Today at Tor.com I talk about some awfulsome Christian horror movies.

Two things about this article:

1) I am not joking about The Prophecy. Simon is a wounded angel hiding in the abandoned wing of a school, and when he realizes Gabriel is coming for him, he coaxes little Mary close enough that he can spit the soul he’s carrying into her body so Gabriel doesn’t find it.

This is not weird in terms of heavenly amorality, ends justifying the means, etc. It’s unsettling, but the whole idea is that the heavenly agenda can’t be understood by mortal men, so that’s all fine. But what this means in real life is that Eric Stoltz looked at the script and went, “Okay, I fight an angel, sure, I talk to the agnostic, okay, I make out with a twelve-year-old, sure, and then Gabriel kills me. I don’t see any problems here! Sign me up!”

And seriously, Eric Stoltz is creepy enough without watching him French kiss a child, okay? You can’t un-ring that bell.

2) I kid about Stigmata, but no joke, I think that movie is awesome, and here’s why.

“Lift a stone, and you will find me.”

Let’s start with some truth that you should know if you’re going into this movie thinking that because I love it, it’s a great movie that should be awarded a bunch of Oscars. You should know better than that by now, but sometimes people get confused, so I’m just specifying.

Firstly, some of the dialogue in this movie is not great. It’s not End of Days bad, but it’s a lot of exposition/doom and portent/being sad. Just…you know how movies go.

To be fair, a lot of the exposition is necessary here because this movie is trying to do something that not a lot of Christian horror does, which is to actually bring up some legit questions about religion, God, and what have you. (God in most Christian horror tends to be a testy, bizarrely specific, hard-to-please grump. Which is not necessarily an unfair depiction of the Biblical God, especially from the Old Testament/Revelations, but still.)

Another trend you will notice in this movie is “Not Subtle”. Beds light on fire, people scratch things obsessively on walls as rock music plays, the bad guys spend their time slinking around corners and staring at you in a way that, if you had the common sense God gave a stick of gum, you’d recognize as eavesdropping, but if you are a priest in this movie you dismiss, and just continue researching your super-secret information. There are some nice moments in this movie, even some subtle moments, but they are a little more the exception than the rule.

…subtle!

However, the movie is still awesome! Let me explain.

Stigmata follows Frankie, an atheist hairdresser living it up in Pittsburgh, which is apparently a town packed with hairdressers who all go out at night together to the only nightclub in Pittsburgh. Her mother sends her a rosary (which we know is from the secretive and now quite deceased Father Alameida, but which is treated by Mom just as a fun souvenir of her trip), and Frankie thinks no more of it.

Then she takes a long, hot bath in a room lit only with votive candles (who does this? Don’t tell me if you do this, I like to pretend this is just in the movies), gets two holes the size of quarters in her palms, and nearly bleeds out. The people at the hospital treat her like a suicide attempt, even though she’s like, “I’m not suicidal, and also, how could I possibly hammer two huge holes into my own wrists?” They pat her on the head and send her home. This becomes a theme, because every time a new mark appears they send her to the hospital for CAT scans and everything, while treating her like she came in with the sniffles instead of a case of Huge Gashes That Appear On My Body While I’m Out With My Hairdresser Friends.

Tangent: I appreciate whenever the medical aspect of a horror movie is just as creepy as the supernatural hoopla, because your chances of being unduly prodded by someone in the medical profession are slightly higher than your chances of being possessed by the undead and/or Satan. (It’s just a numbers game.) The spinal tap in The Exorcist was more terrifying than the pea-soup vomit, I don’t care what you say. End tangent!

Anyway, Father Gabriel Byrne eventually shows up hoping to debunk her, and they sit down to have a nice conversation, and this is where, when I saw it the first time, I went from sort of being interested in it to really liking it. I am not always the biggest fan of Patricia Arquette, but she’s really suited to this role, and Gabriel Byrne is always awesome, and they work together well, and there’s just something about this scene that I love. It helps that he’s like, “So, let’s talk about how you’re crazy-devout and that’s why this is happening,” and she’s like, “Atheist,” and he’s like, “…Oh. Um.”

So they talk. They talk a lot, and some of it is flirting, but a lot of it is just her asking these quiet questions that he realizes he doesn’t have the answer to, which is cool, and pretty different for this genre, in which dudes tend to be right about 115% of the time (unless the woman is a virgin or pregnant, which…I’m not even going to get into).

Anyway, he has a crisis of faith, and he makes a lot of phone calls to his priest friend who lives in the National Archives so they can exposit back and forth and get instant results, and Father Gabriel unwisely involves Cardinal Jonathan Pryce, not realizing this character is the wrong side of Pryce’s 40/60 Good Guy/Bad Guy split. (Honest mistake.) Meanwhile, Frankie’s stigmata recur more violently and frequently, and with every new one she receives her situation worsens.

Father Gabriel tries to comfort Frankie in between her possessions/stigmatic episodes, and ends up taking her to Cardinal Pryce for help (wrong end of the split, dude, come on!), and leaves at an inopportune moment to get the final piece of exposition.

Good news: Father Gabriel figures out that she’s being possessed by Father Alameida whose rosary she possesses, because the old Padre had discovered a Gospel consisting of Jesus’s own words, which reaffirms that Jesus was a cool dude who loved everyone, and negates the need for a Catholic Church.

Bad news: I bet the Catholic Church is gonna love that.

Good news: He gets there before Cardinal Pryce can strangle the innocent Frankie to death in an attempt to keep the secret from getting out!

Bad news: Then the dead Padre lights the bedroom on fire.

Good news: It’s holy fire that Father Gabriel can walk through without harm because his faith has been renewed by the existence of this down-home Gospel that gives him a way to love god more directly!

Bad news: His relationship with Frankie is about to take a seriously awkward turn.

Good news: She lives!

Bad news: Father Gabriel leaves her to go unearth the manuscript, which means he’ll be busy dismantling the Catholic Church for the next thousand years.

Things I Like About This Movie:

1. The arbitrarily-chosen woman is actually arbitrarily chosen. So many of these kinds of movies “arbitrarily” choose a woman of a particular virtue or lack thereof to make a point. Here, Frankie is a workaday nobody who gets a rosary mailed to her entirely by accident, and becomes the vessel for the rosary’s prior owner through zero fault of her own. (It also avoids the “For a THOUSAND YEARS our secret society has waited in readiness for the Chosen One to be born!” thing, which generally doesn’t sit well with me. Couldn’t you have trained a decent leader or something in the intervening centuries? Okay, then. No wonder you guys had to sit around for a thousand years; bunch of lazies.)

2. The movie generally avoids sexualizing Frankie, which I also appreciate. Her stigmatic and possessive episodes are not filmed as quasi-erotic writhing; they’re attacks, and filmed that way. It’s awful and terrifying, and treated that way. Even her relationship with Father Gabriel, which gets a little flirty in the middle (leave room for the Holy Spirit, you kids!…literally), seems to be based on an intellectual and humanist connection and not just plot-necessitated, hamfisted Romantic Moments. Lookin’ at you, Thorn Birds. (When you were nine.)

Hell, even the body-possessor doesn’t do anything sexual to/with her; the stigmata are creepy as hell but not sexual, and his other hobbies are graffiti and levitation and grumping around about the lost Gospel in several languages at excessive volume. Basically, this could have happened to a dude and it would have made an equal amount of sense, is what I’m saying, and since most of these movies are about the birth of a particular child from some unfortunate lady’s womb, you don’t get to say that very often.

3. In most of these movies, God is the vengeful, spiteful little grudge-holder from the Old Testament who sends angels to rip people’s hearts from their chests and doom some unknowing lady to bear the demon-seed or something. In this movie, God is actually a loving force whose son’s Gospel is very caring and kind and promises you a direct connection with his loving presence, etc. Instead, it’s the corrupt clergy, who are willing to kill a woman to prevent her from telling people about their own God’s love for everyone, who do not come off so well. On the other hand, throughout history the Catholic Church as an institution has routinely been a bunch of poopheads, so this is not particularly out of character. (“Sorry about that, Galileo! Our bad!”)

4. She’s an atheist. No bones are made about it. Maybe by the end of the movie she changes her mind on some things, but her changing her mind is not something on which her fate hinges. For an atheist to be the legit hero of a Christian horror is pretty awesome.

5. The movie looks pretty good. I kid (correctly) about some of the non-subtle imagery, but there’s also some lovely imagery, and the more you look the more it’s there. Things like, when the bedroom is on holyfire, there’s a tiny, brief close-up of a Virgin Mary statue getting licked by the flames, which is a nice reminder of what will happen to religious icons when the news gets out about this Gospel, etc. Even some of the obvious stuff is very well-shot and planned. One scene of Frankie and Father Gabriel Byrne talking has a conversation with them where the audio fades out into Twinky Piano Music of Happiness, and you get a real sense that these crazy kids are getting along just fine. And then she gets another stigmata, loudly and violently, and it rips the scene apart – her, the nearest market stalls, the soundtrack, everything. It’s effective. (Plus at the end she wanders in a garden, and she’s wrapped in a sheet and a dove comes to rest on her (Not Subtle!), but there’s a St. Francis statue behind her, and by then she’s suffered so much that you’re just relieved she’s going to be okay, and if she’s now St. Frances, then fine, you know?)

6. She lives.

I understand the narrative option of killing her – and in an alternate ending on the DVD, she gets the fifth stigmata and dies, and it’s very poignant and even narratively satisfying in some ways – but I seriously appreciate that she survives. I mean, it’s not like any of this is her fault. She never even investigated a strange sound while wearing only a skimpy nightgown or anything!

(It’s interesting how much I like her character, since Patricia Arquette is hit or miss for me. Frankie’s just…neat. Sure, she suffers a little from Vessel Syndrome, where she’s the one who suffers and the priest is the one making expository phone calls and deducing left and right; but she handles the suffering and tries to push past it and live a normal life as if it’s not coming back, and she never dismisses her own experiences or listens to the people who try to tell her it’s not happening, and she grows on you.)

Basically, if you have read this far, it’s clear that I love this movie too much. The end.