Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, And Demonic Belief, Sena Nurhan Duran

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson, The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

Alice, Sheila J. Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Alice (2022), directed by Krystin Ver Linden.

Nothing Compares, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Nothing Compares (2022), directed by Kathryn Ferguson.

Descendant, Sheila J. Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Descendant (2022), directed by Margaret Brown.

Frederick Wiseman's Essene (1972): The Duality Of Mary And Martha, Nilita Vachani

Journal of Religion & Film

America’s legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman shot Essene 50 years ago at the height of the commune movement in the United States. Unlike his previous institutional films which showcase an insane asylum, a public high school, an inner city police force, a hospital, and a military training school, Essene's canvas is the far less turbulent terrain of a serene and austere Benedictine monastery devoted to the love and service of God and the divine spirit. This paper undertakes a close textual and hermeneutic analysis of Essene alongside an appraisal of Wiseman’s working methodology, his cinematic portrayals of character and dramaturgy, …

Religion And Moral Injury In American Vietnam War Films, Mary F. Brewer

Journal of Religion & Film

This essay focuses on the representation of religion in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). It explores how religion intersects with the experience of moral trauma at an individual level, and how the films portray moral injury to be as damaging an aspect of war trauma for Vietnam veterans as grievous physical harm. Further, the essay considers how moral injury is a fundamental component of the collective trauma the nation experienced and, in turn, the culture wars that erupted during and after the …

Who We Are: A Chronicle Of Racism In America, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (2021), directed by Emily Kunstler.

End Of The Line: The Women Of Standing Rock, Gary Saul

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (2021), directed by Shannon Kring.

“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, And Jokers, William S. Chavez, Luke Mccracken

Journal of Religion & Film

Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of …

Stanley Kubrick, Jewish Filmmaker: A Review Essay, Michael Gibson

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a review of two books: Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), and David Mikics, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre to represent not simply a particular historical setting, the Great Depression, but also a vision of history to be interpreted in terms of eschatology. Expressionistic photography transforms the characters’ experiences into enigmatic visions that invite and guide interpretation. A comparison of montage sequences in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), a Farm Security Administration documentary, clarifies how Ford’s narrative film aligns spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène.

Hail, Caesar! A Jesus Film In Search Of A Christ Figure, Jon Coutts

Journal of Religion & Film

For over a century the moving picture has been a medium ripe for propagation or exploration of the story of Christ. Since the first wave hit screens in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the list of so-called “Jesus films” has come to number in the dozens. Given that Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2016 Hail, Caesar!­ sets itself up as a reprisal of such films, the question is how to interpret it. To explore this, interpretation of the film is framed by consideration of the Coen brothers' attention to religious themes, is set against the backdrop of the second wave …

Burden, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Burden (2020) directed by Andrew Heckler.

Sister Aimee, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Sister Aimee (2019), directed by Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann.

‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, And Not Surviving Patriarchy, Laurel Zwissler

Journal of Religion & Film

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, early modern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that the film, The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship to which the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of the isolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Thomasin.

Representations Of Nineteenth Century Mormonism In A Mormon Maid: A Cinematic Analysis, Elisabeth Weagel

Journal of Religion & Film

During the first quarter of the 20th century there was a trend in Hollywood to make films about Mormons. Practices such as polygamy created just the kind of sensationalism that attracted filmmakers (even Thomas Edison contributed with his 1902 film A Trip to Salt Lake). Many of these were B-pictures, but the 1917 film A Mormon Maid stands out because it was produced by a major production company (Paramount) and was backed by top director Cecil B. DeMille. It is often given passing reference, but very little genuine scholarship has been done on the film. A hundred years …

The Semi-Anti-Apocalypse Of Black Panther, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is one of a series of films reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

King In The Wilderness, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of King in the Wilderness (2018), directed by Peter W. Kunhardt.

Fixing Ground Zero: Race And Religion In Francis Lawrence’S I Am Legend, Michael E. Heyes

Journal of Religion & Film

Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.

Religion And Violence In Jesse James Films, 1972–2010, Travis Warren Cooper

Journal of Religion & Film

This essay analyzes recent depictions of Jesse James in cinema, examining filmic portrayals of the figure between the years of 1972 and 2010. Working from the intersection of the anthropology of film and religious studies approaches to popular culture, the essay fills significant gaps in the study of James folklore. As no substantial examinations of the religious aspects of the James myths exist, I hone in on the legend’s religiosity as contested in filmic form. Films, including revisionist Westerns, are not unlike oral-history statements recorded and analyzed by anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnographers. Jesse James movies, in other words, have much …

How To Attain Liberation From A False World? The Gnostic Myth Of Sophia In Dark City (1998), Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Journal of Religion & Film

In the second half of the 20th century, a fascinating revival of ancient Gnostic ideas in American popular culture could be observed. One of the major streams through which Gnostic ideas are transmitted is Hollywood cinema. Many works that emerged at the end of 1990s can be viewed through the ideas of ancient Gnostic systems: The Truman Show (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The Others (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001) or The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003).

In this article, the author analyses Dark City (1998) and demonstrates that the story depicted in the film is heavily indebted to the Gnostic myth of …

Indigenous Helpers And Renegade Invaders: Ambivalent Characters In Biblical And Cinematic Conquest Narratives, L. Daniel Hawk

Journal of Religion & Film

This article compares the role of ambiguous character types in the national narratives of biblical Israel and modern America, two nations that ground their identities in myths of conquest. The types embody the tensions and ambivalence conquest myths generate by combining the invader/indigenous binary in complementary ways. The Indigenous Helper assists the invaders and signifies the land’s acquiescence to conquest. The Renegade Invader identifies with the indigenous peoples and manifests anxiety about the threat of indigenous difference. A discussion of these types in the book of Joshua, through the stories of Rahab and Achan, establishes a point of reference by …

"We Are Legion": Primal Dreams And Screams In The Satanic Screen, Carrol L. Fry Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Satan figures prominently in the Christian tradition as the ultimate Other, the enemy of our species, and he has been a central villain first in literature and now in horror films. Why viewers enjoy films that scare them is a conundrum of long standing. An explanation might come from the work of a new generation of Darwinists who have expanded on the master's findings to develop the field of evolutionary biology. Scholars in these fields believe that adaptation to the environment and survival of the fittest created not only physical forms for species but also behaviors that were adaptive for …

“I Ain’T So Sure But What The Lord Done Put These Folks In Our Path For A Reason”: Latter-Day Saints Building Communities Through Dancing In John Ford’S Wagon Master, Ian Dwayne Pettigrew

Journal of Religion & Film

One of Ford’s lesser known works, Wagon Master (1950), utilizes Mormonism’s affinity for dancing to build bonds between diverse groups, thus epitomizing the director’s optimistic vision of a united and progressive America. Through the development of the narrative and Wagon Master’s mise-en-scène, Ford displays a keen awareness of Mormon culture and the reasons dancing still holds such significance to members of the religion. Surprisingly, the film also captures a core tension of LDS culture: the desire to receive the inclusion of the rest of society whilst remaining a distinct and faithful people. For the Saints in the film, …

The Movie Mogul, Moses And Muslims: Islamic Elements In Cecil B. Demille’S The Ten Commandments (1956), Michael D. Calabria Ofm

Journal of Religion & Film

Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, has come to define the genre of the biblical epic. It has earned a permanent place in American culture due to its annual airing on television during the Easter and Passover holidays. Most viewers are unaware, however, that DeMille had sought to make a film that would appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims at a time when their common Abrahamic ancestry had yet to be articulated, and interreligious dialogue was all but unheard of. To this end, Henry Noerdlinger, DeMille’s researcher for the film, consulted the Qur’an, and screenwriters incorporated Islamic …

The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes

Journal of Religion & Film

This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …

The Butler, Carol Miles

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels.

There Will Come A Day, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of There Will Come a Day (2013) directed by Giorgio Diritti.