I had no interest in distressing my diminutive friend. Instead, I conceived my plan in humane terms. Pushing his tiny brain to its limits would help him develop his full potential, winning my gratitude and a monstrous hunk of cheese.

The Greek myth of innocent Athenians escaping a labyrinth and its man-eating minotaur has spawned many a variant over the centuries. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a captive of the Spanish inquisition struggles to survive a lethal dungeon. Wrongly imprisoned brothers strategize escape in the popular TV series Prison Break. A kidnapped, routinely assaulted young mother risks death to free her child in Emma Donoghue’s critically acclaimed novel Room (and its equally lauded adaptation by Lenny Abrahamson).

Each tale provides audiences the opportunity to imagine what they themselves might do if confronted with capture, their options as limited as their mobility. Which relational ties would we preserve, and which abandon, to gain our freedom? What ambitions would suddenly appear trivial? Which values disposable?

And what of faith? Can we never know the mettle of belief until our lives are on the line?

Jesus proclaimed himself the path to true freedom, audaciously redefining an ideal grasped tightly by a people under Roman occupation. Granting “freedom for the prisoners” (Luke 4:18) meant not a reordering of the social matrix but a recalibration of expectation—a transformation of desire itself. Becoming “free indeed” (John 8:36) had little to do with political revolution undertaken to eliminate stigma and usher in material equality. Instead, this new freedom promised first an escape from the weight of sin (Rom. 8:1–2), a release enabling radical, equalizing acts of caritas (Gal. 5:13) hidden from both a spectacle-hungry public and one’s own ego (Matt. 6:1–4).

One might, like Paul and Silas, remain truly free while yet a prisoner, retaining invisible agency though a victim of injustice.

The film Heretic, directed by screenwriting duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, explores the plausibility of this kind of freeing faith. Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) has entrapped two young Latter-day Saint missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) in his home.

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It’s the sort of situational crucible familiarized by 21st-century horror. Instead of being forced by a hidden antagonist to saw off limbs or kill a friend to obtain freedom, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton verbally spar with a captor they can see while seeking a way out of his underground maze.

The adversarial dialectic which unfolds touches on the evolution of world religions, shifts in church doctrine, and the nature of personal belief. At the center of this ideological maelstrom—an exchange that grows stormier once the women realize they have been kidnapped—lies a question once posed by the Roman governor of Judea: “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

Mr. Reed claims to have found a definitive, ancient answer following years of academic study, and he attempts to methodically break down the missionaries’ own belief system by spotlighting the malleability of religious truth. He opens by asking, in a deceptively gentle manner, how they feel about polygamy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chose to outlaw the practice in 1890, he notes, because the determination to grow their numbers kept stumbling over public disdain. He steamrolls Sister Paxton’s argument that God temporarily consecrated this ancient practice, suggesting instead that Joseph Smith desired license for an uncontrollable libido.

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Physical passion, Mr. Reed implies, is a universal imperative, a physiological truth religion has only sanctioned when it has benefitted particular leaders. And fickle emotions, not intellectual assent, he argues, motivate the faith of many a layperson. When Sister Paxton observes that she knows the Book of Mormon to be true because of how it makes her feel, Mr. Reed pounces. Is emotion the final arbiter of human destiny, a shifting but foundational truth beneath all other apparent truths?

Or could it be that the unshakable fact of human existence is the one Mr. Reed ultimately discloses, a conviction that frees him to practice cruelty without moral scruple? I’ll allow you to discover for yourself.

The two missionaries presumably live by a code of honesty, a key virtue in Joseph Smith’s 13th Article of Faith. Yet they begin lying as swiftly as they cease proselytizing once they suspect Mr. Reed’s motives.

Is integrity of word and mission a principle held only when safe and comfortable? What happens to prayer and a belief in miracles when we’re shut up in a cage with no key? Are these twin elements, rooted in transcendent reality, vital organs that work the harder when life hangs in the balance or skins we quickly shed to escape constricting circumstances?

Heretic poses, rapid-fire, even more questions than I’ve framed here, doing so in a way that avoids the didactic and eludes easy answers. Fortunately, we don’t need to share the missionaries’ religious affiliation or Mr. Reed’s cynicism to appreciate the film’s aggressive interrogation of faith. Belief in Christ rooted more deeply than rhetoric will only grow stronger in the face of such a challenge. A determination to know the Truth is more than enough to set us free.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at Cal Poly State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

The post ‘Heretic’ and the Truth That Sets Us Free appeared first on Christianity Today.

If we can remember that our true foe is neither the recalcitrant coworker nor the disgruntled family member, martial imagery can prove useful—focusing devotion and inspiring endurance.

But a mind primed for conflict can also mistake difference for malevolence or confuse an imperfect individual with the author of deception. Lucifer only inhabits a stabbable body in video games and horror films, and crossing swords without causing collateral damage requires discernment. No matter how flawed the person in question, remembering the call to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44), those who also bear the divine imprint (Gen. 1:27), should prevent us from targeting pesky people as if they were the Devil incarnate.

Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) had little patience for knee-jerk assessments of others’ moral character. She recognized the temptation to inflate our own sense of righteousness by deriding those who appear to fall short of invisible, exacting benchmarks. In the novel Adam Bede, she anticipates her reader’s desire to label as pagan a rural pastor who neglects to prevent sexual malfeasance. Pausing the tale to speak directly to her audience, her narrator declares that condemning others for such failures, as for their brusque manners or lack of beauty, constitutes egregious self-deception.

Jesus cautions against seeking specks with our log-filled eyes (Matt. 7:1–5). Similarly, the narrator of Adam Bede insists we remember our shared fallibility with those we denounce, lest we “leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”

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If we can instead learn to sympathize with fictional characters in books like hers, Eliot argues, we’ll be primed to extend charity in the real world.

This merciful ethos transformed storytelling in the last half of the 20th century with the retconning of established villains. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) reimagined Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason as a mistreated, wrongly imprisoned Caribbean heiress instead of the violent adulteress in Jane Eyre. John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) recast the monster of Beowulf as a stymied philosopher. In the years since, nearly every classic villain bent on frustrating the happily ever after of a Snow White, Little Mermaid, or Sleeping Beauty has been reconfigured as a misunderstood victim of prejudice or bad luck.

Or take George Lucas’s original trilogy, in which a murderous psychopath fond of telekinetic chokeholds turns into a remorseful, conflicted father willing to die for his son. Darth Vader’s return to the light mirrored the redemptive arc of a Christian penitent, supercharging my young imagination with salvific possibility.

Today’s storytellers tend to either flatten baddies into risible, easily dismissed puppets whose defeat moves us not at all or grant villains the depth traditionally reserved for heroes. Marvel’s Killmonger, Loki, and Magneto fit the ranks of the latter, as do J. J. Abrams’s Kylo Ren, Todd Phillips’s version of the Joker, and Gregory Maguire’s Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maguire’s first novel about Elphaba, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, launched a book series and Broadway musical so popular that cinematic translation was inevitable. The movie Wicked: Part One (Part Two arrives in November 2025) writes backward from that weird moment in The Wizard of Oz when the diminutive inhabitants of Munchkinland sing a rousing, eerily vengeful chorus of “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” Wicked opens with a similarly disturbing anthem, “No One Mourns the Wicked.”

“Ding-Dong” assumes that an individual can be wholly evil, that there is social utility in a scapegoat, and that an enemy’s death constitutes an intrinsic good. “No One Mourns the Wicked” ironizes such thinking by pushing its suppositions to the breaking point. Its cheerful melody is undercut with barely disguised cruelty. “The good man scorns the Wicked,” we’re told, leaving the pariah to “cry alone” until, finally, thankfully, they one day “die alone.”

How do we justify such marginalization? By convincing ourselves “we know what Goodness is” and “the truth we all believe’ll by and by / outlive a lie.” Lyricist Stephen Schwartz nimbly undermines the conviction that we can ever know another person well enough to damn them by appending the subtle caveats “we all believe” to “truth” and “we know” to “goodness.” 

The Christian knows we are prone to rely too heavily on appearances (1 Sam. 16:7; John 7:24), and that darkness often obscures our understanding of truth (1 Cor. 4:5). The Munchkins’ summary judgment of Elphaba should make us cringe, not cheer.  

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Like the book and the musical, Wicked: Part One refuses to limit its critique to a single social dynamic. The most obvious target is racial discrimination, an abhorrence of green skin standing in for race-based prejudice writ large. (That cinematographer Alice Brooks lights certain passageways so Cynthia Erivo’s green makeup briefly resembles the dark brown of the actor’s skin underscores this commentary.) 

Wicked also questions why we dole out pity toward people with mobility impairments. And (in a move C. S. Lewis would approve) it questions the mistreatment of talking animals. Every point in this multipronged assault on intolerance hinges on the central premise that all bigotry proceeds from unquestioned conclusions about others’ moral constitution.

Some might ask whether all this restructuring goes too far. If we recast every evildoer as a survivor of trauma and attribute actions we once thought evil to mischance and others’ willful misinterpretations, are we whitewashing the human condition? Does such relentless character revision amount to a methodical deconstruction of brokenness that explains away human error by blaming it on faulty design and unhappy circumstance?

Not really. For every villain we rehabilitate, there’s another waiting in the wings, hiding behind a veneer of respectability and effectively deceptive propaganda. Wicked is no exception. The film’s big reveal does not ask us to disbelieve in badness, merely to question those biases that so often mislead and misname. Something wicked this way comes, just not by way of the usual suspects.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

The post Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Misunderstood appeared first on Christianity Today.

Should I have averted my eyes altogether? Or did my terror—detached from an actual, immediate threat—prepare me for real-world trauma? Can believers who have received a spirit not of fear but of “power, love and self-discipline” (2 Tim. 1:7) possibly justify toying with trepidation, even in imaginary spaces?

The poet Samuel Coleridge threw down the gauntlet in the early 19th-century culture wars when he declared that reading about “giants and magicians and genii” as a child granted his mind “a love of the Great and the Whole.” C. S. Lewis echoed these sentiments a century later. He held that the fear engendered by certain types of adventure and fantasy fiction could ennoble readers of all ages, teaching us that “immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones” exist to combat evil. Instead of tossing scary, supernatural stories into the bottomless pit, both writers contend that such tales prepare the mind to embrace deep truth.

Fictional threats—zombies, vampires, and hostile extraterrestrials—are one thing. Thrillers about real terrors—kidnappings, torture, serial killings—hit harder, having stolen their dramatic force from real-world crimes.

Tales dramatizing spiritual warfare, however, are another species entirely. For the believer, they can feel too scary—not equipping us to combat evil but overwhelming us with their power.

Exorcism movies are experiencing something of a renaissance. Several recent titles—The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), The Exorcism (2024), The Deliverance (2024)—coincide with the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist (1973), which splattered the silver screen with the foulest language and images imaginable. Such cinematic offerings seek not to subtly disrobe that dark expert at angelic disguise (2 Cor. 11:14) but to blazon the depredations of a leonine prowler seeking someone to devour (1 Pet. 5:8).

The boy who fled into the theater lobby now draws others toward films as a vocation. (I’m a literature and film professor.) And though I don’t teach classes that focus on horror, I do incorporate the occasional exorcism tale into my introductory film course. Features like Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (a personal favorite) take our struggle with “this dark world” as seriously as the early Christians did (Eph. 6:12).

Revisiting such fare, particularly in late October, reminds us that the “spiritual forces of evil” identified by Paul should be treated more seriously than Halloween’s flippant displays of gore and ghoulishness would suggest.

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Though far from theological treatises, each of these exorcism movies does pose questions about the nature of demonic possession—about good and evil, free will and fate. If submission to God ensures that Satan will flee when resisted (James 4:7) and believers can resist any temptation they face (1 Cor. 10:13), then do demons only gain entry when invited—like the vampires in old creature features? Once they acquire a foothold, does removal require outside intervention? What role does the host play in their own emancipation?

Hollywood would have us think the answers as numerous as the directors tackling the subject. The Pope’s Exorcist configures possession like a mousetrap that springs once a vulnerable, already-traumatized innocent enters its domain. Exorcist: Believer places a little blame on its possessed adolescents for attempting to contact a deceased parent with candle and pendulum in hand but similarly avoids censuring them for the havoc they wreak once possessed. Instead of beginning in medias res, with each possession already in motion, both stories spotlight their victims’ childlike before to throw their monstrous after into greater relief.

Scripture itself provides no single pathway into possession. Readers are left to imagine how the seven demons cast from Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2) entered her in the first place and whether any particular sins committed by the superhumanly strong tomb-dweller in Gerasenes granted Legion entry into his mind (Mark 5:1–20).

There is, however, a clear escape from demonic influence, always involving either the person or name of Christ. Whether Jesus himself casts out the demon or his disciples do so in his name, the message is the same.

Fortunately, films involving exorcisms often not only acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil but also point to the one who is able to overcome it. The question is “Who can access his power?”

Rescue traditionally rides in on the cassock of a priest armed with Scripture, holy water, and an enviable supply of conviction. In the 1973 original, faith and experience fail to prevent Father Merrin’s untimely death; he only saves young Regan by committing suicide once he’s drawn the demon into himself. The Pope’s Exorcist grants Christ a bit more power, its priestly duo effectively wielding the Word of God (Eph. 6:17) after confessing to one another those sins Satan will otherwise use against them. Once again, a priest saves an innocent via demonic absorption—but this time his partner’s invocation of Jesus’ name prevents any fatalities.

The Exorcist: Believer kicks precedent to the curb. A swelling musical score marks Father Maddox’s dramatic entrance, feigning deliverance via priest. But his efforts are abruptly interrupted when his neck is telekinetically snapped. The script’s effort at inclusivity (with help from cowriter and CT podcast guest Scott Teems) demands that salvation arrive with the help of assorted neighbors, four ideologically contrary parents, a nurse, pastors from different traditions, and a motivational speaker who vaguely invokes “the name of all holy beings” and equates “faith in each other” with faith in God.

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Lee Daniels’s The Deliverance shares standard features with its forebears, including a haunted house and a couple deaths to signal the demon’s power. But it takes a hard right toward the unexpected idea that a laywoman’s faith is enough to repel the Evil One. The pastor who attempts the “deliverance” of young Dre dismisses the need for a professional intercessor, proclaiming that one need only act with the authority of Christ to drive out a demon. When she fails in her own attempt, she explains with her dying breath that she faltered due to fear.

It is left to her listener, a single mother who has long spurned religion as a “fix” every bit as addictive as the alcohol she regularly imbibes, to prove the adage that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18) and to drive the demons from her own children. Carrying the burdens of sexual assault, emotional abuse, divorce, and financial strain has long impaired Ebony Jackson’s ability to parent her three kids. Stressed, snappish, and regularly drunk, she reacts to her children’s plights with either aggression or slurred speech. She is the last hero one would expect in an exorcism movie.

Could she also be the perfect hero? When her possessed children’s inexplicable behavior drives her to her knees for the first time in her life, the prayer that follows is dragged from the depths of her soul, just as the tortured cry “Jesus” later bursts from a frame contorted by the demon’s onslaught.

And it is enough.

Scripture offers a number of direct alternatives to fear and its maverick cousin, anxiety, including confidence (Ps. 27:3), courage (Josh. 1:9), peace (John 14:27), and delight (Ps. 94:19). Fitted together, a beautiful tableau emerges of the equipped, stalwart Christian. The Christian’s virtues are akin to a stained-glass window, translating the blinding sunlight of the Spirit into colors we can bear.

But in every rose window, lines of lead help delineate the design. Contrasting darkness makes adjacent colors pop. In the same way, fantastic, disturbing dramatizations of sin and suffering accentuate the virtues extolled by Paul in Philippians 4:8. “Whatever is true” comes into greater relief when juxtaposed against the enticing deceit of the Adversary.

Victory doesn’t require a demonology expert or priest, holy water or magical incantations. At their best, exorcism movies remind us of the Spirit-filled power available to every believer. With Christ before us, we can ourselves become the “immemorial comforters and protectors.” There’s no need to hide in the lobby.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at Cal Poly State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

The post Exorcism Movies’ Terrifying Truth appeared first on Christianity Today.