The Spirit and the Screen 4: Leah Payne on Pentecostal Camp and Horror
fourth in a series on pneumatology and cinema
Leah Payne (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is an associate professor of American religious history at George Fox University and Portland Seminary. She is also the principal investigator for two Lilly Endowment, Inc. initiatives. Her research and teaching have been supported by the Louisville Institute and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology & Religion. Payne's analysis of the intersection of American Charismatics and Pentecostals, politics, and popular culture has appeared in op-eds in The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today. As a public-facing scholar, she is cited as an expert on matters of Pentecostal and Charismatic media, political theology, and practice in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Religion and Politics, and in Christianity Today.
First, I have to say how much I enjoyed this book. For one thing, it is just plain fun. Thinking with Steven Felix-Jager about Wonder Woman & the Spirit is truly my idea of a good time. Considering In the Heights with Wilmer Estrada-Carrasquillo? What a wonderful way to consider the role of the Spirit.
The Spirit & the Screen is full of rich observations about how a Pentecostal imagination of the Spirit can enhance our understanding of film, but also the diverse areas of expertise represented in this volume: theology and biblical studies and history and much more.
And the films represented! Wow. I appreciate the diverse representation here: everything from obscure art film to musical theater to animated film, superhero epics, and much more. Along the way, each author brings their own distinct voice to their analysis and criticism. I look forward to assigning this in a course.
I’ve recently completed a book about Contemporary Christian Music, and I think it’s fascinating that while Pentecostals owned popular music, and while Pentecostal celebrities were very skilled at creating watchable television (hello, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker!), they were not widely known for storytelling through film, to say nothing of becoming film critics.
Why? Especially when a.) Pentecostals are so skilled at harnessing the power of mass media, and b.) there are so many theological riches to be gleaned from filmmaking? Dr. Green’s introduction offers an explanation. In a brief summary of Pentecostal relationships to “aesthetics” and “art,” Green notes that:
But the late 20th century middle-America Pentecostals who reared [Dr. Green] put no store by “taste”—and they had less than no time for aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, they, like Moses of old, aspired to forsake all the pleasures of sin— including the pleasures of movies and TV. [They] loved craft, to be sure, but [they] were suspicious of “art,” at least much of it. [Their] deepest worry, however, the thing that truly fretted [them], was entertainment; [they] feared it would not only distract [them] from the prize but out-and-out corrupt [them], body and soul.
Dr. Green goes on to describe and “anti-aesthetic aesthetic” of the late twentieth century. The “blood and wound” mysticism of the early generations gave way to a Pentecostal imagination shaped by premillennial dispensationalist watchfulness for the rapture and the Second Coming that sought withdrawal from the worldly pop culture imagination.
So mainstream popular culture was out. Films, t.v., dancing, and of course, music. Well, church music was still ok, as was non-social dancing. The rapture was definitely in—as well as rapture-themed films like A Thief in the Night. And also quirky forms of worship expression like banners and finger streamers and mimes and I think most Pentecostal churches had tambourine artisan of some sort.
But those forms of expression were not widely recognized outside church circles as being art. They were (and are) often overlooked by the rarefied world of art criticism.
And yet, they were, and are, deeply formative.
I recently read (and everyone should read) Dr. Lloyd Barba’s excellent, Pneuma award-winning Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California, and Barba pays close attention to Pentecostal art and artisans in immigrant farmworking communities. Barba attends to the small details. They were not perhaps considered to be “art” by a certain set of critics, but Barba shows the beauty of Pentecostal crafts and craftsmanship and how those pieces are symbols of resilience and resistance and hope and love.
Barba’s work also demonstrates, however, that artistic contributions of many Pentecostal communities went unappreciated because the communities themselves experienced racial and class discrimination. One explanation for the lack of Pentecostal presence in the world of film criticism, then, is the fact that for many outsiders, the aesthetics of the multi-classed, multi-racial movement were not welcome among the film criticism set. As my Grandma Barb would say, Pentecostal art was not something that fancy people like.
And can I just say how fancy I felt while reading this? I’m getting to think with several of my favorite scholars of Pentecostalism about the Spirit in cinema. Not “the movies.” But cinema. I may have even had a glass of wine while I read (don’t tell my Pentecostal mother!). I was a fancy Charismatic lady.
As I read, I kept thinking about the communities of Pentecostals who, perhaps, by conviction, self-selected out of such conversations, because they believed it was far too “worldly,” but also of the ones who never had the opportunity to join the conversation because of the historically white, middle to upper middle classed culture of film criticism.
My Foursquare mother, of course, would not approve of many of the films in this book. Certainly Ladybird. Probably most things from the Dylan film… and anything from Malick. I got to thinking about how few people in my childhood Pentecostal circles would have even known about most of these films. Especially the films that had limited releases and would be considered “art films.”
A critical contribution that this book makes, then, is applying an unapologetic Pentecostal lens to these films. And I find each one to be a delightful journey, There are a wealth of insights here; our understanding of each film is enhanced through each chapter, as well as our understanding of the Spirit, and of Pentecostal communities.
A question that kept floating around in my mind as I read, and one I’d love to pose to you all was: what about the artistic legacy of those late twentieth century Pentecostals described by Dr. Green? Is there a film genre or genres that could capture the rapture-bound, holiness-code embracing, Satan-busting Pentecostal world – even the world that was set on withdrawal or rejection of popular culture. I’d like to suggest that if Pentecostalism itself is a film genre, I think it might be horror. And also, probably camp.
Dara Delgado’s exploration of the Spirit and Bride in Moana got me thinking along these lines. She writes:
Interestingly, a Google search for “Spirit and Cinema” yields a host of frightening thumbnails for suggested movie titles. These films, which Google broadly categorizes as “Horror,” tout related subheadings like “Movies about spirits” as well as “Fantasy movies about spirits.” At first glance, it appears that in the dominant cinematic imagination, s/Spirit connotes the “dark” indeterminate-forma that constitutes the more elusive and horrifying aspects of death, the occult, and the paranormal. However, a similar search for “Christ and Cinema” yields no such film suggestions or captivating cinematic images.
This is such a keen observation. If a google search is to be believed, there is something much more abstract and unsettling about the presence of the Spirit, than there is in the presence of the Christ. There is, as Delgado notes, something elusive and horrifying and captivating about a world infused with the Spirit.
There is so much written about Catholicism and horror and how it is a form of Christianity that is distinctly well-suited to the horror genre; and, in fact, there is a strong argument to be made that Catholic liturgy is theatrical horror before the invention of the genre. There is blood and guts and mysticism and mysterious processes and rituals. There is a materiality to Catholicism that invites haunted storytelling; holy water, eucharist, relics.
Pentecostalism, however, is likewise steeped in horror. There are exorcisms, and cursed objects, and holy hankies. And even some horror films. The rapture-extravaganza A Thief in the Night is perhaps not the highest quality script ever written, and as far as I know, it did not win any awards for cinematography, but I will say one thing: it’s very scary. And the demons and angels cosmology of Pentecostal horror novelist Frank Peretti is unsettling too.
Because I write about music, if there’s one late twentieth century media maker who, to me, demonstrates a truly Pentecostal brand of rapture-anticipating, demon-busting, withdrawing from the mainstream world it would have to be Carman.
Carman, for those who are unaware, can perhaps best be described as a singer who presented as Liberace-meets-Vegas-magician-sensation-David-Copperfield-meets-Rocky. Carman was the ultimate, extra Pentecostal. He invited evangelical young people to imagine a world of demons and angels and the Second Coming and put the talking points of the Religious Right into a Pentecostal cosmology. His music videos were decidedly lowbrow. But they were also terrifying if you took them seriously, and a lot of people did.
But Carman wasn’t just full of horror—he also exemplified Pentecostal camp. The dictionary definition of “camp” is “a style or mode of personal or creative expression that is absurdly exaggerated and often fuses elements of high and popular culture” and Carman was camp. He was flamboyant, gaudy, a peacock. He was always, at all times, over the top.
I don’t think that camp and horror really never get their due—in mainstream conversation or among Pentecostals. But so many Pentecostals flourished with campy, horrifying performances.
I wonder if our analysis of Pentecostalism could be enhanced by thinking of it as a horror and camp tradition. I keep thinking back to those Pentecostals that raised Green. I wonder how they would feel about the world of withdrawal and rapture that they created being categorized as horror. They were keeping their children from “the world,” and all the while infusing every day life with the terror and excitement of the anti-Christ and a lake of fire and a Beast. All the while creating campy artistic renderings of those horrors that would put the Rocky Horror Picture Show, perhaps the campiest film of all time, to shame.
Is horror a “respectable” form of art? In some circles. Is camp a “respectable” form of art? Perhaps not. But it’s evocative, and hilarious, and allows for marginal figures to be centered and transgression to abound, and I cannot think of another genre that is more fundamentally Pentecostal.
So, thank you, to the editors and authors of The Spirit & Cinema for inviting us to think about the expansive and at times perhaps even horrifying capacity of the Spirit to illuminate our experience with film, and in the process to get us thinking critically about Pentecostal pneumatology. Congratulations on a wonderful achievement.
I love this reflection. I love horror films. I wasn’t allowed to watch them as a child, but I was both enraptured and horrified by stories of demons and exorcisms in my rural Pentecostal community. I found that I enjoyed being scared, whether it was good for me or not.
The most recent movie script I wrote includes a scene of a Pentecostal church exorcism that is basically taken from my own experience witnessing exorcisms growing up.
I love this. I can’t watch horror films-the pictures stick in my imagination and resurge during prayer or give me nightmares. BUT I have a love and fascination with movies and the way they often “prophesy” about the times, culture, and even the future.