'Conjuring' belief in demons

Forty years after The Exorcist made $441 million and lodged itself in the American imagination, the latest cast-out-demons based-on-a-true-story film hit theaters this weekend. The writers and director are hoping the $20 million production called The Conjuring makes some money -- and gets some viewers seriously considering demonic realities. 

"People should never be ignorant of demonic forces and think it can't happen to them," said Chad Hayes, one of the screenwriters. 

Chad and his twin brother and co-writer Carey Hayes have been adamant about the connection between their faith and this horror film, a connection which has pretty seamlessly blended with some of the studios' promotional efforts. The film's distributor, New Line Cinema, has subcontracted with Grace Hill Media for a specific faith-market campaign. The company arranged advance screenings for faith groups, including groups of priests, and has made the writer-brothers and the real-life exorcists available to the religious press.

The people behind this film hope those who believe in demons go to theaters and watch. Chad Hayes, for example, said, "Men and women of faith should see this film because they will see the power that only God holds to overcome evil. They can be witnesses to that moment of darkness that only the power of God can defeat."

The people behind the film don't only want believers to go and see it, but one way to market it to believers it to talk about how the product will be powerful and especially spiritually useful for those who don't believe. This is part of why there's all this talk about the reality of demonic forces. It's aimed at those who like their scary narratives to teeter on the question, "is it real?," and also at those who think it is real and want to believe that such a film could transform the beliefs of others.

That evangelical message is clear enough that some reviewers are reacting to it. At Salon, the film has been dubbed "one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years," which is not framed as a compliment.

At a recent screening, the director reportedly spent some time trying to persuade incredulous critics of the film's serious intent. The final words on the screen, too, from one of the real-life exorcists involved in the real-life version of the film's fictionalized events, emphasize this point:

Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.

Whether or not they believe in The Conjuring, marketing a movie to people who believe in demons isn't a bad idea.

For one thing, there's a good number of them. There's not a lot of really solid information on exactly how many, but one poll reported that 41 percent of Americans agreed with the the idea that demons exist, and another, which just looked at self-identified Christians, put the number at 64 percent of Christians, which is about 48 percent of the general population. That works out to more than 150 million Americans as the potential market for this marketing campaign of this movie, plus, presumably, the people they know and think might be somewhere on the edge of possible belief.

For another thing, appealing to religious audiences has paid off in recent years. There are success stories inspiring this marketing drive: The Passion of the Christ, The Blind Side, Fireproof, and others. Add the successes of faith-"infused" TV shows that have fared so well lately, Duck Dynasty, The Bible, etc., and the people who decide what movies get made are going to pay attention. And they are: At this year's Annual Faith and Values Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry, a Hollywood affair celebrating films pitched as faith-friendly and making lots and lots of money for it, marketing strategists were saying they could sell anything that is faith friendly. It was reported that in the last 21 years the number of films classified as having "at least some Christian, redemptive content" has grown from about 10 percent of the movies produced to nearly 57 percent, but there is still demand for more.

It turns out religious right's efforts to demonstrate the economic strength of conservative Christians actually worked. If not with boycotts, then with theater tickets and big buckets of popcorn.

According to Carey Hayes, "the essence of this movie is, God wins."

One could say the same of The Exorcist, of course. That's what these movies do: God wins, demons are dramatized, some segment of the audience wonders if maybe that fictionally depicted reality is really real, and others say yes, yes!, and a bunch of money is made and more such stories are put into production.

The Conjuring continued that tradition this weekend, pulling in box office receipts worth $41.5 million,  earning more than twice what it cost with just it's North American debut.

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'Do you believe God will save you from your own ridiculousness?'

The "processing" scene in P.T. Anderson's The Master:

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The Rich Mullins story

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'Some weeping'

From the NPR review of Consuming Spirits:

[Chris] Sullivan's Appalachian Gothic takes us into a convent chapel where the mother superior makes product endorsements part of her tour; a tiny local-history museum where unruly children chatter while being told about the ghoulish, recently found Indian corpse that's been hurriedly taxidermied and added to a display; and into the touched mind of Victor, a depressive, alcoholic man-child who drifts in and out of consciousness behind the wheel of his truck while listening to Gray's radio show.

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'Stop the car'

In its opening weekend a year ago, Courageous, an independent Christian film produced by the film-making ministry of a Ga. Baptist church, brought in more than $9 million in ticket sales. Nearly $8,000 tickets were sold per theater showing the film. The film's budget was only $2 million, in part because half the actors were church volunteers.

Courageous earned eight times its budget in 10 days.

In the four months before Courageous was released on DVD, ticket sales in the US reached a total of more than $34 million.

All of which is only by way of assessing cultural impact.

The director, Alex Kendrick, whose title at the church where he works is associate pastor of media, has been quoted as saying: "They say we're preaching to the choir, but you know what? Sometimes the choir needs a good reminder."

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Žižek's favorite film

Slovoj Žižek listed The Sound of Music among his top 10 favorite films for the BFI's 2012 critics list.

He said, "This is what I really enjoy – no compromises for high quality or good taste."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the critics' final top 10 list didn't include any of Žižek's picks.

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Hard-to-sing redemption songs

It happens halfway through the hymn, between the second verse and the chorus. Walter, struggling with the key, looks at the white-haired congregants around him in the plain Protestant church, looks at the hymn book in his hands, and drops his voice a step to try and sing bass.

It's a familiar enough scene in congregational singing, though I don't think I've seen it in a film before. The hymn is pitched a little too high or a little too low -- I don't know the technical terms here -- and the singers struggle with high notes being too high or the low ones too low, and they switch, several times in the four or five verses, trying to get it right.

Trying to conform to the voices around them. Trying to find the right place in the community song.

This is also the theme of Small Town Murder Songs, a film which is ostensibly a moody, modern gothic crime story, but is really about a drama of the struggle of faith in the context of a community.

Walter, played by Peter Stromare with a very large mustache, is the aging police chief of a very small Ontario town. Most of his duties have been speeding tickets, illegal dumping, and escorting doublewide mobile home transports through town, but now he's faced with the first homicide of his career. A woman -- "not from around here" -- is found stripped and strangled between a highway and a lake. The news, and the subsequent faltering investigation, upsets the town, upsets the area's Mennonite communities, and upsets Walter's recently reformed life.

The crime narrative in this 2010, Ed Gass-Donnelly-directed film, which is showing, right now, in my local art house theater, is very linear. It's straightforward. The investigation and the plot act as the three, four, five verses of a  hard-to-sing hymn. The drama, the real heart of the story, is Walter trying to adjust himself to sing it right.

He changes course several times in the story. He attempts to transform himself, and to be transformed, and to fit with and be in right relationship with the community around him. Much of the tension of the film comes from the way the chief is always ill at ease, always not quite right with the people who are always in some real sense his people, and yet who won't, don't fully own him as a part of them. He's separated from his Old Order family, awkward with his church, distant from his one fellow officer, increasingly isolated from his wife, detached from the life of the town. Yet he desperately, desperately wants to fix it.

More accurately: he wants to be fixed. He experiences this alienation as his sin, and his sin as part of himself, his "nature." It's the part of himself and his vague, violent past from which he wants, desperately, desperately, to be saved.

The film does all this fantastically, making use of open, seemingly empty rural spaces, long silences, and a sound track of old hymns and folk music of the Alan Lomax field recordings style, re-created by Canadian band and choir Bruce Peninsula. The acting is excellent, with Peter Stormare and co-stars Martha Plimpton, Jill Hennessey and Aaron Poole each embodying, in different ways, supressed turmoil and surface tension.

In one of my favorite scenes, Walter is baptized. He stands arms crossed, fully dressed, chest deep in the baptismal tank. The minister holds Walter's nose, and dunks him. When he comes up his mustache is dripping and, for a moment, there's a look of rapture on his face. Then he starts laughing. And keeps laughing, in what's either relief and joy -- or hysteria.

This ambiguity is consistent throughout the film, and proves powerful.

Small Town Murder Songs not only gets religious details right -- a rare enough thing -- but also gets and portrays the sense of a struggle that's so often a part of being a part of a community, the struggle that's often a part of faith.

It is a crime story, and critics aren't wrong when they compare this to Fargo or Winter's Bone. At the level of viscera, though, this story is a story about wanting and struggling to sing along to a song everyone is singing, except you.

 

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