The Nephilim and the False Prophet

The second book in my Armageddon trilogy, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, is live in the Amazon bookstore!

From the blurb:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the Earth descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. 

The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

This edition includes a synopsis of the first book in the trilogy, The Blessed Man and the Witch; a list of characters; and a glossary of terms.

$2.99 or free to read through Kindle Unlimited. Get your copy now!

Analysis: Event Horizon

On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict, I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon.

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well.  It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror.  The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn't count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward.  After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: "2015 - First permanent colony established on Moon."  We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades.  The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs.  While this takes us out of the film a bit, it's a temporary departure: we're immediately thrown into Dr. Weir's nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward.  Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse.  The camera takes us through the corpse's screaming mouth and into Weir's eye.  In fact, it's the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it's been poisoned.  The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship's log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark  bothers to clean it up or even mentions it.  From the ship's cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we're meant to know that the Event Horizon's possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space.  It's only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion.  Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released.  From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there's no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film's weaknesses: didn't anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, "Yeah, that's messed up."?  Are the humans of the future that blase?  The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film's theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark.  After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it?  The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself.   Weir's wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes.  Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity).  Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her.  When Miller asks Weir, "What happened to your eyes, doctor?" Weir responds, "Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."  And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, "Do you see?  Do you see?"  Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality.  The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it's finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you'll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn't perfect.  The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form.  Nevertheless, it's a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it's currently available on Netflix.  Watch it (again).

Reminiscence and Analysis: Omen III

I must've been twelve or thirteen when I first saw Omen III: The Final Conflict.  I watched it with my older brother (the same brother with whom I'd watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker when I was too young staying up too late on Friday nights) on a Sunday evening.  We'd recently gotten cable TV, and my dad had sprung for subscriptions to both HBO and a local cable channel called Prism.  I think it must have been a package deal to get both, because Dad wasn't into movies very much.  He liked baseball, and Prism broadcast all the Philadelphia Phillies games that the local TV stations didn't or couldn't due to blackouts.

We loved Prism, not least because, unlike HBO, it showed rated R movies during the day.

I can't remember if I'd seen The Omen before watching Omen III.  Probably not, but it didn't matter at the time.  The synopsis in the cable guide told us everything we needed to know: Adult Situations, Adult Language, Violence.  (Horror, 108 mins.)  I also can't recall if my younger brother watched it with us or not.  I hope not, because it had some pretty disturbing stuff for an adult, let alone a kid.  Now that I'm the parent of a little boy, media management has become a concern.

The beginning of the film was brilliant: they wrote and filmed a commercial for Thorn Enterprises that Damien didn't even like.  He poked holes in it.  It was a great way to show Damien's intelligence, power, and amorality.  The previous ambassador's bizarre suicide was another great piece of moviemaking: how many people shoot themselves under the nose?  I assume the effects guys measured the angle of the bullet to determine where it would go from the gun under the desk and said, "Well, it should go here."  Truly disgusting brain splatter.  Very shocking.

Harvey Dean's character had some depth.  Rather than have him just ignorant of his boss's true nature, he knows that Damien Thorn is the Antichrist.  Consider the kind of person who knowingly works for the personification of evil.  He's conflicted about ordering the deaths of the potential Christ-child babies, but does it anyway.  And when it comes time for him to pay the piper and have his own son killed, he refuses.  It's all too much for him.  He wasn't a sniggering caricature of an evil henchman, but a man who'd chosen the wrong side and paid for it with his life.  And soul.  There's an unexpectedly poignant moment late in the film when his wife learns what he's been doing and who his boss truly is.  She confronts him, holding his own baby son, with a monstrous series of crimes.  She's broken and horrified and scared for her baby, and we feel for her.

There is still a part of the film that I can't watch: the burned face of Dean's baby when Damien uses the hell hound to implant horrible suggestions into Dean's wife's mind.  It showed the true, unadulterated evil of Damien Thorn in a way the other scenes did not.  His foiling of the monks' plan to kill him was self-defense, but the baby-killing went way too far.  The method of the baby's death was no accident; Damien had quoted Genesis 22:2 when telling the shocked Harvey to kill his own son, saying, "Then God said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love--Isaac--and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you'[emphasis mine]."

The screaming monk swinging from the cable, swathed in burning plastic, was also disturbing.  As a youngster, the sex scene seemed more brutal than in later viewings of the film.  What was worse was that they killed the kid.  They wrote that the monk, a good guy, should accidentally stab a child to death.  Very brutal.  The kid was doomed, an apostate of Hell, but still, how often do boys get murdered in movies?

Damien praying to his own father Lucifer and cursing Jesus Christ was an extraordinary soliloquy.  It combined fury and loathing and even self-pity as he, the son of the Devil himself, describes the glory of suffering.  This insight into true evil was riveting and imaginative, making you understand Damien, if not sympathize.  Later, the juxtaposition of the monks' exaltation at the star alignment heralding the rebirth of Christ with scenes of Damien in agony over the same event show us that in the end, Damien isn't a man.  He is a figure, a supernatural creature.  A thing born of a jackal.

Note also that Damien only once or twice refers to Jesus Christ by His title: Christ.  He speaks to and of Him often, but uses the term "Nazarene," denying Him His kingship as the Messiah.  In Damien's mouth, Nazarene is a pejorative.  It works.

As Jews, we knew that demonic and vampiric bad guys in the movies could be turned by crosses (Richard Benjamin showed how useless the Magen David was against vampires in Love at First Bite), but we didn't feel left out.  Judaism doesn't have demons like Christianity, so things like the Antichrist and hell hounds were part of their mythology.  We could be frightened by it in fictional representations, but at no point did any of us say, "Hey!  That's exclusionary!  You're not being inclusive!"  It was a strength of the film that we were as caught up as much as any Gentile: after all, we're talking about Armageddon here, and Jews will die at the end of the world, too.  The weird crucifix in Damien's secret chamber was disquieting because we knew it was meant to be profane, especially when we saw what he was doing with it. Thorn's Herod-style killings of the babies born during the star alignment lacked any deeper meaning for us when we first saw it (I didn't learn about Herod until later in life when I read the New Testament), but the end was cathartic.  The good guys won, despite the terrible price.  We could rejoice in the death of the Antichrist and the horrible Armageddon he represented with clear hearts.

Looking back, it's easy to see how different the film is from today's efforts.  Even though the monks were bumbling and even foolish at times, they were the good guys.  And they represented the return of Jesus Christ.  No bones about it.  No pedophile priests, no new chapters of the Bible revealed to show how evil the Catholic church is.  Damien was the son of the Devil, and the priests, as incompetent as they were, fought to save the Christ child.  The religious iconography was relevant and poignant, including the vision of Christ at the end.  Even Jews could be moved.

The end was rushed, especially the last confrontation.  It didn't make sense.  I'm not sure if some elements had been edited out for time constraints or if it was written that way in the beginning, but getting Damien to the place where he'd be killed should have been a lot more difficult than it was.

Despite its flaws, the 80's hairstyles and terrible grating American accent Neill was obliged to adopt, The Final Conflict still holds up today.  If you haven't seen it in a while, give it a look.

Movie Review: I, Frankenstein

Simply put, I, Frankenstein is an absolutely terrible movie.

But it doesn't mean you shouldn't see it.  If you modify your expectations, knowing at the outset that you're going to see a terrible movie, you can have fun with it.  You just have to stop cringing first.  The plot is a confusing, terrible muddle involving Frankenstein's monster (named Adam), demons from Hell, and gargoyles who exist to protect mankind from the demons (but they're not angels).  Thematically, it's an appalling mishmash further confused by awful dialogue and a silly backstory.  Despite all that, I was entertained.  I'd see a sequel if they made one (which they won't).

• Aaron Eckhart: A fine actor, he was completely wasted in this film.  We'll ignore the strange scars his character Adam was forced to bear other than to suggest that Doctor Frankenstein was an unbelievably incompetent stitcher and couldn't find a single clean face to put on his creation.  Eckhart tried, he really did, but he was given such terrible lines that not even he could save them.  To his dubious credit, Eckhart never once descended into the smart-alecky humor that made him so watchable in Thank You for Smoking.  The film was far too earnest and grim for that.
• Everyone Else: Miranda Otto (Eowyn) was the Gargoyle Queen.  She was also schizophrenic to the point of making no sense at all.  Bill Nighy did his usual sinister upper-class Brit schtick.  Yvonne Strahovski added no charm at all to an entirely useless role.  The only stand-out was Jai Courtney as Gideon, the mean gargoyle.  He did a great job and added actual depth to his role; a Heavenly miracle, of sorts.  It helped that he was such a cool character from Spartacus: that just sort of bled over.
• The Script: Ignore it.  Everything everyone says is extremely silly, but they say it with such gravity.  If at any point you think somebody's going to say something interesting, you're wrong.  Recalibrate your expectations.  When it isn't cliche, it's stupid.  The thing is, they believe it's meaningful, even if you don't.  So don't worry about it.  This goes double for the plot.  It's hopeless.  Imagine if Mary Shelley wrote a sequel to Frankenstein while high on opium.  Then someone photocopied a mirror image of it and threw it in a wood chipper with a copy of the Bible.  Finally, a chimpanzee scotch-taped the bits together larger than a thumbnail, and that's your plot.
• Fight, Fight, Fight: This is the real reason to see this film.  If you liked the fight scenes from Blade, you'll dig this movie.  I practiced serrada escrima several years ago, just enough to get some sinawali patterns and flow drills down, and the Kali-style fighting Adam did in the movie was a real treat to watch.  They even did some punyo-work in the fight scenes.  You know where the special effects budget went, and they squeezed every nickel out of it to great effect.

It's terrible.  See it anyway.

Movie Review: The Possession

The Possession is an excellent horror film that puts the lie to the notion that good horror can't be rated PG-13.  The nature of the supernatural antagonist was different enough to be interesting and woven deeply enough into the film to be more than a gimmick.  Don't be fooled by the silly "Based on a true story" thing.  A spoiler-free review follows:

• John Winchester: Jeffrey Dean Morgan showed great range in this role, and was believable as both a college basketball coach and a terrified father trying to save his youngest daughter.  His frustration and confusion were palpable throughout.  Even though he'll always be Sam and Dean's dad to me, and I was hoping he'd just kick the monster's ass the way he would in Supernatural, he showed that he could believably go beyond his beloved television role.
• Poor Kid: Natasha Calis as Em, the dybbuk's victim, did a great job.  Usually, let's face it, kids in movies tend to get shrill and annoying when dealing with perilous situations, but Calis didn't go there.  What was happening to her wasn't fair, and you wanted that filthy, horrible thing out of her.
• The Others: Kyra Sedgwick was her usual, irritating self in this film, which was probably deliberate on the casting director's part.  She's unlikable in every role she's in, so it worked here as the ex-wife.  Matisyahu as Tzadok stole the show: he was funny without it spoiling the film's intensity, and authoritative as a Hasidic exorcist, of sorts.  The filmmakers used him just enough.  
• Dybbuks: The notion of a dybbuk box was very neat, and it was quite interesting to see Jewish exorcists using the power of Adonai to fight a demon, rather than the standard Catholic priest vs. Lucifer contest.  There's a great deal of wealth to be mined in Jewish mysticism and folklore.
• Nastiness: the rolling eye effects were particularly disturbing, as were the moths and other nasty, horrible things the dybbuk inflicted.  The MRI scene was bizarre, but worked.  Seeing the dybbuk out of the box...gross.  This was a filthy, disgusting monster that did appalling things, and it showed.
• Caring Is Sharing: Unlike far too many horror movies made these days, effort was made to get you to care about what happened to the characters.  This wasn't a film about bad things happening to bad people: it was about awful things happening to decent people, so the outcome mattered.  

Go see The Possession on Netflix when you have a spare 90 minutes.  4 out of 5 stars.

Is Professor Xavier an Archangel or a Principality?

You can't browse through the Paranormal Fiction section of a bookseller without running into something with an angel on the cover.  There are whole sub-genres devoted to romance between angels, romance between angels and demons, romance between angels and humans, angels and vampires (!), etc.  If there's a supernatural creature out there, someone, somewhere, is going to want to have sex with it.  Or write about someone having sex with it.

This is not to disparage the genre: people like what they like.

Call me a purist, but if you take a thing too far away from its essential nature, it ceases to be that thing and becomes something different.  If obedience to God is an integral part of an angel's being, then it will cease to be an angel when it defies God.  Without God, an angel is no longer an angel.

The idea of angels acting in defiance of an absentee God is all over modern fiction, particularly the TV show Supernatural.  In an increasingly secularized media culture, this divorce of angels from religion, from God Himself, simply turns angels into superheroes.  X-Men.  Beautiful, winged X-Men, but mutants all the same.  They can fly around, have super-strength, perform miracles, but lack the thing that makes them actually angels: faith in and obedience to God.

The angelic fiction sub-genre has plenty of room for latitude.  If there are sparkly vampires and Teen Wolves, there can be superhero angels.  A fallen angel doesn't have to de facto become a demon, an idea I explore for the Watcher angels in The Blessed Man and the Witch.

Nevertheless, magical powers and feathered wings do not an angel make.  Secularizing an angel takes him away from his core and transforms him into a superhero.

Whereupon I Give Away the Whole Store

The difficulty of depicting angels as properly angelic and God as an all-encompassing force for good in fiction is that we do not live in a culture of moral absolutes.  Likewise, we cannot rely on an ultimate moral arbiter if we cannot or will not define evil.

Kristen Lamb's point about the value of Dungeons & Dragons alignments in characterization is well-put, but it falls apart at the macro level, especially in dealing with the apocalypse.  It can be argued that the end of the world is always an individual situation, as each character will react to it in an individual manner according to his ethics and situation.  But when you deal with the larger issue of a God that ends the world, aided by His angels, character alignments don't hold up for Him, and even Lawful Good characters can protest the injustice of it.  Even if it's being done for the best of reasons, according to God.

This is the central concept behind my Armageddon trilogy: the relevance of Biblical ethics in today's ultra-modern society.  Nowhere in it do I preach, nor is it my intent to advocate for a particular moral stance within the text.  Rather, it's an attempt to bring prevailing Western belief systems into immediate conflict.  Mankind in the face of Armageddon is the ultimate existential crisis.  So how does one resolve it?  Is it possible?

During a rare moment of respite near the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, one character says, "We must be guided by our own ethics, not what we think God wants us to do. We must get comfortable with the idea that we can disagree with Him and still keep our integrity."  To many of us, this is an absolute impossibility.  It can't be done.  For others, it's a necessity: the God of the Bible is the ultimate source of evil, oppression, and ignorance.  Both points of view cannot be correct.  But can they both be ethical?

For Hell's point of view, there's this: “I know what I am, but you lie to yourself every day. You’d burn the world clean of everyone who doesn’t kowtow to your…God, and call it goodness.  That’s if you win.  You wanted Armageddon. You started this war, but we’re going to fight harder. And when we win, the world gets to go on. That’s not so bad, is it?”  In a nutshell, Hell claims to be fighting for its own survival.  Despite the unspeakable ugliness of Hell's tactics, isn't that reasonable?  Don't they have a right to resist God's plan to end the world, if the alternative is an eternity of torture in the Lake of Fire, or oblivion?

Between Heaven fighting to create the Day of God (or, in the series, the New Kingdom, the merging of Heaven and Earth into one eternal paradise) and Hell fighting to maintain the status quo (or so it claims), there are those who don't want the New Kingdom, but properly refuse to ally themselves with Hell.  As one character puts it at the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, when everything's at stake, "We offer a better way: freedom. Freedom to strive, to progress, to no longer be subject to the whim of an angry God or a monster that feeds on torment."  Put that way, how can you disagree?

You can, though.  You definitely can.  Especially if you've embraced the God of the Bible as an all-encompassing force for good.  After all, if there's a choice between the salvation of your eternal soul and the death of your temporary physical body, why would you choose anything but God's side?  Especially when you'll be given a new body of spirit made flesh at the beginning of the New Kingdom, when Heaven has crushed the forces of Hell and turned the Pit into the Lake of Fire.  If Heaven wins.

There are more questions asked than answered, obviously.  And there's no way to make every character happy (no way to make every reader happy, either).  Sometimes it's the struggle that matters: working these things out for yourself.  If my sympathies lie anywhere, it's there.