GNoH Review: The Scarlet Gospels

Few events in horror literature have more impact than a new novel from Clive Barker, and his latest effort, The Scarlet Gospels, is no exception.  Pinhead the Cenobite vs. hard-drinking occult detective Harry D'amour in a conflict with stakes that reach from Hell itself to the future of magic on Earth: what's not to like?

This is a review for those who have already read the book, or don't mind significant spoilers.  Get to Ginger Nuts of Horror and start reading!

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).

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.