The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to themes that derive from Biblical and Christian sources. The Bible is divided into two parts – The Old Testament concerning Adam and Eve, their fall from the Garden of Eden, Noah and The Flood, Moses and God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and The New Testament concerning the life of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross to deliver humanity from sin.
For Jewish belief see Judaism. Christianity concerns the belief in God, of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice to deliver humanity from sin and the adherence to a moral code. There are many different interpretations and sects within this – the major one covered here is Catholicism. For films depicting faith in action or critical of religion see Religion in Fantastic Cinema; for strange breakaway groups see Cults.
Many popular ideas in genre cinema derive from the Christian tradition – of an afterlife where the virtuous go to Heaven and the evil and sinful go to Hell. In Heaven, God the creator of the universe lives, and is tended by Angels. Hell is commanded by The Devil, the prime source of evil in Christendom, who command hordes of Demons.
A large number of genre tropes derive from these ideas including stories of angelic intervention, demonic possession, people making Diabolical Pacts to sell their soul, of Miracles from the hand of God. The Vampire Film makes use of the prime Christian symbol, the crucifix, as an icon of power that can drive a vampire away.
There is the popularity of films about the Biblical End Times Prophecies as depicted in The Book of Revelations. The first of these was The Omen (1976) concerning the Antichrist, the coming battle of Armageddon and the Rapture where all true believers are taken up to Heaven. There have also been a number of films concerning the return of Jesus, people who are thought to be Jesus or the retelling of aspects of the story in modern times.
It should be added that the use of these elements in stories do not necessarily denote that the people writing and making them is a Christian believer. One needn’t be a regular church attendee, for instance, to write a story about using a crucifix to fight off a vampire. For films made by Christian believers for other believers and/or to proselytize to non-believers see Christian Cinema.
A controversy-laden Jean-Luc Godard film that offers an irreverent modern-day retelling of the Immaculate Conception. An amusing idea that vanishes under Godard’s pretensions
A very strange film where widow Adrienne Barbeau finds an amnesiac Keir Dullea on a Greek island who shows mysterious abilities and may have come from the future
One of the early films from Paul Verhoeven, an amusingly blasphemous tale that draws more than a little from Don’t Look Now with gay writer Jeroen Krabbe becoming wound into the dealings of femme fatale Renee Soutendijk
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
The definitive film version of the Arthurian legends. John Boorman gives us a magnificent and soaring work of beautiful impassioned imagery that delves deep into the rich mythology of the cycle
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s homage to the adventure films of the 1940s was a huge hit in its day, spawning several sequels and many imitators. The film is pure action and adventure, delivered with enormous charm and wit
Ray Bradbury’s book about the human colonisation of Mars is an SF classic for its wistful, nostalgic poetry. This tv mini-series adaptation is killed by a lumbering director who over-explains Bradbury’s imagery in the most literal ways
The Monty Python team’s finest hour, a wickedly irreverent spoof on Christianity that contains some of their most side-splitting gags
Earlier less well known adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book made for tv. This is faithful to the book but is badly hampered by primitive animation and an exceedingly simplistic rendering of the story
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen industrialist Kirk Douglas fighting the coming of the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant
This is where all the cliches of Devil Children began. A big hit among the 1970s occult boom, this is essentially Sunday tabloid Christianity – a lurid, doom-filled take on Book of Revelation End Times prophecies that moves with a slick polish and a series of schlocky deaths every few minutes
An Acid Western was a Western made with a psychedelic trippiness. Directed by Robert Downey Jr’s father, this is a surreal work about a Christ-like visitor in a zoot suit who turns up in a Western town
Classic anti-war film with Timothy Bottoms as a limbless, sightless soldier in a hospital bed as his mind wanders between hallucinations, visions of the afterlife and attempts to communicate with the medical staff
Droll, elegant camp masterpiece with Vincent Price giving the best performance of his life as a deformed madman employing the Biblical Plagues of Egypt as a motif to take revenge against the surgeons who killed his wife
One of the classic works from Ingmar Bergman, uncreditedly remade by Wes Craven as The Last House on the Left, with Max Von Sydow as a virtuous farmer who is driven to vengeance after three youths rape and kill his daughter
An amiable venture into the light fantasy films that were popular during this era., Here angels come down and intervene to aid a baseball team on a losing streak
One of the strangest films of the 1940s, featuring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and others as a group of Devil’s Island escapees who realise during the course of their journey that one of the company is Jesus Christ
The first full length Edgar Allan Poe film from D.W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame. Rather than Roger Corman’s brooding Gothicism, Griffith waters Poe’s melancholia down to a banal Christian morality play