Posted on 11/09/2007 7:52:20 AM PST by ParsifalCA
When Damien Karras, the faith-challenged priest in The Exorcist, decided to liberate Regan from demonic possession, not by invoking the Name of his more powerful God, but by substituting himself for her, I had a strange feeling that an important line was being crossed. If you saw the film, you cannot forget the scene.
Karras walks into the room of that afflicted little girl and finds her standing triumphantly over the fallen Father Merrin. Seeing Merrin splayed across the floor in defeat is more than Karras can bear. Knowing he lacks Merrin's faith, no supernatural help is likely to come to his aid. So Karras reverts to what he knows: boxing. He attempts to beat Regan senseless, and seeing that it isn't working, he simply offers a sweeter deal to the demon inside her. He screams, "Take me!" And once the demon changes residence, with the last ounce of his human strength, he throws himself out the window, down the steps, to his apparent death. [more @ ExileStreet]
(Excerpt) Read more at exilestreet.com ...
The secular humanists spread this message, but they didn't create the idea. It's a very, very old idea.
Interesting article...
A re-run of John Ford’s “King of Kings” from the 1930’s while Bibically satisfying to Christians, would not be accepted as popular weekend movie going...
See:
The Exorcist
The Omen
The Amityville Horror
End of Days
Etc.
Forget the slasher movies, that’s a shallow and meaningless genre.
i wouldn’t be surprised if Hollyweird comes up with a movie in which vampires are defeated only by means of embryonic stem-cells. Or vampires are unleashed in large numbers by Global Warming. Or the vampires are members of the “Religious Right,” and attack peaceful abortionists.
I was just playing a new shooter game called Bioshock. The bad guys are zombie like creatures that wander around saying Christians thing like: Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so. And the idea is for you to shoot them, burn them, bash them with a wrench, freeze them and smash them to pieces and blow them up to smithereens. You know, just like many on the Left would like to do outside a game.
Exile Street?
And Mom thought I’d never make anything of myself.
Awwww Yeaaahhhh
I agree. For example, in the lore, vampires are terrified of the Cross. Holy water burns them. They cannot stand on sacred ground (heck, they can't even pass over a threshold uninvited). Yet today's vampire movies have rewritten the legend so that vampires brush aside the traditional religious icons as though they are toys.
Bram Stoker didn't write Dracula that way. So the opinions expressed are those of the godless Hollow-wood crowd, to whom the church has no power against evil.
Isn’t that just the truth about life...we will die, and that is the way God made us...doesn’t have anything to do with evil.
We are talking about legends, not reality...maybe that is why they get re-written...they are legends.
So, you’re saying that secular humanists are promoting suicide as the path to redemption?
Hmm... I have mixed feelings on this...
In the movie "Blade," the female lead cures vampirism with gene therapy...
My point was that legends reflect the values of the culture that creates them. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in a milieu that respected the church, and held faith that good would triumph over evil. Hollow-wood reflects a somewhat divergent sensibility.
So did Joss Wheadon in his Buffyverse. In both Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and the Angel series, the vampires are adversely affected by crosses and Holy water, even the “good” vampires with a soul seeking redemption.
Right, because values are relative to the times and the people, along with the telling of stories, to better adapt them to the audiences. I would think that with fiction, anything is OK.
Okay, yes. Nobody "owns" the vampire legend. But to create a vampire story, one must remain true to the original concept, that vampires are hell-spawned, unredeemable beings without a soul. Otherwise, they're just Mattel monsters -- boogeymen you trot out to frighten small children, not symbols of something older, greater, and more sinister.
And if you've got to remain faithful to that character, then you have to give power to the church as their antithesis. Although it is important to note that in Dracula, the protagonist is not a priest or a holy man of any sort, but a physician/scientist/professor.
Maybe you should say’...to create a (legendary or classical) vampire story, one must remain true to the original concept...’
I think one of the reasons they’re just Mattel monsters, etc...is because the originator can do/say whatever they want. They can start a whole new kind of vampire story or whatever. They were all more or less Mattel monsters when they were created anyway.
I read Bernard Cornwell a lot, and he has a character; Sharpe, that I remain faithful to as a reader, but to remain faithful in the sense as to give power to a fictional character...I don’t know about that.
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