but it can't be boring and it can't be uninteresting. And I found the real time experience of watching it. It just didn't. I didn't find it riveting. I found it much more interesting to think about after the fact. So the while watching it, I thought this is a very long movie. I can come back to my thoughts on it, let others speak, but I just, while going through the movie, I was thinking that this movie would never end.
Speaker 3:And then there was a kind of a false ending and I just wanted to cry. I can sit through really great movies that are very long, so that didn't speak well to me. I have some critiques.
Speaker 1:we can come back to and you mentioned the false ending, something I should have mentioned at the very beginning spoiler alerts throughout. We're not going to hold back on anything, and so if you don't want to hear about the movie before you watch it, then definitely don't listen to the podcast and also the other movies that we talk about as well. We're just going to give spoilers all throughout. So, christy Michael P, what do you all think?
Speaker 4:So I enjoyed the movie. I did. I mean, it is a two-hour movie, I think at least, so it is longer than typical movies. But I think part of the reason I enjoyed it is I teach the history of rock and roll class and we start with the blues, and so the fact that this blues music joint is kind of at the center of it. I was able to make a lot of connections there for things that I talk about in class as well as just the South during the Great Depression, references to, you know, service in World War I by the two of the main characters, and so all of those things were enough to hold it together for me, even without the horror aspect, which was also kind of interesting. So, yeah, so I enjoyed it.
Speaker 3:There was a lot of backstory, as you put it. Oh yeah, Tons of backstory. But I felt like I wish they had made a movie about the backstory, which I think they might be doing. I wouldn't be surprised if there are sequels and prequels to this, but I think they set it up. Wouldn't be surprised if there are sequels and prequels to this, but I think they set it up. And while they're talking about some of the backstory, I thought I don't see how this really plays into character, but it's more interesting to what we're going through here.
Speaker 1:But yeah, michael Papazian, go ahead and give your initial reaction, and then we probably should get some context to what the movie's about.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean I had I shared a lot. I mean I did enjoy, there was a lot going on. I liked that. It was a lot to think about. So I think I enjoyed it more the next day, kind of like Mike was saying. But I just found, you know, just the general sort of part of the issue was that it kind of was a mix of two different kinds. It was sort of a historical movie and also a horror movie, and it became more horror towards the end and so it was kind of a hybrid film, and intentionally.
Speaker 1:so I'm pretty sure. Yeah, but also.
Speaker 2:I tend not to like hybrid films, although I do kind of like this. Okay, and I was never bored, it was engaging throughout and it was, you know, as you said, as Christy said, a two-hour movie. I had no point. I didn't get the sense. Oh, I want this to end now. No, I was really into it.
Speaker 1:I echo everything you said. That was your experience and my experience were very similar that I enjoyed it Never crossed my mind that it was going too long. I actually liked the false ending.
Speaker 1:No, the false ending was okay and there was more to it and I enjoyed that. But I usually try very hard not to know anything about the movie before going into it, and so I didn't read anything about it and I didn't know really anything. And then this is one movie where I wish I had probably read some context and read some, you know, and I might have appreciated things in real time while I was watching it better than I did I. Looking back and reading the reviews afterward, I really started to appreciate it more and more as well, just like you said.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I mean I feel like it's. This is a really critique of movies. More than this one is that, I think you know, if you know a lot about something, as Chrissy does about that particular time, then that adds some richness to it, especially if they are insightful or, you know, enlightening.
Speaker 1:Or it drives you crazy when there's mistakes right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. But I feel like movies aren't books, and movies have to stand on their own two feet and so you know you can think like the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz may be some sort of ridiculous metaphor for silver currency or gold currency, but you don't have to know any of that for it to work as a movie. In some sense it doesn't even really work as a metaphor. I think this was trying so hard to be a metaphor that the primary stuff itself, the art, to me didn't stand. It's more interesting to think about the implications of what it was hinting at as an allegory.
Speaker 3:I saw Silence of the Lambs at the theater. My sister was in Austin, where I lived, and she wanted to see a movie. I did not want to see this. I'd never heard of it until the time she mentioned. I said what is it about? She said it's a serial killer. I said I do not want to see this movie. I was captured within 90 seconds of that movie. So I feel like a good movie can bring you in independently of the knowledge of it, and if you have to read reviews.
Speaker 3:I feel like it doesn't work as art. It might work as propaganda, it might work as a thing I think it's kind of a thinker but I don't think it works as a standalone piece of art. That's my own and I'll come back to that, okay.
Speaker 1:All right, well, we've given our impressions, but what is the movie about? How would someone give an overview of what this movie is about? Because it's a hybrid, it may not be easy to encapsulate.
Speaker 4:I'll start All right. So you have these twin brothers who come back to the Mississippi Delta.
Speaker 1:Can I be bad and have a confession here? Yes, it wasn't until I talked to my son afterward that I realized that they were the same person I should have known.
Speaker 3:But that's how passively I was watching them. No, it just shows the astonishing degree of technical prowess that they have, that they could film the same person obviously some sort of green screen or something and there is nothing that would give that away. It was incredible.
Speaker 4:And I think the acting was really well. He did a good job portraying those two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you got the personality differences, Even if the physically he looked the same.
Speaker 1:But that's how identical twins are. They do look the same, yeah, exactly but their personalities can be quite different.
Speaker 2:Jordan, they do look the same. Yeah, exactly, but their personalities can be quite different. Yeah, he's a good actor.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they're the smokestack brothers or twins, because one's Smoke, I guess, and one is Stack.
Speaker 2:The other's Stack and the name their actual. I guess their birth names are Elijah and Elias.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Which are biblical names. In fact, they're the same person, aren't they? Because Elias is a variant of Elijah. Really, I think so, because originally I thought it was Elijah and Elisha, but Elias is just a different form. I think it's the Greek form of Elijah, so they actually have the same name. And also, the other thing just came to me is Elijah is one of two people who never died in the Old Testament, that's great. I have no idea if that was deliberate, but I'll just throw that out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, of course it was deliberate. Oh, that is kind of interesting. I mean that shows the thought that went into this I mean. Clearly this was just a work of systematic theology, in a way.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean they really went.
Speaker 3:The director and writer? I suppose, yeah it just I wish it were more interesting. I suppose, yeah it just I wish it were more interesting Continue.
Speaker 4:So the twins come back. They've been in Chicago earning money. Apparently there's, you know, mentions of like Al Capone and bootleggers. This is 30. It's set in 34. So prohibition would have been repealed by now, but you know that was 32. I thought it was the movie set.
Speaker 2:I thought the movie I by now, but you know I thought it was 32. I thought it was the movie is set. I thought so. The movie, I think, is set in 1932.
Speaker 4:from what I've read, yeah, so it is not repealed yet. Right, and they had actually left the Delta, I guess, to serve in World War, but instead of coming home went, but now they have some money they're going to open up this joint, they were earning money too.
Speaker 1:Some of the earning is in quotes, probably yeah that's right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they're going to open up this place. This was a place where you could listen to the blues dance, a place where African Americans performed and socialized. They buy an old slaughterhouse from a white plantation owner, or at least a wealthier white man and a lot of the beginning of the movie is them setting up the place. One of their cousins is a great guitar player blues guitar player Great voice.
Speaker 4:His father is a preacher, runs a church, and so that sets up some of the first religious, I think, conflict that you see in the movie about the father takes the guitar to the church, the kid's looking for it, and there's this little talk about you could be a musical artist, but an artist for you know the church.
Speaker 3:You could be part of the praise band. Oh boy, yeah right.
Speaker 4:And so yeah, and so, while they're setting it up, both the brothers run into old loves where they've both been separated for different reasons. One of the old loves, I think, is also a religious element. Is there because she's practicing maybe a voodoo type of faith?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely an indigenous. African tradition, something about the ancestors.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the other one's been separated because she could pass for being Caucasian, being white, and actually is married to a white man who lives in Arkansas. So that could lead to, you know, definitely significant issues. And then you have the first kind of horror bit. That starts when some man shows up at a white couple's door. He has been burned very badly. They don't want to let him in, but he offers them money. When they do let him in, you then discover he's a vampire and from there things proceed.
Speaker 1:Things get worse yeah get yeah, very quickly. And were you all aware that this had vampire elements to it before, before walking into the theater?
Speaker 4:I didn't I did not I did and you did.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my daughter saw this movie. At least two of them didn't. They loved it and I agreed to go to this because of their recommendation you know so, and it was my, it wasn't our company well, I mean I agreed to it so readily because of them, but I would have just, you know, delayed a little bit and said yes, of course.
Speaker 1:No, it was my son who told me that I needed to see it as well, and he's already watched it twice.
Speaker 4:He said so did you know there was a vampire element in it or a horror element in it?
Speaker 1:I don't. I think I knew that there was a big twist and so it didn't surprise me, and so it didn't surprise me, but no, I did not know the thing that's interesting is that, just so the listener and potential viewer can know, is that that develops maybe an hour into the movie.
Speaker 3:And so it is. This kind of traditional movie, sort of like a period piece of history, has its own arc. And then I mean, really out of nowhere, more or less, there's a few hints that there's something ominous and dark, but the actual event of the appearance of this vampire it is like act two of a different play it just comes out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:There were, as you said, there are some foreshadowings, I mean partially. Also, the pastor is warning to his son about you know what is going to happen if he goes to the juke joint, and then yeah, so they're just some very brief, but you're not thinking vampires at that point. Well, you also see several points.
Speaker 3:I think it's three crows in the background and you see this like multiple times. There's three crows just flying and I think that's very much meant to suggest a kind of anti-Trinitarian type of perspective. They represent evil and we'll come back to that maybe.
Speaker 4:I do think also that I mean one of the. So where I kind of thought it was going to go is they start out the movie and then it repeats, like if you can play music so well right, or the, I don't know if it was just the blues but if you can play so well, you can like open up this doorway to the past, the future, and so that's kind of and that is an element of this, but it's not the main horror. That's where I thought it might be going.
Speaker 1:And that's where it starts right. The whole movie starts with a little intro preface about the people throughout history who have been able to connect the divine with the earthly through their music, so powerful that it connected these two realms together. Well, it also connects.
Speaker 3:I think this is important is it connects generations, both the past as well as the future, so it allows the present generation to, through the music, to be with their ancestors and so all has not been taken from them, and it shows that they can have an effect on the future as well. And it's kind of did you want to carry on with the story? You said it's like two parts, and that was an excellent summary, by the way.
Speaker 3:That's why you're a historian and I don't do, I'm not good at narrating but so there is this wonderful scene.
Speaker 3:The music is great, at least half of the music is great, the African-American music is great, but there's this wonderful scene on the dance floor where this gifted guitarist, gifted from the divine, who can, through his music, link these generations playing, and then the movie depicts generations from Africa participating in the music with their own African instruments and then it shows it's very jarring, it's 100% nuts, and to me it works perfectly because it shows then people who are hip hop stars, who are spinning platters and they're rapping, and all of this massive mashup of music where you have all of the time right here at this particular moment and I took that to be.
Speaker 3:I'd like to know where it was in the movie, because it seems to me that's almost right in the center and it seems to me that's really what the movie is trying to do is trying to be a mashup of multiple genres, multiple themes, multiple ideas, and I think it worked on the dance floor, but I don't think it worked so well as a movie. There's a lot there to tease apart, but I guess it doesn't cohere, I think, in the moment.
Speaker 1:Did you all find that scene very powerful? Oh yeah, Very much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a sense of historical continuity that I think the movie was trying to convey, and that that continuity has been uprooted by the enemies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. I mean it demonstrates that there's still a connection with the ancestors and what you do may be a life of apparent drudgery, but it will have this effect rippling forward into the future in a positive way, and it's all part of the divine and that can't be taken from you. So you think, yeah, right.
Speaker 4:I mean, that's a theme that I bring out in the history of rock and roll, so much that you know this didn't emerge from nowhere. It comes from a yes, it comes from a specific time and place, but it's built on things that happened before, and then everything that happens afterwards is a part of you know, the beginning, and so, yeah, I thought that was so well done.
Speaker 3:And horror movies are also like that. I mean horror movies. I think half of the fun of a horror movie is to try to figure out what. Is it paying homage to the past horror movies? I think this is. I don't think this movie could exist, and it wouldn't try to exist, without a bunch of other prior horror movies that we can talk about.
Speaker 1:And so you mentioned something about enemies. Who are the enemies in?
Speaker 2:this. That's a big question, I mean, I'm not quite sure. I mean, at least at first it seemed to me that the enemy was, I guess, either Christianity or evangelical Christianity or white Christianity. That was, you know, trying to, you know, bring, convey this notion of the, at least trying to appropriate the culture or at least to destroy the indigenous culture or to change it in certain ways that make it less powerful. But then I kind of moved away from that and I saw it more as a political or economic statement about how sort of the modern capitalism and liberalism tends to break us away from our roots and try to appropriate black culture and other cultures but doesn't really respect it and doesn't, you know, it just tries to make money out of it and so in some sense it ends up really depriving it of its power and its authenticity.
Speaker 2:That's where I am right now, because it seemed to me that there was a little bit of ambivalence about the portrayal of the black church here. I mean, the father was kind of wrong, but he was kind of right too. I mean, something bad didn't happen to Sammy, even though it was a great night in retrospect for him. Well, it was. It was, you know, also a bad night too. So there was a sense in which you know this wasn wasn't necessarily negative about the black church, so I didn't see it as anti-Christian in general, but just sort of anti some of the manifestations of Christianity.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I actually well certainly colonial Christianity right, colonials.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess that's a good term and your term of white Christianity. I think that probably had a lot to do with it as well, had a lot to do with it as well, and I actually thought that the movie and I probably got this from somebody else and not my own mind, but that even the black church that Sammy's father led it was kind of they were all dressed in white, there was kind of a whitewashing right and it was a very tepid kind of faith, and even the music was very, you know, stayed, and so it didn't have that same kind of life to it, and so the life had kind of been drained out of that church as well, just as life is drained out by vampires. I think that's correct.
Speaker 2:That is to say that there was a vitality to black spirituality that kind of has been sapped by whatever colonialism. One reason why I thought about that is-. And yet still far more vital and I got this also because the director, I think, was also the director of black panther and and you, I, you get a similar. I got a similar sense, a similar message from that film as well. I don't know if you all saw black panther but it's the.
Speaker 2:is it Wakanda? Is that the fictional mythical kingdom? But it's actually rooted in reality and here, okay, as an Orthodox, this is, I'm going to make a connection.
Speaker 1:You found a way to work it in, is it?
Speaker 2:Wakanda Is the kingdom that has not been spoiled by European colonialism.
Speaker 2:It's the part of Africa that has been meant to be authentic. And there is one major civilization in Africa, in the heart of Africa, that is kind of like Wakanda. That's Ethiopia, an ancient Christian Orthodox nation. And there's the sense I got out of that movie and I'm reading a lot into this because of my own heritage, in part as an Armenian Orthodox who is in full communion with the Ethiopians that there's a sense in which there is an authentic African Christianity that is reflected in that Ethiopian culture and great civilization that produced enormous, you know, and continues to produce enormous literary and other achievements, and it's that that has been kind of suppressed, or Africans have not been allowed to develop that sort of indigenous Christian tradition and instead there is this sort of more tepid white Christianity that has been imposed upon them, and I saw that carrying on as well in this film too. So that's my kind of take on this. So I don't see it as anti-Christian so much as anti-sort of inauthentic forms of Christianity being forced upon people by colonialists.
Speaker 1:So help our listeners understand, and you help me understand this too. So my strong sense was that this was a vampire movie that inverts the role of Christianity, that historically Christianity has been the great savior against the evils and the sexuality and the temptations and all that vampires provide, and Christianity holds those forces against. But here the vampires have been kind of sucked in by Christianity.
Speaker 3:Well, or I think they may represent sort of a toxic form of Christianity.
Speaker 3:I think you see like I said, you do see these three crows that are flying around and you see, finally, when this head vampire, he doesn't really go after this juke joint until he gets two other people, so they approach as three. They're very much like comical depiction and, by the way, this movie was wildly lacking in humor. That was actually one of my problems with it. It is a humorless movie and it seems like it's so ripe for humor. Also, just another aside was that I did not know until I found out afterward that this is the same director as the Black Panther and I kind of had the same response to the Black Panther as well. I found it just sort of boring, and so I think it's ponderous. I think, in part because it is so ambitious and there's not a whole lot of humor, is that it just tries to do too much. So these vampires come to the door like an evangelist.
Speaker 4:These three are all white.
Speaker 3:They're all white, they're super white. I'm not going to name denominations One's Irish right. Well. Ramek is the first vampire Ramek is Irish, right, and he's an English actor, but yeah, he's Irish. And so he comes to the juke joint with two other white folks. They're very polite, they point out this is really not for folks like you and they say almost explicitly we don't see color.
Speaker 2:We don't see race.
Speaker 3:We are beyond that. And they said we're very patient, we can be polite, and they were supremely polite. And then they played really bad music and I think that's important, that there was this contrast between the blues music, which is life-affirming and celebratory, to this other kind of phony praise music. I thought as well. And then at one point they all recite the Lord's Prayer, which I think is not a very subtle way of saying what they represent. So I don't know if people remember that.
Speaker 2:And there was a pseudo-baptism scene, right, yeah, there was a pseudo-baptism and that actually was trying to kill them through baptism.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, so it was again an inversion of the sacrament of baptism? Yes, very much.
Speaker 2:Instead of restoring you to life, kill it drowning you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, but the baptism theme was very obvious in that. So do you think that it was not a coincidence that it was someone who was Irish in another area where Christianity had gone in and destroyed the indigenous faith?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought of that too, that you have another example of victims of colonialism, in this case British colonialism, that it seemed there might be a connection there too, I presume so I would absolutely assume so, because it's something where you can throw into the mix here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, why not? It's about the potato famine, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Michael Bailey is like a dog with a bone.
Speaker 4:All right. So, yeah, I did not pick up watching it, and if it had been for you guys talking on the thread about it, like the whole Christian fundamentalist kind of aspect, I'm not sure I would have picked up on. Instead, I was thinking more of you know the vampires they are. They're turning all the African Americans that could get their hands on into you know, into vampires. And then it did seem like color did not matter, as opposed to one of the final scenes where members of the Klan show up who are whites, who do see color, and that seems way worse than being the vampire.
Speaker 1:And so yeah, how does?
Speaker 4:that fit into.
Speaker 1:Let me pick up and then you get the right answer. But, chrissy, I was the same way that you know. They seemed naive, but they did seem nice.
Speaker 4:And welcoming.
Speaker 1:And love and fellowship, yes, and we'll have community together forever. You know, this is yeah, and so I was like this doesn't sound unappealing.
Speaker 2:Well, it is superficially, but underneath it it's still nefarious, it's still right. So the idea is in some sense it's more dangerous than the Klan. The Klan is overtly racist and hostile and hateful. This is hate sugarcoated by love.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's culturally right. It's a particular peaceful white representation.
Speaker 2:Let's all get together. We can forget about all the terrible things we did If we can go back to marijuana for a minute. Okay, sure.
Speaker 3:No, I mean you can't really understand the usage of drugs unless you understand the appeal of it. I mean, if you just think of it simply as a bad thing, that people go into it because they're pursuing something bad and want it to be bad, you will never understand that right. It has an appeal, and so I thought one of the strengths of this movie was that it depicted that allure as very seductive for very real reasons, as it depicts some sort of fellowship and joy and freedom from other kinds of deprivation. So I thought that made sense. But I think it's really important, as I sort of hinted at earlier, that Remick is that his name?
Speaker 2:Remick is the Irish vampire Was really going for.
Speaker 3:He says we are here for the guitarist, that's why we came here, because what he wanted to do was destroy this gateway to the ancestors, because it's through the music that you have access to the ancestors and to the future, this kind of connective, indigenous or African type of religion. So it was, I think, very explicitly trying to destroy that. We're going to take that away from them.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's a great point. That's a great point. So who are the sinners?
Speaker 3:Well, okay, does it have to be one it?
Speaker 4:could be everybody. There's lots of sin, lots of sin, yeah.
Speaker 3:And the twins I think are. You know, they sort of start with a lie about their identity. They're cousins, they claim right, but you know that they have these ill-gotten goods, they have this past history hinted at would be a very good movie, better than the one we saw.
Speaker 2:They're working on it now. Yeah, they are.
Speaker 3:I'm sure they are, because they do open it up to the possibility of a sequel at the end as well, but so, yeah, it shows them, as the main characters are clearly sinners and say, basically I'll see you in hell. And it says that at one point. So I don't think the idea is that there's a group of people who are sinners and those who aren't, but I think there is this sense of you should let people have their authentic culture and not destroy it.
Speaker 4:So I also wondered, like so both the brothers end up in different situations, right, one of them becomes a vampire and he is turned a vampire by this woman he's always loved, that he's never been able to be with because life, and the other one decides not to become a vampire, in part because the woman he loves makes him promise to kill her if she gets bit because she wants to be with their child who had died, and so this idea of an afterlife. And so you know both of them I don't know like was one wrong and one right, or they both just choose different paths that worked given their situations.
Speaker 3:It goes back to, I think, a theme that maybe three years ago we talked about, which is the centrality of erotic love to all of this. And so you know, for example, in Midnight Mass, this is, you know, seven episode or so, maybe 10 episode miniseries, and it turns out that the main character does this who is a priest, deep theological reasons. He actually does this again to connect with a lost, unrequited love. There does seem to be some message here that's really central to who we are as human beings.
Speaker 1:I like that theme Interesting, because I tend to dislike that theme. So that's another topic for another podcast and we can talk more about senators if we want, but for now let's do a game show there. Now's the right time to press that button. All right, today's game show? Vampire or theologian? Oh, I love this All right.
Speaker 1:Or both. Well, I actually did take one out. I took a quote out by Anne Rice that was kind of. They actually were calling her a theologian, yeah, so I'm going to give a quote and you have to tell me whether it's from a vampire movie or whether it's a theologian, or from the Bible itself. So here we go the blood is the life.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's Bonhoeffer.
Speaker 4:All right, I'm going to. Yeah, I'll say theologian too the the life. Oh, that's Bonhoeffer.
Speaker 3:All right, I'm going to yeah.
Speaker 4:I'll say theologian too, theologian.
Speaker 1:Boo, that is from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Did I say I meant to?
Speaker 2:say Stoker, he's not. Stoker is not a theologian, apparently.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. And Rice is.
Speaker 2:That's not fair.
Speaker 1:All right, all right. So here's the next one. So, for the life of the creature is in the blood. It is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. That's Richard Niebuhr. I have no idea. That sounds like a theologian to me.
Speaker 4:I would have said movie but I'm sure they know.
Speaker 1:That's Leviticus 1711.
Speaker 4:Okay, it's the Bible. It's not just the theologian, it's the Bible.
Speaker 1:All right, death is. Death is not even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning. I think that was.
Speaker 3:Winston Churchill.
Speaker 4:Theologian.
Speaker 3:Vampire.
Speaker 2:This is horrible All right, there's not that much of a difference.
Speaker 1:And Bailey's just tossing his hands up.
Speaker 3:Oh, calvin, I know Calvin, this is the first one.
Speaker 1:You didn't say it, it was Bonhoeffer. So you finally got your Bonhoeffer there, all right. So let's see we got some more here. God has abandoned you. He didn't watch, he didn't care.
Speaker 3:Vampire. I mean, it sounds vampire, so I'm going to say it's Abraham Kuyper.
Speaker 4:That would be pretty dark for a theologian. Well, there are some dark theologians. Oh, there really are. I mean it seems I mean okay.
Speaker 3:So Jonathan Edwards, right, you get to your game.
Speaker 2:But Jonathan Edwards.
Speaker 3:He has this post, like you know people apparently asked him questions like my children died, they were unbaptized. How can I be happy in heaven? And he said you will be more blissful watching your unbaptized child burn forever because you will, in heaven, understand the justice of it all and you would not be nearly as so. Yeah, that's, I mean it could be a theologian, yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, here's one that sounds a little bit like that. The day of death is better than the day of birth. That's theologian.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's got to be Jonathan Evers, right there.
Speaker 1:That's Ecclesiastes 7.1. We live forever and yet we are always dying. Vampire, that sounds vampire-y, theologian. Oh, this is for Michael Papazian. The rest of the other two were right. So that's a paraphrase from Only Lovers Left Alive from that movie. All right, let's do this last one here. Last one. Children gather round for not too long for this world, am I? But we had a good run. That's not Pope Leo, is it?
Speaker 4:I did not gather round. We had a good run Vampire.
Speaker 3:It can't be a vampire because you know yeah.
Speaker 4:It could be Like it could be a I don't know Children. It could be. It could be I don't know.
Speaker 3:Children gather round.
Speaker 1:That is Michael Bailey, according to his family.
Speaker 3:Is he a vampire or not? I was going to say that I say children gather round all the time. I came up with this idea like two minutes before the podcast, I texted him.
Speaker 1:I said I'm doing this game show. I said tell me some things about death that your dad said that's good, that's good.
Speaker 3:I that's good. I like that. It's a good quote.
Speaker 1:Children gather round for not too long for this world, am I, but we had a good run.
Speaker 3:I mashed up some of the things. I had my first gather round with my son-in-law, Zachary, this last weekend.
Speaker 2:Is that right? So I did.
Speaker 3:I said Zachary gather round. I must tell you. I said you must love one another and be kind, and I'm not long for this world.
Speaker 1:Well, because I was here, yeah, of course. And they said if you're not close to death, but just sick, it's Paul Widow. Mikey, yeah, so that was the other one.
Speaker 3:Just not text my children anymore.
Speaker 1:Okay, I should have gotten permission ahead of time. No, that's fine.
Speaker 4:But thank you for playing.
Speaker 1:Vampire or Theologian, all right. Well, I don't think we should go into great detail here, but spend a little bit of time talking about some other horror movies that made an impact on us, especially because of the religious imagery. So who would like to get us started here?
Speaker 4:So mine might be the oldest, mine's 68.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, mine is 73.
Speaker 1:So the historian wants us to go in chronological order.
Speaker 3:I think mine's 1960-ish 1960.
Speaker 2:Okay, you better go, so you go first.
Speaker 3:Oh well, I'm not going to talk about Midnight Mass, all right, so I just want that on the record. Okay, I mean I will talk about it really and interpolate it into no mine is one of my favorite horror movies, which is Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And the original. And one thing I like about this movie is I think it's a little bit like Groundhog Day in the sense that no matter what your ethical worldview is, you think that Groundhog Day is a beautiful depiction of that. It illuminates your particular view and I think you can sort of throw anything into Invasion of the Body Snatchers, kind of like they did in Sinners.
Speaker 3:Well, this is not a mashup at all, unlike Sinners, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers is very much what the title suggests.
Speaker 3:And so there is some sort of alien being that is taking over human beings in their form and they become which I got this phrase pod people right. They never use that particular expression, but there's these pods. And so the idea is, you have the sense of the uncanny or uncanny valley, as you have these people walking around who don't have souls and you can't put your finger on what it is about that, and so it's probably some sort of at the time discussion of communism and collectivism. But it can also be thought of from a Christian perspective of how do we know we have souls and you have this imperative to share people about the threat, and so I think it's important that in this movie you lose your soul when you're sleeping. So you know you have to be awake and alert and vigilant, and then no one believes the person, you know the person who has figured out what's happened, and so he's trying to, you know, evangelize what's happening and no one is believing, and so this horrible, sinful, outside alien collective is taking over.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I never would have thought of that as yeah, having the religious connotation, so you know religious theme, it makes sense now that you explained it. I always thought, yeah, it's about communism.
Speaker 3:I think it is about communism. But I mean depends on what you mean by a Christian movie. So I think of a Christian movie as one that's consistent with sort of Christian sensibilities, that's all.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so all right. So all right. I'm going to go with the 1968 Rosemary's Baby right Starring Mia Farrell, who does a great job, Directed by Roman Polanski, Really well done film where it's a think inversion of the Immaculate Conception, All right. So it's a couple who's living in New York. They move into a new apartment. The husband is a struggling actor looking to get ahead. There's neighbors who for most of the movie seem like they could just be nosy and kind of intrusive, but the husband gets really close with them. They're very encouraging on his acting career.
Speaker 4:The woman they try to have a family and this is where I guess you start to see the film's more religious connotations, or the horror part of it. While dreaming, it's hard to tell what's going on. She's kind of in this haze. She is raped by Satan, but you're not sure whether she just thinks that's what has happened or whether that is really what has happened. And it turns out it's really what has happened. And she goes through this pregnancy.
Speaker 4:It turns out her husband had agreed to allow this to occur in order to advance his acting career. Yeah, she finds out that the neighbors really are like the leaders of this satanic. They're witches as well and so they're using magic to do things she tries to escape. She's brought back, has the baby. She's told it's dead, but it's not really dead. She hears it crying, and the movie ends with her kind of realizing what she has given birth to and them trying to convince her that it is the duty of a mother to take care of this child of Satan and to raise this child, and it looks like at the end of the movie she's going to do it, that the mother's love is more important, and so just this whole kind of yeah.
Speaker 1:And they leave it ambiguous at that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1:That is terrifying.
Speaker 4:It is terrifying, incredible movie yeah, kind of, that is terrifying, it is terrifying, incredible movie yeah, it's really great and we watched it last night knowing this was coming up and I didn't even catch this. The first time she was raised Catholic. She says and the Pope is supposed to be visiting New York, but yeah, and they're having dinner with the witches, their neighbors when this occurs and they're like, oh, organized religion it's all costumes and showbiz, right? So, unlike Satanism, I guess, where you go around nude.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it was very interesting. I thought the neighbors were all, if I recall I was in your side, but weren't they all like really innocuous, like you expect them to be part of, of like a Maxwell house coffee commercial right? You know, just old and very sweet, sophisticated you know, that's how the devil appears.
Speaker 4:Sort of like the vampires in sinners Very much yeah, so, yeah, so that was yeah, so that is the one that I found yeah, great.
Speaker 2:That's it. It was a good, that's a good. These are both great examples. So mine is the Exorcist, which came out in 1973, based on a novel that was published in 1971 by William Peter Blatty. And I was okay, so I was eight when the Exorcist came out and I remember adults talking about it.
Speaker 2:I remember like people saying oh, you know, you go to the movies and you throw up or you faint, and apparently things like that happened. And so immediately I was intrigued. When I was only eight I couldn't watch it, so it was kind of like taboo. But of course, if it's a taboo you want to do it, you want to watch it. But it wasn't until I think I was in college and it was on like late night, it was like three in the morning, which is probably not the best time to watch it For our younger listeners.
Speaker 1:there was a time when you had to actually watch the show when it was scheduled to be on the television.
Speaker 2:Before there was Netflix or streaming. It was terrible, it was primitive.
Speaker 3:We were like animals.
Speaker 4:You had to go find a VCR or somebody who had the tape Right exactly.
Speaker 2:So I watched it and I find it just a. I mean, I was completely taken in.
Speaker 2:This is like a great work and it's a horror and it's a very effective horror, but it's also very theologically profound and it makes sense. It was Blatty. He was a graduate of Georgetown, educated by Jesuits, a very serious Catholic, and I just love the way it was filmed. It begins with a scene in Iraq where a priest, who's also an archaeologist, discovers this talisman of an ancient god who turns out to be the demon that possesses Linda Blair, who's the actress who plays the Regan, who's the who's was the one who was possessed. And it's filmed in Georgetown area in DC, and there's a priest, young priest, father Damien, who has doubts about his, about his faith. I mean just the portrayal, I mean he actually I think he embodies for me, like the tortured priest. Yeah, I mean just perfect acting and it was just, it's just wonderful.
Speaker 2:And so there were a couple of themes that, first of all, he's a psychiatrist too, and there's a scene where he's speaking with Chris it was played by Alan Burstyn who's the mother of Regan, of the possessed, and when they first meet each other and she's first of all, he comes, he's not dressed as a priest. He said I'm sorry, I'm dressed as a civilian, but then he says that. You know I'm a psychiatrist and a priest too, and she's kind of surprised at that. And but he said he was a priest. I mean, he was ordained already and the Jesuits sent him to Harvard and Johns Hopkins to study psychiatry and medicine. And so there's this, right away. There's this sort of, you know, science versus religion thing going on as well, and particularly the assumption is that it was his psychiatric education that caused him to have these doubts. So in a way it's very sort of, you know, a profound critique of modern psychiatry. You know, making everything a medical condition.
Speaker 2:There's no such thing as just sin or evil. You're sick, right, and I think that was what the movie and Blatty were critical about. And so, you know, when Ellen Burstyn asks you know the actor, father Karras or Father Damien Karras is his last name, you know I need to find an exorcist he says you'll have to go back to the 16th century. The church is way beyond that. We don't do that Well, but it turns out that's not the case. The movie is trying to portray that you know, the evil is still there. The church still recognizes that. So in a way it's a sort of a very conservative move politically and religiously.
Speaker 3:And it's sort of you know, there's this's this notion, that? No, that there's a reality beyond.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's what all horror points to that the supernatural and that we can't just sort of explain everything away scientifically. Let me interrupt you just for a second because that's a point that you know.
Speaker 1:I have no interest in horror. You know, on its own I don't enjoy horror movies at all. But I have become over the last couple of years more aware and just more, finding it more interesting that it's the one place that takes religion seriously. In some ways it's the one genre that takes religion seriously, because there is something beyond our earthly existence and at least religion is. Even if it's faulty, even if it's doubtful, they're still taking it. The supernatural realm is there and needs to be dealt with. Yeah, there is something to that.
Speaker 3:I'll just interject yeah, go ahead. Cs Lewis talks about and I think when we last time talked about horror film, I may have brought this up as well he talks about this distinction between kind of fear that you have out of your own self-interest. He says imagine if there was a tiger in the next room. Right, he said. Well, you'd be fearful, how would you get out, and so on, and obviously you might approach something like terror. But he said you know, if you were told and believe that there was a ghost in the next room, he said that would elicit a totally different kind of reaction where essentially you'd feel dread and what is at stake in that would be not so much just your self-interest but your place in reality your own identity and your nature of how things work, and I do think you have lots of movies that, like Jaws, is considered to be a horror, I think it's a thriller.
Speaker 3:I make this very sharp distinction that's probably unwarranted between horror movies and thrillers, and I think for horror they have to have the noumenal or ineffable, they have to have some sort of sense of mysteries that can't be explained by science.
Speaker 2:That shark is kind of more than a shark. There is some element.
Speaker 3:I think of no Country for Old Men is basically a horror movie because Anton Chigurh has the same sort of Jaws-like otherworldly. I think he represents death and it works, though, as a symbol, so carry on with the exercise, yeah.
Speaker 2:So well. One other thing is that this was, I mean, people lined up to see it, even if you know this was like the biggest gross. Apparently, when the novel came out it wasn't. It didn't sell very well until Blatty was the author, was interviewed by Dick Cavett. I think it was a really old interview show, he was great. Yeah, and Dick Cavett asked Blatty, you know, is Satan real? And apparently the audience was enthralled when he started talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is a Satan and there are demons and all, and the sales for his book went after that interview. There were just there's this kind of fascination for also for and it's interesting, you know a largely Protestant and at that time mostly more mainline Protestant country where you know there was more sort of Christianity, was had sort of you know kind of moved away from the more ritual, the more mysterious, yes, and become more rational. This was a sense of kind of a thirst for that more. What's what?
Speaker 2:sometimes people call weird Christianity. Yeah, the rituals, the ancient languages, the incense and all that that. There was this, you know there's this, yeah, there's this rite of exorcism in the Catholic Church. There are Catholic priests who are certified to be exorcists and you know they perform exorcisms. That this is a side of Christianity that maybe had not the same kind of profile that it has now, and I think there was a sense in which, you know, even within the heart of the most rationalist Protestant, there was a yearning for this kind of older, more traditional kind of spirituality in Christianity, Christianity is just spooky, I think.
Speaker 3:I think probably most religions are spooky, but Christianity is no less spooky. I mean the sense that death isn't death, you're not really dead when you die. I think that's a big issue. The idea that people God, maybe angels, certainly Satan, maybe certain prophets know what you're thinking without you saying it. The idea you're being constantly watched. I mean, seen from one perspective, it is kind of a horror movie.
Speaker 2:And that you have to drink blood in order to have eternal life. So the notion is let's make Christianity spooky again. It is kind of a horror movie and that you have to drink blood in order to have eternal life, right, I mean, so it is, yeah. So the notion is yeah, let's make Christianity spooky again. Yeah, right, because it is at its core. Any attempt to de-spookify it is also taking away the power of the faith too.
Speaker 1:So that's what I got out of the Exorcist. Very cool, very cool, and my movie and I'll try to do this fairly quickly was much more recent. It was I Am Legend and also based on a book, and this was a movie that I had no intention of seeing, didn't know anything about it. Ingrid had a doctor's appointment on the other side of town when we were in Pensacola visiting a specialist, and there was a mix-up and so we weren't able to visit. We weren't able to go until much later in the afternoon, and so we just found a place where you could have a little food and we sat in a movie to take the time away, and it was I Am Legend, and it's this movie about Something that seems to be pretty popular In movies today A virus that breaks out. Is this Will Smith? It's Will Smith, yes, yes, and everybody dies. Basically, there's just a handful of people who are immune to this virus, and Will Smith is one of them, and basically he's in New York City, right, new York City.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I don't think I've seen it.
Speaker 1:Is that right? So New York City, totally empty New York City, and it sort of shows his day very slowly. But at night there are these dark seekers that come out and they're basically vampire-zombie hybrids, which are all the humans that were infected by the virus. And this movie while I'm watching it, I just had this almost epiphany. These dark seekers were in the uncanny valley because you could tell that they were human, but they had lost all their human qualities, or all of their human qualities had been tainted in a way that they were not what they were supposed to be, but you can still tell it. That's what they were. And I had this revelation almost like oh my goodness, this is when we talk about sin and how sin impacts all of us. I said I wonder if I'm looking at these dark seekers like God looks at us right in terms of how sin has changed us and we are not the creations that we are supposed to be, that there's something that falls short. And so I just had this really profound moment of thinking that I understood my sense of sin in a new way that I found very profound the end of the movie.
Speaker 1:Well, there's Christian themes throughout the whole movie. There's posters everywhere that says God is still with us. There's butterfly themes throughout the whole movie. There's posters everywhere that says God is still with us. There's butterfly symbolism throughout. And, just for anyone who does go and watch this, some people miss this butterfly symbolism. When the dark seeker smashes against the window at the very end, the breakage of the window is in the shape of a butterfly even, and so you have that symbol of new life. But the movie takes a very different ending than the book and some people were infuriated by this because the ending of the movie is very Christian, very Christocentric. And again, I probably like this movie because the imagery was so obvious. Right, will Smith cries out. He's a researcher and he's been looking for a cure and he finally figures out the cure and he yells out the cure is in the blood.
Speaker 1:I thought you'd say it is finished no, he didn't quite do that, but he out the cure is in the blood. I thought you were going to say it is finished no, he didn't quite do that, but he said the cure is in the blood. And ultimately, to get the blood to the few people who still live on Earth that can help the zombie vampires become human again, he sacrifices his life. Now there's not a resurrection moment for him, but he sacrifices his life to provide the blood that saves humanity. And so there's this resurrection, the book, and there's also an alternative ending that you can see on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Actually, will Smith recognizes that these people, even though that they're tarnished, still have the capacity for love. They still love one another, and so he decides not to try to change them back to human. Oh, wow, yeah. And so it's a very different theme, but it's a theme that love is still possible even in that broken state. So, either way, I think it has some powerful Christian themes to it and I really enjoyed it, and there was some good humor in it as well.
Speaker 3:So you would have appreciated that part.
Speaker 1:Michael so great.
Speaker 3:But what I like about your analogy a lot is you're suggesting that these dark seekers is that what? They're called Right or not more lovable, but they're somehow tarnished right.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 3:And in your analogy you said you were seeing this, trying to think of how God may view us, but then to think, knowing what you know or what you proclaim about God, and I believe that you believe this is that God loves us despite that. And so that does reveal, just sort of an astounding way, just the beauty of that story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you said that much more clearly than I did, but had intended to say it that way, so I'm just gonna splice your voice into mine somehow and take credit for that. So great, well, is there anything that we didn't say that we wanted to talk about? No, well, I had fun talking about it with you and thank you all again for coming to the movie with me. I had a good time, and I just want to thank our audience for sitting around the table with us today, and I hope that we have provided you with some food for thought and something to chew on, and we might have a few more comments after this. We all got to run out to another event here in a second, but we might say a few more. Have some leftovers for you to enjoy. We appreciate your support and if you have a chance, please consider ranking us and reviewing us wherever you get your podcasts. And until we gather around the table next time, this has been Church Potluck. Thank you so much so.
Speaker 3:I got a question for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is Wizard of Oz a horror movie? I mean, it terrified me as a kid, right, it definitely has elements of fantasy. There's things that you can't quite explain, despite. I mean, you have witches, right, you have flying monkeys, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I've never thought of it that way, but it is interesting that you can make the case, I guess.
Speaker 3:I just know that as a kid, two years in a row I had to run out of the room. I stood and watched the scenes with the flying monkeys in the doorway between the kitchen and our family room, where they were, and I felt my body moving away from the TV. I had no control over it, so that was probably when I was like 17, 18. No, I'm joking.
Speaker 1:I think of myself as a scaredy cat, but I have always loved the flying monkeys. Even as a young child I found them cool.
Speaker 4:So you went and saw Wicked right.
Speaker 1:Yeah right. Is that horror I was thinking that, because it's told from the Wicked Witch's point of view right.
Speaker 4:So is that one horror, Because it doesn't seem to me like Dorothy makes it home and yeah, she has to overcome these things, but yeah.
Speaker 3:No, I mean part of again. For me, what makes a horror movie versus, you know, a thriller is there does have to be for me, and I'm not saying this is I'm not trying to be categorical here for everyone, but I feel like there needs to be a sense of the noumenal, of the uncanny, and I feel like the original Wizard of Oz has that to me more than Wicked. But you know I can't back that up because I don't know either film especially well.
Speaker 2:Well, is it just because the flying monkeys are unnatural Like?
Speaker 1:is it because you can have a cartoon where, like a rabbit talks. And the Wicked Witch right and Dorothy's life is in peril.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's you know. When I first start teaching here, I used to ask people I've asked this to christy and I would I'd ask people what's more frightening for you?
Speaker 3:would encountering some skinheads or flying monkeys and, like everyone says, oh, skinheads you know, and I always thought it was flying, because I just thought, no, it doesn't seem like an evolutionary thing. This seems like they are. They got some sort of magical thing going on. I mean, I couldn't go to Walmart if I was afraid of skinheads, I think, so that's probably a bad joke, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think a case can be made. There are horror elements to it, but it's also fantasy too. Yeah, right, and there's a connection between fantasy and horror. I don't know.
Speaker 4:I mean, there's not a lot of blood, you know, because even the witch just kind of melts. Yeah, it doesn't, it's not, I don't know. It seems like gore isn't well. Where's Mary's baby?
Speaker 1:Would you rather be gore to death or melt to death? Melt, I guess.
Speaker 4:I Melt, I guess, I don't know One more.
Speaker 3:If you were very squeamish about gore, then Sinners may not be your movie. That's about as much. It was almost Tarantino-esque without the humor.
Speaker 4:Just so over the top, even the end scene, which does not include a supernatural element, is full of gore and death with the machine gun.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think of Alice in Wonderland as kind of really scary. Oh, it's terrifying so that could be horror literature.
Speaker 3:I really hate that. Yeah, I mean, I respect it, I appreciate it. I think the guy did a really scary thing. Oh, he was nuts, yeah, and all the right ways, except for that one way Terrified me.
Speaker 2:I mean, he was a brilliant log and mathematician, but also in a really strange mind.
Speaker 1:And wrote something so irrational. Well, it goes together.
Speaker 2:When you study reason, you also understand irrationality. I was going to say how can you know what's irrational if you aren't very clear on what is rational?
Speaker 1:Are any of you fans of the horror genre? Do you typically go to gory things or horror things?
Speaker 2:I'm not like, I don't go out of my way to, but I appreciate it a lot. I mean, there was something. I mean this is a question that psychologists and philosophers have been puzzling over is why we find, you know, entertainment, why we find horror entertaining, and how we can sort of suspend our belief that it's all just acting or fiction, and yet we still find it enjoyable. And, you know, it's kind of like eating foods that are very spicy, or roller coasters too.
Speaker 1:Or listening to true crime podcasts and all the details that come out.
Speaker 2:Well, they say that. I mean one evolutionary explanation is that this is preparing us for the things we might encounter in life, and some people have argued that nightmares are doing that function. They're kind of the mind is prepping itself for these nightmare situations which might be real and that horror is kind of an extension of that. So, we do inflict horror movies on ourselves involuntarily. Those of us who experienced nightmares.
Speaker 3:No, I definitely like scary movies. I would see a lot more, but I'm not necessarily encouraged at home to see them, so I was trying to think of like a list of horror movies that I like and whether roughly call them as you know, consonant with some Christian sensibilities.
Speaker 3:And there is a fairly long list of scary movies that I've seen. I probably I haven't seen a lot of the contemporary ones. So yeah, I one one trend. I don't know if we're out of that trend, but there was a trend for a while where in the 70s although you think this is a 70s thing, but more in the teens, in the aughts, is where it all goes to pieces. I mean, it does not end, it's a terrible ending, and I, as a film lover of the 70s, I always think, well, I don't need a happy ending, but it turns out in a horror movie when it just ends with dread, I don't like that.
Speaker 4:So yeah, so this kind of gets us back. I want to go back to Sinners just for a second Sure Alternate ending versus what I thought was going to be the ending, which is leaving us not knowing whether he drops the guitar or not, right, yeah, I thought that would have been a great ending. What did you guys Did you appreciate it? I thought so, too, would have been a great ending.
Speaker 2:What did you guys, did you appreciate it? I thought so too. In fact, I thought it was going to end. Yeah, me too, I thought it was.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so don't leave as soon as the credits come on, if you haven't seen this movie.
Speaker 3:I want Please.
Speaker 4:I want to say drop it, please drop it. That's not. I really thought he was going to.
Speaker 1:I really thought he was find it fascinating and I'd be curious to see what you all think about this. You know, at the very end I think it was at the second ending it says I still think of that day as one of the best days of my life because until it, all broke down.
Speaker 1:But that's kind of part of it, isn't it? You can't have, you can't have that without the other, and there's just so much I want you to say. I got more to say, but you go ahead. You were gonna say something. Well, went back to. You think it's sort of profound that everything is about erotic sex, right, and so it seems like there is a type of movie attitude. Eros is what I'd prefer to say Eros yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's better. But that hedonism, that filling up the senses, really is where everything is at. That is true. The true epitome of human experience is filling up the human senses, which I think Christianity has been wrong historically to say you got to avoid all of those things in order to be pure and holy, but to think of those as the ultimate you know, just even to think of Eros as more ultimate than agape just seems yeah. Well, I don't think it has to be just about the senses, though I mean.
Speaker 3:To me you can be inspired by art. I don't know if that's just a matter of it appealing to your senses. Help me out here. But Kant doesn't he say that, when it comes to art and aesthetics, that if it appeals to your. So if you look at a painting of some fruit and you get hungry, painting has failed.
Speaker 2:It has to appeal to something higher. It has to be. There's a sublimity to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the neon of the sublime that is inspiring, that you know, that lifts you up, or just you feel awe, those can be related to, can be mediated through the body, but it doesn't, I wouldn't say, carnal.
Speaker 1:This is one of the blind spots that I have how aesthetics can lead to the sublime For sure. I typically don't experience the sublime that way that's really.
Speaker 3:without that I probably wouldn't be a believer at all.
Speaker 1:That's definitely a conversation we'll have on air. Yeah, love it as well as off.
Speaker 3:I love the ending, by the way, the second ending, even though I was ready to be done.
Speaker 3:I felt like the ending in a sense almost redeemed the whole movie from my perspective. It also, I thought, was a conclusion completely consistent with Christianity, the sense that you've been given a gift, you have the whole package. It comes with death, it comes with sadness, it comes with deep sorrow in the valleys, but it's worth it still. And he was able to find that beauty and expression and he was willing to take all of the bad because of so much good that comes with creation.
Speaker 3:And I feel like I'm a creation guy and more than a fall guy. I used to be a fall guy, right, but now I think that gives too much power to human beings to destroy God's work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'm with you on that, Even though my movie example was all about sin in the fall. I totally agree with you. I like that.
Speaker 4:So it's more godly to keep playing when God has given you this gift than it is to drop it so you could stay in your desk church. Drop it so you could stay in your desk church, and that was kind of.
Speaker 1:One of my criticisms, again coming from a very Christian perspective, is that almost for me it created a false dichotomy right that you can only do good music, you can only experience that sublime aesthetics outside of the boundary of the church. But there's some kind of good evidence for that too. In some ways in certain parts of history you made a little mocking about the praise band. Yeah, but Bach is a good counter-argument.
Speaker 3:There you go, probably the best, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Cool, all right, all right. Well, thank you all very much, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.