Heretic flips the script on how horror plays with the Christian persecution complex

In the final moments of The Wicker Man, devout Christian Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) crests a hill on the remote Summerisle and sees his final resting place, a giant, twig-woven humanoid sculpture where he will be burned alive by the pagan islanders. Howie, an indignant policeman who came to Summerisle to search for a missing girl, has been confronted by his own sexual insecurity and superiority complex throughout his stay, and now his adult virginity has made him eligible to be sacrificed to secure a bountiful harvest.

Director Robin Hardy shoots the cheery islanders dancing at the foot of the burning statue with a handheld vérité energy in order to undercut the barbaric ritual’s intended spirituality. The unified beaming faces that surround Howie as he’s engulfed with flames conjure a potent, abject sense of alienation—of not belonging, and being isolated, targeted, and punished because of it. One of The Wicker Man’s enduring strengths is how much it plays like a snide commentary on Howie’s self-righteousness; as a Christian soldier, he never doubts his moral surety and vents exasperation whenever the islanders don’t bow to his authority. 

Over 50 years later, Heretic replaces Summerisle with a labyrinthine house in snowy Colorado, and instead of the disarmingly cordial Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) we have Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), a similarly sinister man who’s somewhere between Jigsaw and an /r/atheism poster. Replacing the brash Howie are two young, female Mormon missionaries, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East). But the films share a similar dread-inducing driving force: These characters’ religious disposition has made them marks, springing traps they don’t know they’ve walked into, against an ideologically armed foe. They are both horror films that tap into an intangible and dubious phenomenon, the Christian persecution complex.

Even though Howie becomes indirectly persecuted for his Christian beliefs and practices (mainly that he abstains from premarital sex—in another life, this cop could have been a Paul Schrader protagonist), The Wicker Man isn’t warning us about an impending attack on Christians by pagans. Rather, it’s about how Britain’s contemporary curiosity and derision of alternative lifestyles and religions is an inadequate defense against the ways that any religious group can alienate and abuse us, packaged within an exploitation B-movie structure. The contradiction of a member of a mainstream, colonial religion feeling persecuted by people that their church has historically eradicated isn’t just laced with irony, it resonates with the victimhood psychology that Western Christianity has increasingly adopted since the mid-20th century. 

The idea that the Christian faith has ever been under serious, debilitating attack in the United States depends on a nebulous, flexible definition of who the strawman attackers are, be they the indoctrinating Cultural Marxist intellectuals of God’s Not Dead, the Muslim communities apparently compromising national security, or the queer people secretly corrupting the nation’s morality. The hysterical pitch of these claims is directly linked to how distant from evidence they are; they justify their hostile, punishing ends with rhetoric that can be vague and urgent whenever it’s most convenient. Crucially, this persecution complex translates well into drama, where a child trafficking thriller like Sound Of Freedom can directly play to both QAnon and as-yet unradicalized conservatives who still identify with the broad message that their beliefs make them the true, chosen defenders of American society.

As Alan Noble pointed out a decade ago in The Atlantic, there are many countries and regimes where practicing Christianity results in direct oppression, imprisonment, and violence. “Christians with a global perspective on their faith rightly identify themselves as part of a persecuted people in the 21st century,” argues Noble, while also pointing out that Western Christianity holds all the power and risks basically nothing. For the latter, it is not about being persecuted, it is about keeping the church’s dominion intact in society and government.

One of the benefits of occupying a persecuted mentality 24/7 is that it makes decision-making easy and keeps your messaging clear. As New Testament scholar Candida Moss writes in The Myth Of Persecution, where she interrogates claims of early Christian persecution, it’s necessary to think you’re fighting the Devil at all times: “In a world filled with persecution, efforts to negotiate or even reason with one’s persecutors are interpreted as collaboration and moral compromise. We should not attempt to understand the other party, because to do so would be to cede ground to injustice and hatred.”

All of this to say, there can be no depiction of Christian persecution in horror films that isn’t inherently complicated. Many horror films are built on an implicit Christian framework—the monster, creature, or demon is an aberration of the natural, holy order, and the fight to repel them calls upon and falls back on Christian power in order to return to how things were before. In Dracula, Bram Stoker conjured up a Slavic, non-monogamous, blasphemous boogeyman who offended Victorian sensibilities. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein centers the contemporary anxiety that leaps in scientific discovery would soon recklessly replace God.

These classic horror texts don’t uncritically recite Christian moralism. The sexual temptation and moral outrage that vampires provoke is baked into Stoker’s work and every cinematic adaptation. James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein undermines the aristocratic need for Christian procreation with Dr. “Henry” Frankenstein’s subversive but strangely legitimate creation of an heir to bear his name. Compared to a property as conservative, reactionary, and Christian as The Conjuring franchise, which uses the invasion of ghosts and demons as a means to strengthen Ed and Lorraine Warren’s dedication to the power of their beliefs, Stoker and Shelley’s texts offer richer reflections on the innate artificiality of Christian fear-mongering.

Movies about demonic and Satanic possessions flourished in the wake of Golden Age Hollywood, where the rise of ’70s cynicism set the stage for horror like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist, which identified flagging spirituality in the West as a vulnerability that the Devil would easily infiltrate and manipulate (if he hadn’t already). The filmmakers behind those movies weren’t religious hand-wringers, they simply used the Devil as an irony-tinged narrative device to show the murkiness and dispossession that was gripping the country. These classics of possession horror reflected contemporary societal fears just as much as the Universal monsters—these villains are not purely allegorical, but products of how society responded to their own alienation from religious certainty and to their awareness of a chaotic, rapidly changing world.

Even within ostensibly Christian frameworks, horror has made a name for itself as the very enemy Christians believed was corrupting their nation. Watch any genre film where normal, honest folk face off against murderous demons or sacrilegious maniacs and try to argue that the audience isn’t meant to get a degree of indulgent pleasure from the garish mayhem. Religious sermons, these are not.

Rather than keeping its critiques of the constructed nature of religious order open to interpretation, Heretic centers it, grounding its criticisms in a dubious perspective. After a polite but red flag-filled conversation with Mr. Reed, whom the two young missionaries hope to convert, Barnes and Paxton realize their skeptic host has trapped them in his own secular chapel, verbosely picking apart their fervent doctrine and forcing them to witness a miracle of his own design.

Heretic is full of contradictory power dynamics that make its chamber piece mechanisms more compelling. Mr. Reed rails against Christian dogma and specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS considers itself a Christian faith; many mainstream Christian churches do not) with arguments that, in isolation, may be cohesive and convincing—specifically his rejection of Mormon revisionism that the history of polygamy in the church wasn’t misogynistic—but not exactly revelatory, and nothing the women haven’t heard before. What complicates Reeds’ righteousness isn’t just that he holds his debate opponents hostage and later inflicts violence upon them, but that he chooses two young women to make an example of rather than holding anyone with meaningful power accountable.

These women have internalized the need to show deference to a potential convert, which is exacerbated by the fact that he’s an older man, and he frequently pushes the conversation towards places they find uncomfortable—like a man having sex with multiple women. The LDS church has a clear history of entrenched misogyny, regressive roles for women within their hierarchy, and an inability to confront gendered violence within its membership (not to mention racism, homophobia, and revising and mythologizing its own history). But Mr. Reed can’t address the church’s widespread complicity in these abuses by isolating and threatening its already-vulnerable female members. Blinded by his distaste for religion and the false victimhood their members adopt, Mr. Reed looks past the tangible, gendered ways he presses on the power he holds over the Mormon believers trapped in his home—you can’t argue in worse faith than that.

Heretic writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods intentionally keep Mr. Reed’s focus narrow in order to show his blind spots. He’s never outside his own carefully constructed home, he never threatens any men, he never attacks anyone with real authority. At one point, Barnes points out his reliance on rhetorical fallacy—in taking a cheap, rehearsed shot at missionaries being salesmen, her kidnapper never acknowledges that Judaism might have fewer believers than the other Abrahamic religions because its members suffered the largest genocide in recorded history—but Reed can only claim victory over the women because their priority is escaping his clutches rather than debating him. Reed feels constantly under threat, but will not account for the disproportionate harm he is willing to dole out. By transposing the mechanics of the Christian persecution complex onto a jaded atheist, Beck and Woods illuminate how any powerful entity internalizes threats to its dominance.

It’s notable that Reed doesn’t realize his own hypocrisy, as feeling like your dominance is under threat is a core tenet of the religious history he criticizes. Centuries before the Westward expansion undertaken by Joseph Smith, European settlers were also confronted with the perils of colonialism, which of course found its way into horror movies. In Robert Eggers’ The Witch, a family of New England Puritans interpret their hardships as confirmation that they are God’s chosen soldiers. After being exiled from the safety of their settlement in the 1630s, the family continues believing they are owed a thriving, bountiful life on American soil because of their devotion to God. A colonial ideology like this maintains that Native Americans and members of opposing faiths are expendable as Christians progress in their God-given quest, which lays the groundwork for the myopic hypocrisy of its modern equivalent.

The family in The Witch fall victim to an absurd amount of supernatural tragedy: The youngest child is stolen and eaten by a forest-dwelling witch, their livestock is mutilated, and everyone in the family dies except for the eldest daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy), who accepts the Devil’s invitation to join his witchy flock. Throughout, the family’s insistence on being blessed with God’s wisdom and protection is repeated to the point of empty recitation, and Eggers finds grim irony in the godlessness of the American colonial project. The fierceness of settler religious ideology does make them a target, but not because the Devil is scared of their holiness. Their certainty of being protected by God, their hubris, is far too tempting an opportunity to ignore. 

Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch attacks its characters with the supernatural because it could never happen in real life. There’s a clear contrast between the gnarly, invasive, and brutal ways the cinematic Devil persecutes God’s chosen flock and the empty rhetorical justification that some Christians use to justify their political aggression in reality. It’s no coincidence that in both of these films, the targets of Satanic violence are young women—these are people central to the religious project, but not meaningfully protected by it. If Rosemary’s Baby channeled these ideas as subtext, The Witch made them unmissable text.

Since The Witch’s release in 2016, evangelical aggression has become more pronounced and dangerous in America—aided by the erosion of social media platforms into zones of misinformation and abuse. It’s this context that Heretic is born from (Mr. Reed has plenty in common with the “conservative destroys college debater” content industry), where we’re not asked to take a particular culture war side, but rather feel the intense power imbalance in how the debate is structured. Heretic provides a villain that mirrors the blinkered, heartless thinking of the worst evangelical crusaders. He’s having an empty argument with an imagined opponent; in trying to expose religious hypocrisy, he swallows it whole.

The Christian persecution complex cannot be understood on the level of individual psychology, only as a system of broader, interlinked power dynamics. Reed isn’t just a bad-faith “debate me” villain. He feels intellectual enough to know that films like The Wicker Man and The Witch are perverse, ironic plays on how Christians perceive victimization from outsiders, but he’s not self-aware enough to realize that, when it comes to his rebuttal to the Mormon church, the ends are negated by his means. These complexes aren’t maddening and dangerous because of their logical fallacies, but because of the hateful, violent abuses of power they prop up. Heretic demonstrates that ignoring this leads to more harm than good.