A movie that vamps a bit on faith....

Media Observation

Ministers are rarely depicted with any accuracy in the movies, as real human beings.

One exception I found was a movie starring Harvey Keitel as a struggling pastor. We get the sense of struggle when one of his children relates a telephone call from his church. They will hold his ministry position open until he returns. He’d given up his parish and purchased a motor home in which he and his two teenaged children were taking a road trip. He tells his kids he is not going back. At one point, there is a discussion between him and his daughter, played by Juliette Lewis, in which she asks essentially if he has lost his faith. His response is very, very human. He still believes in God and in Jesus, but he no longer loves them.

We soon find out why. His wife died in a car accident. Mr. Keitel relates almost matter-of-factly how the brakes were not so good on the car, it was a rainy night, she went off the road, and it took six hours for her to die. It is a tragic, but entirely believable story. I found the writer’s take to be very real. The pastor did not lose his faith in God or Jesus, he simply could not love them anymore, and, by extension, serve them anymore as a pastor. Harvey Keitel played a man whose faith was present but empty of any meaning. It was more poignant then to simply have the pastor just turn away from God.

I have not encountered a movie where the relationship of a pastor and the Lord is taken up in such personal terms. How can such a tragic set of circumstances, which could affect anyone in the ministry, be resolved in a way that does not seemed forced or unsatisfying? How do you deal with a situation like that?

So what’s the drawback? Never heard of this movie? That is because this story line is a subplot of the vampire gorefest “From Dusk Till Dawn”. George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino playing murderous bank robbers who kidnap Harvey Keitel and his family to sneak into Mexico.

So how does the pastor get his faith back? By recognizing evil not in God and the death of his wife but in the hoards of bloodsucking vampires threatening his family. His faith is only restored after he is bitten and he seeks to take out as many vampires as he can before he becomes undead and his will is no longer his own.

It is an interesting theological point that the body could continue as an instrument of evil after the soul has been saved and gone on from this life.

It is also interesting that one footnote has been added to the vampire lore of the movies. Protestant, especially Baptist ministers-whose churches do not have as part of their liturgy or regalia ‘holy water’-can bless and create holy water to use against the undead.
- P. Hofstra, Opiner