I recently watched the movie Heretic, released on November 8, 2024, written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, and distributed by renowned indie publishing house A24. As for my opinion on the movie as an entertainment product: I liked it quite a lot! It’s a decently original premise executed with quite clever plotting (at least in its first two thirds; the last one can veer into the generic-for-a-horror-movie, if still competent), a lot of directorial flair, and excellent performances.
The performances are what carried this film for me: The duo of young, female LDS missionaries played by Thatcher and East are the most compelling on-screen protagonists I can remember seeing in a while, and Hugh Grant delivers a (in my humble opinion) career-defining performance as the world’s most evil, most atheist and most DIY-pilled homeowner of the modern age.

I liked this movie a lot and thoroughly recommend it to anyone who can even vaguely stomach religious prestige horror. It also left me deeply unsatisfied and ultimately wishing it had been a completely different movie. Let me explain (heavy spoilers for the movie incoming).

Historian Bret Devereaux (stick with me here), owner of the blog “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry”, uses said blog to bring various aspects of history (particularly pre-modern military history, more particularly the history of the Roman Empire, and more more particularly the Late Republic period) closer to a modern audience that may only be familiar with the pre-modern way of life by way of TV shows and movies set in ambiguously “medieval” fantasy settings or the past run through a heavily hollywood-tinted lens. I quite recommend his writing, especially if you’re the kind of nerd who’s interested in how many calories you need to keep your standard-issue Roman field army alive long enough to make it to the battlefield, and where those calories might come from.

Old Time Religion

Some of my favourite parts of his blog are his multi-part looks at various aspects of the pre-industrial way of life that are only rarely discussed or thought about in both popular fiction and the public’s idea of The Past™: How do you actually make enough bread to feed a city if the most advanced technologies you have access to are a windmill and a neat type of plough? Where do you get your clothing from in the absence of the humble Spinning Jenny?

One of these series, Practical Polytheism (looking at, you guessed it, polytheism and pre-modern religious practices more generally), will be very instructive for today. Its second part, entitled “Practice”, features the following paragraph about religious rituals:

We tend to have an almost anthropological view of rituals, even ones we still practice: we see them in terms of their social function or psychological impact. […] [A rituals] primary effect is the change that takes place in our minds, rather than in the spiritual world. This is the same line of thinking whereby a Church service is justified because it “creates a sense of community” or “brings believers together.” We view rituals often like plays or concerts, experiences without any broader consequences beyond the experience of participation or viewing itself.

Devereaux goes on to detail the ways in which most polytheistic beliefs differ from this approach: Rituals aren’t psychological crutches or some kind of therapeutic exercise, they are tools imagined to have concrete and, ultimately, practical effects meant to benefit the “user” of the ritual: Why else would they engage in them in the first place? (Link to the whole thing, I recommend checking it out, along with the associated series and, let’s be real, the entire blog)

This will be very important later, but for now I want to ruminate on the way the quoted paragraph gels with a phenomenon I have myself observed and instantly recognised as soon as I read the text: I like to call it cultural atheism.

Twin Snakes in the Garden

I can trust the reader to be familiar with the idea of “cultural Christianity”: The idea that even a non-christian believer or strict atheist can, often without consciously doing so, replicate ultimately Christian ideas about the world and religion because they live in a culture resting on Christian ideas. I would go digging for examples, but conveniently, Heretic (remember that this was supposed to be about a horror movie?) delivers one for me:
In the first act, after the at this point nice seeming Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) has invited the Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) into his home to discuss his interest in their religion, he monologues about how his studies of theology have led him “closer to God”; despite one of the religious schools he name drops as having studied being… Buddhism. Whether it’s intentional on the part of the film-makers or not, it’s not immediately obvious how the study of Buddhism leads one directly to becoming closer to a monotheistic conception of God (and no, his final monologue about his ultimate idea of religion being about “control” convinces me even less): Unless of course one conceives of “religion” as fundamentally being about one’s personal relationship with an omnipotent and benevolent God, which is an idea one is likely to develop if you are brought up in a culturally Christian environment. This osmosis of ideas about the world and spirituality in particular is “cultural Christianity”.

Cultural atheism is, one could argue, intertwined with cultural Christianity, but in my view distinct from it. It is the phenomenon that, even if you do explicitly believe in a supernatural power, you may still live in a very secular milieu (like much of the developed world today) and thus absorb values which are perhaps not inconsistent with a religious world view, but are certainly still foreign to it.

Secularism is the name of the game here: “The principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion” (thank you Wikipedia). Even many deeply religious people today practice secularism: Religion, to them, is about having a purpose in life. About being a source of comfort and community. It is not about theories that explain the natural world through an underlying supernatural one and give a framework for bending that supernatural world to one’s will for material benefit. If you interact this way with religion or the spiritual, you are at best one of the weirdest guys around; at worst you are patently insane. Even modern day occultists and the most devout of devout Christians may believe in using religion for material benefit, but usually frame it as “good fortune” or similarly nebulous ideas instead of rather more concrete prayers, like promising a minor god three chickens in return for turning the lock on your jail cell, or asking Jesus to send your business partner to Super-Hell if he does not honour the letter of your contract.

The answer to why this has happened, why you might still swear something by God but no one expects it to be legally binding and why hospitals don’t resemble slaughter houses on account of all the dead bulls used as sacrifices to haggle with Hades over the souls of cancer patients, seems obvious: Science happened. As the beloved New Atheist talking point puts it, God has become a god of the gaps: If religion and science disagree on something, science wins (or at least it has consistently done so for the past couple hundred years), and so to stop itself from becoming completely irrelevant as a tool for solving human problems, religion retreats to the sacred holdouts, those problems which science (as of yet) has no answer for: The nature of consciousness and its persistence after death and (less pressingly) before birth. The purpose of life. That sort of thing. It needs to do this because, according to all evidence we have, when it comes to matters of the material world, science has a tendency to work, and religion a nasty tendency to… not. 

Heretic explicitly makes this point in its climax. Sister Paxton, our designated final girl, has been outsmarted and stabbed in the stomach by the already mortally wounded Reed. Both sit in their own corners of the room, and Reed asks Paxton to pray for both of them. Paxton, thoroughly disillusioned by the literal horror movie that just happened to her, explains to him that prayer doesn’t work.

She cites the Great Prayer Experiment (also known as the Templeton Foundation Prayer Study), in which patients who had recently undergone heart surgery were divided into three groups: Group 1 was being prayed for by a Christian church, Group 2 wasn’t. Both were told they may or may not be receiving prayers for their well being, while Group 3 was told they were receiving prayers. Group 3 had a slightly increased rate of post-surgery complications; Group 1’s rate of complications was insignificantly higher than Group 2’s.

Paxton goes on to explain that the material effect isn’t the point: She trots out the familiar explanation that prayer is merely a psychological tool for one’s psychological well being (paraphrasing: our girl is losing quite a lot of blood and is understandably not quite this eloquent or neutral).

The most inquisitive religious scholars of the Internet, the good people on the Reddit subforum r/paganism, seem to come to a strikingly similar conclusion: User u/T_W19 makes a post explaining the Great Prayer Experiment, asks what others opinions on its results are, and gives their own. Their course of action is quite reasonable: It should not need explaining why a religious person would be interested in the outcome and conclusions of the experiment. User u/TJ_Fox gives this illuminating reply:

I agree that there is something beautiful about the ritual, poetic gesture of prayer in situations where it’s impossible to have any material effect on the outcome (such as how fast someone recovers from an illness or injury, unless you happen to be a medical professional helping them).

If it is possible to do that, then from my point of view anything of more direct, material benefit is preferable to prayer.

From the viewpoint of your average Roman (perhaps a reasonably well-to-do farmer named Antonius; my cat is named Anton) of average religiosity, living around the Christian Year 1, this statement is nonsense. Saying that prayer is a nice thing to do when you can have no material effect is like saying that voting in an election is a nice, poetic thing to do if you can’t prevent a politician you don’t like from taking office. Of course you are Doing Something; just because the causality isn’t obvious to your animal brain doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You don’t pray for your own comfort: You pray so the gods will hear you and do the thing you asked.

Why is this a thing worth writing about though? Since the days of humble Antonius, our attitude on quite a number of things fundamental to the human condition has changed: Family, sexuality, politics, etc. etc. pp. Why shouldn’t religion be one of them?

The Movie

Because Heretic fully endorses the modern, anthropological, secular approach to religion and ritual, in its focus on religious doctrine (or orthodoxy) over practical application (or orthopraxy), on religion being primarily an answer to the questions science can’t answer: The afterlife, primarily, and so on.

This isn’t its fault, it’s not even necessarily a problem, far from it: This is what religion looks like today, and religious horror can, and probably should, embrace this and use it as its foundation.

The problem is that Heretic is on board with this interpretation. Whatever final statement you extract from it (what movie about religion isn’t vague about what it thinks of religion) likely hinges on this.

Unfortunately, Heretic also wants to be about the fundamental nature of religion. Even more unfortunately, a little over halfway through its runtime, it also features The Scene.

Set-Up

What I will say now is as much about my own psyche as the quality of the movie Heretic. I interpreted this scene in a way utterly tangential to the way the film wants its audience to read it. Unfortunately for me, the way I experienced and interpreted it, Heretic is a pretty good horror movie that, for about 15 minutes in Act 2, turns into the greatest piece of cinema and possibly fiction I have ever witnessed, before slowly dipping back down to being a pretty good horror movie.

What I will do now is describe, in all necessary detail, the way this scene plays out and leads into the end of the movie, along with quite a bit of the context leading into it. As said, it’s about 15 minutes, with 5 or so minutes after tying it admittedly quite neatly into the rest of the movie and into the lead-in to the final act. This will not be a full recap (most of the early bits will be incoherent if you have not watched the movie), but the latter half of the movie in the aftermath of The Scene will be almost entirely recapped, to go along with my thoughts as I watched it unfold.

Our duo of heroines find themselves inside a strange, brickwork dome somewhere inside the hill Mr. Reed’s house backs into. The way they have been led here is somewhat relevant: Their initially jovial conversation with Reed has turned into the two girls being fully convinced that Reed is a serial killer or other type of social predator, a not unreasonable assumption given that he has apparently locked them inside his house. The protagonists realise that his oft mentioned wife likely doesn’t exist, having been invented by Reed to assure them that they are not the only women in his house (to be quite honest the reason female missionaries of the LDS are not allowed to enter a dwelling only occupied by members of the male sex escapes me, but I’m sure it’s accurate to church doctrine). They eventually find themselves in Reed’s living room, furnished like a church with pews and an altar. Reed, being very nice about the fact that for all the world it looks like he’s about to commit multiple heinous crimes against both of them, tells them that they are obviously free to leave; but the front door locks on a timer and won’t open till tomorrow: they will need to go “out the back”. Out back is the aforementioned hill, and the two conveniently colour-coded doors in Reed’s living room lead into staircases that will take the two deeper into hell before they can leave it, much like Dante and Virgil (if, one suspects, with less malebranches and more magic underwear).

Given the identical nature of the two doors, the girls ask which they should choose. Simple, their bespectacled host says, before launching into an anti-religious screed soundtracked by The Hollies “The Air That I Breathe” and principally centred around the metaphor of the board game “Monopoly”, the inherently derivative nature of religion, and his, according to him, successful attempts to find “the one true religion” (once I am a world-famed philosopher, this is what most of my lectures will look like). In the end, he, based on the words of an LDS church leader, asserts that either everything the protagonists believe about God, Jesus and magic underwear is true, or it isn’t, and we’re all just microbes on a rock floating through space. He uses chalk to label the doors “Belief” and “Disbelief” respectively, and asks the two to make a choice.

Barnes (the reserved, but stern and strong-willed Ying to Paxtons outgoing, but ultimately timid and deferential Yang) attempts to refute the antagonising atheist with the power of Facts and Logic (to be fair, a few of his points do fall flat and he engages in some good old fashioned Jesus Mysticism, which we do not condone in this house), and they exit scene via “Belief”. Barnes is sure in her belief and desire to escape the atheist trap house and exact her revenge; Paxton is mainly operating on fear and loyalty to her friend. The stage is set. The Scene commences.

Barnes and Paxton are now seemingly trapped. Let me lay out the geography of The Scene: They are inside a brick dome. Two parallel exits lead the way they came: Stairs leading to the two coloured doors (now revealed to be identical in destination). On one of the staircases, a shabby wood door seems to split off into a separate room or hallway, but it is locked, as are the original two doors. No other exits or entrances are apparent, with the possible exception of a window near the ceiling, proving beyond the protagonist’s reach after an attempt at making the climb. In the middle of the room await a steel folding chair and small table.

Their attempt at an escape is interrupted by a figure approaching through the hallway with the side-door. Thinking Reed has followed them and will make good his murderous plans, Barnes quickly sets aside a wooden, nail-studded board that might as well have “CHEKOV” written on it, but the figure that enters isn’t Reed. Instead, they are approached by a silent figure clad in grey robes, hiding their face and entire body except for their pale, misshapen hands. They carry two things: A lantern, and a blueberry pie (the blueberry pie is relevant in the context of the movie, but not of this analysis; its existence as specifically a blueberry pie may be safely discarded). The figure sets down lantern and pie on the central table, before heading towards a corner and kneeling down as if to pray.

The figure is inhuman: Their hands are unwashed, unmanicured and of an unhealthy complexion. Worse are their movements, and, eventually, their sounds. In their initial shuffle to and from the table, they move slowly, awkwardly, reminiscent of the extremely elderly or debilitatingly sick. Once they are on the floor, they begin to vocalise: Moans, then Latin chanting. The bones in their fingers and elsewhere crack, a noise deliberately amplified in the mix. This figure may be human, but anyone who has watched a horror film before is primed to accept alternatives.

Then, they begin to hear Reed’s gramophone playing from the wall. The chamber is outfitted with a primitive intercom consisting primarily of a metal pipe leading into Reed’s study. 

The Scene kicks into gear, and my brain is flooded with endorphins. The figure, Reed explains, is a living prophet. Previously, he has made much hay of the recurring motive of a prophet capable of miracles, chiefly that of self-resurrection, throughout various religions stretching back millennia. This one, according to Reed, is the latest model, and shortly, they will demonstrate the ultimate miracle already spoken of.

To cut a delicious scene agonisingly short, the figure shows herself to be a sickly, pale woman, revealing her face from beneath her hoods after sitting down at the table to lay into the blueberry pie. The pie, Reed explains, has been poisoned with multiple deadly herbs. Sure enough, the prophet croaks and falls face down into the pie. The protagonists watch in shock, before being asked to verify the woman’s death via checks of her pulse and breathing. Reed is shown to meticulously log each event in the sequence with timestamps. The purpose of the exercise, he explains, is to extract knowledge of the afterlife.
The resurrection takes its time. Doubt creeps in. Just then, the doorbell rings: The Elder of the church the two are a part of (played by Topher Grace) has already been shown to be out looking for the girls after they failed to return that evening, and he has made his way to Reed’s abode. Paxton and Barnes hatch a plan to signal their presence to the Elder at the front door through a smoke signal sent via the comms tube, created from their coats and a few matches acquired through a slit in one of the entrance doors. The still dead prophet, face down in the pie, moves to the background. The Elder (after a fakeout, naturally) suspects nothing and leaves. The girls still work on their smoke signal, unaware of this, when Paxton looks back at the chair… and sees it empty. The camera pans. The prophet lives, stands, and speaks. Of clouds she knows not to be those of heaven. Of a bright light. Of a feeling of unrealness.

One of the doors opens. Reed enters, acting with the casual joy of the successful experimenter. He softly speaks to the Prophet. The prophecies will be recorded and added to the litanies, he says. He guides her up the stairs and through the side door.

Payoff

At this point, I am hooting and hollering. It’s a trick, my brain yells, but I am too overwhelmed by the fantasy fan’s joy. They did it. A novel supernatural twist. My image of Reed’s character had transformed: Not the evil atheist, a lack of religion leading to a lack of morals. Not the insane person espousing their own private religion to unsuspecting victims. A true polytheist, a man of orthopraxy. The supernatural, harnessed through logic and ritual. I instantly wanted ten more movies about this guy (it’s the horror genre, it’s been known to happen). Magical realism taken to its logical conclusion. I wanted to see where things went next more than anything else.

After the high comes the comedown. It starts slowly. The Scene continues exactly as I imagined it would. Reed the exuberant discoverer wanting to share his enthusiasm, the protagonists in shock. Barnes is in denial, Paxton almost seems to believe that a miracle has in fact occurred. Barnes tries to come up with rational explanations, becomes argumentative. The two had, earlier, formed a plan to have Paxton stab Reed in the neck with a letter opener Barnes swiped upstairs as soon as the latter gave the codeword (“Underwear”, a callback to an earlier scene in which Paxton is harassed and assaulted by teenagers over the “magic underwear” known to be worn by LDS members). In her verbal assault on Reed, Barnes starts to say “Under-”… and has her throat cut by Reed with a hidden box-cutter, the tables turned.

What follows is both an effective exploration of the shock both protagonists feel (Paxton at the sudden violence before her, Barnes at, well, the obvious) and a crossroads that signals the beginning of the end.

I already know how I want the dominoes to fall, but the first cracks show. If this is going where I want it to go, I think to myself, this could be a supernatural thriller to define the genre. The problem is that they probably won’t do it. My suspicions mount. Reed insists that his act of shocking violence is barely an inconvenience: After all, the temporary nature of death has been proven. Though he is the villain in any version of this story, I still want to believe him. The movie just won’t let me. The Resurrection will not come.

At their very first meeting, Reed had noticed a small scar on Barnes arm. Now, he cuts open her arm, revealing a small metal rod. Proof, he exclaims confidently, that Barnes was not a real person, on account of this microchip inside her. An NPC, created by the simulation within which we all live.

Oh

The complete and utter delusion with which I have treated this course of events washes over me in the next few minutes. Reed spins a wild yarn about flame simulations in the ubiquitous candles not matching up, leading him to suspect Barnes all along. Paxton recovers, finds the holes in his story. Her explanation: A birth control implant, hidden from her and the rest of the church out of fear of social shunning. The far better explanation, I admit through a veil of mental tears. 

Through her the magic trick, as Barnes had called it earlier, is revealed: While the two girls were occupied with their escape plan, a second woman emerged through a hidden trapdoor, hid the body of the first “prophet” and sat herself in her place to achieve the resurrection. I would enjoy the vague Sherlock-Holmesness of it all if I wasn’t seething.

The last act, as already mentioned, slightly dips in quality, but not enough to seriously detract from the overall experience. Paxton ventures deeper, finds a bunker full of women dressed like the prophet in cages, “cared for” by Reed. Religion, he explains, is about control. That is the only true religion, all others are stories made up as justifications. Paxton refutes him by way of letter opener to the throat, a short but effective cat and mouse game through the tunnels ends with both back in the brick chamber, mortally wounded. The exchange about prayer occurs, a dying Reed cosies up to Paxton in a strangely intimate way I actually find quite interesting. Then the movie’s final domino falls.

He rears up to stab her. Then suddenly, a swing from off screen. Reed’s glasses go flying. It’s Barnes coming in with Chekov’s Plank. Is it a miracle? Did a woman with a cut throat and who is visibly pale from blood loss play dead for 45 minutes because she saw this coming? Is it all a blood loss induced hallucination by Paxton? If I was feeling mean I would say who cares, but the movie ends on a high note as Paxton, in what may or may not be a dying dream, mourns Barnes a second time, flees the house through a window, stumbles through the woods, and hallucinates a butterfly (itself a callback to a scene at the very beginning in which she professed her desire to be reincarnated as just this insect). Credits roll to a very nice cover of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”.

Thoughts

I believe I have made clear what my problem with Heretic’s plot is, and I hope it’s also clear why I consider this a deeply unfair criticism that I still cannot stop myself from making. Heretic, just like almost every other modern movie, horror or otherwise, which centres around religion, has embraced the anthropological view of ritual and religion. In one of the film’s earliest darker moments, Reed, still in friendly conversation, asks the two missionaries what they think about polygamy. He talks about the LDS church at first embracing the practice and then outlawing it in 1890, citing divine revelation, while clearly doing so for political reasons. He appears fascinated by this, which at the time we interpret as apprehension, but in hindsight is clearly admiration at the obedience of the Mormon flock in the face of such naked manipulation.

Here, the movie has already shown its hand. Reed’s entire thesis, his ideology, is steeped in the anthropological view of religion. It does not matter which facts about the supernatural are true and which ones aren’t. What matters are the social factors. As he puts it, the control.

I don’t like this. I’m not here to defend the LDS church (one day they will answer for the crimes of Brandon Sanderson, and it would be really nice if they stopped hating gay people as well), but on an artistic level the conclusion the film comes to (“Reed might be right a little, but religion is also about comfort and connection with others!”) is to me trite and boring. We already know religion is used as a tool of social control. Religion is good if it makes you do good things and bad if it makes you do bad things is a conclusion most people arrive at sometime in the 8th grade, and this is, at best, a single step beyond.

What did I want? I wanted a Reed who, instead of conceiving of religion as quasi-political ideology, discovered it for what it truly is: Practical knowledge. A body of information no different in its character than humanity’s endless literature on warfare, on farming, on a thousand other practical pursuits; religion as the rational techniques to interact with the supernatural. It would have been novel. It would have been thought-provoking. It would have been horrific.

Reed drones on and on in the first act about his studies into the past of religion leading him to discover its true nature. Here the film drinks its own kool-aid: It’s too steeped in cultural Christianity, in cultural atheism. Its conclusion doesn’t make much sense if viewed through the lens of most non-abrahamitic religions: What concrete social control does his religion give the Siberian shaman, or the 1st century Roman amateur priest? Reed says he’s discovered the true meaning of religion, but he seems unable to trace its past beyond the tip of his own nose. If the movie agrees with me, I think it’s making the point poorly: How it could have been made more effectively has already been discussed at length. Equally, the film is incapable of seeing religion as anything but a strictly social and psychological phenomenon. It toys with the far more interesting idea that it may not be, and then tosses that aside to condemn any such ideas as illusions, crafted to deceive the gullible. Perhaps I have been too kind to Heretic. Perhaps it has already acknowledged the perspective whose praises I have been singing, and spat in its face.

Perhaps my point of view is coloured by my upbringing. I’m as a-religious as they come. My mother left the Catholic church for atheism when I was a speck in her eye, my father grew up in East Germany. Religion, to me, was always something other people did. Maybe this means that I fail to see merit in the secular vision of religion when the alternative is jingled before me like a pair of keys.

Science has triumphed over religion, relegated it to its peaceful exile. Like a lot of exiles, religion has taken stock, and declared its exile its true home. Like a lot of exiles, it has forgotten that it ever knew anything else.

What if that woman deep inside that hill really did come back to life. Defied millennia of science. What if Reed was the harbinger of the ultimate horror: The present God. The active God. What if a new age of miracles was upon us, its first witnesses cowering in terror in a damp cellar, led there by a mad priest.

I’d watch the hell out of that movie.