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A witch or an apostle, the Devil doesn't care
I appreciate this review of Heretic (2024) informing me in so many words that I am not the film's target audience:
What's scarier than believing in a higher power that controls our every move? Not believing in a higher power at all [. . .] The film is a distillation of thousands of years of the same basic narratives into barely different religions that have shaped human history.
Tell me that the writer-directors are at least culturally Christian without telling me etc. because I don't find atheism remotely frightening, nor is it incompatible with the traditions of the ethnoreligion to which I belong, and if you believe that all human religions across history are barely differentiable from one another, when you get your head out of your Joseph Campbell have I got bad news for you. I am unironically glad that Hugh Grant is having such a good time in his horror debut, but theologically this film sounds stressfully reminiscent of every gotcha conversation I have tried to avoid with the kind of new-or-not atheist who sure sounds hella Christian when filtering the discourse through the lens of belief and treats Mithraism or the Baʿal cycle like a mic drop. I hope it's more complicated. I am not encouraged by summations like:
Why do we believe what we believe? Is it just because we've been told to do so? Or is there something beyond the many books that Reed claims to have read? "Heretic" is a horror movie about some of the most soul-rattling ideas in history, including not just that there's nothing after death but that everything we've built our lives on has been a lie.
By now I am of course prejudiced against the use of the first person plural in this review, but aside from the fact that the dreadful truth beneath a cushion of lies is rather a horror staple, I am not convinced that the loss of faith is such a shockingly universal experience, even among people who have left the religions they were born into. tl;dr I leave this perennial post here and I'll wait for the filmmakers to explain to me how Buryat shamanism and Yoruba Ìṣẹ̀ṣe are totes interchangeable.
What's scarier than believing in a higher power that controls our every move? Not believing in a higher power at all [. . .] The film is a distillation of thousands of years of the same basic narratives into barely different religions that have shaped human history.
Tell me that the writer-directors are at least culturally Christian without telling me etc. because I don't find atheism remotely frightening, nor is it incompatible with the traditions of the ethnoreligion to which I belong, and if you believe that all human religions across history are barely differentiable from one another, when you get your head out of your Joseph Campbell have I got bad news for you. I am unironically glad that Hugh Grant is having such a good time in his horror debut, but theologically this film sounds stressfully reminiscent of every gotcha conversation I have tried to avoid with the kind of new-or-not atheist who sure sounds hella Christian when filtering the discourse through the lens of belief and treats Mithraism or the Baʿal cycle like a mic drop. I hope it's more complicated. I am not encouraged by summations like:
Why do we believe what we believe? Is it just because we've been told to do so? Or is there something beyond the many books that Reed claims to have read? "Heretic" is a horror movie about some of the most soul-rattling ideas in history, including not just that there's nothing after death but that everything we've built our lives on has been a lie.
By now I am of course prejudiced against the use of the first person plural in this review, but aside from the fact that the dreadful truth beneath a cushion of lies is rather a horror staple, I am not convinced that the loss of faith is such a shockingly universal experience, even among people who have left the religions they were born into. tl;dr I leave this perennial post here and I'll wait for the filmmakers to explain to me how Buryat shamanism and Yoruba Ìṣẹ̀ṣe are totes interchangeable.
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a man who found cosmic horror very comforting; the idea being that he had grown up being told that God was watching his every move and had opinions about everything he did. The idea of an impersonal cosmos, where the gods didn't exist or else didn't give a shit about humans, was lovely and relaxing for him.
That was my reaction to cosmic horror as well! I find an impersonal cosmos far more comforting than "His Eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me."
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