#apoclypse

Because my childhood viewing habits were dictated by the tyrannical MPAA, I grew up with a pretty sharp awareness of which horror rentals were graced with less than an R rating. Not that a PG or PG-13 guaranteed that I’d be allowed to watch whatever I wanted, but it gave me a little extra leverage to beg and plead my way to seeing the odd POLTERGEIST or THE GATE. Because of this desperation, THE SEVENTH SIGN was definitely on my radar, although I never saw it. Having finally broken the proverbial seal three decades after its release, I can’t imagine what I would have thought of it.

Carl Schultz’s utterly bizarre religious thriller concerns an extremely pregnant Demi Moore, whose lawyer husband Michael Biehn is struggling to appeal the death sentence conviction of one of his clients: the “Word of God Killer”, a young man with Downs Syndrome who murdered his brother-sister parents to punish their incestuous sin. Demi, who is sort of an idiot, blithely puts down a lot of money-they-don’t-have on a creepy elite preschool even though she has a history of losing pregnancies; I guess she was just really compelled by that culty display of children dressed as pilgrims gravely performing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. To compensate for Moore’s constant spending on fancy Italian nursery furniture despite Biehn’s rapidly declining career, Moore and Biehn open their home to a spooky boarder. Prior to installing himself on their property, Jürgen Prochnow--AKA Jesus Christ--has been traipsing about the earth setting off a series of signs of the biblical end times. As per the Jewish mystical concept of there being a Hall of Souls with finite content, all these doomy phenomena are leading up to a seventh sign of the apocalypse, the birth of a baby without a soul. When nosey Demi Moore investigates a collection of serial killer-y news clippings and documents among Prochnow’s belongings, she figures out her boarder’s secret identity and his sinister mission. To seal the deal on the whole end of the world business, *somebody* is going to have to be martyred for God’s Word, and *somebody* is going to have to have a miscarriage. Guess who’s who!

If you followed all that, then you have understood correctly that the bad guy in this movie is God. Jesus is going around busting up all these ancient seals that trigger the end of the world (yeah, I know, but THE SEVENTH SEAL is already a movie), and this whole process is being encouraged and protected by one of Pontius Pilate’s thugs, Cartaphilus--who has been cursed with immortality by the pissed off God, and who can only get out of this Vampire: The Masquerade-esque conundrum by helping the apocalypse along. Even if I were to agree that this all makes perfect sense, I would still have to ask: What is the message of this movie? I mean, I’ll tell you what happens at the end, if it will help you help me figure it out. It turns out that Demi Moore is the reincarnation (yes, I guess there’s reincarnation in this iteration of bible stuff) of Seraphia, who tried to offer Jesus some water before his execution. She fails to prevent the martyrdom of the Word of God Killer, and then apparently miscarries, but she manages to revive her dead baby by like...um, faith? She has these constant past life flashbacks where Cartaphilus asks her if she would die for the ailing Christ, and when she finally says “yes” to this, she passes away as her baby returns to life. Not that her baby is supposed to be Jesus, Jesus is still on the scene here. But this action, we’re told, refills the Hall of Souls, and then everything’s cool again. Jesus and Michael Biehn come talk to Demi Moore’s dead body in the hospital about how rad it is that she had so much hope, like the most hope of anybody ever, so much hope that it stopped the end of the world. Hooray!

Those are the facts. I don’t know what this is supposed to boil down to. The ending makes it feel like it’s the story of how one person’s display of love and kindness saves the world--so like, the message could be that you should nurture your own humanity, because that practice metaphorically contributes to saving the world. But meanwhile, it feels like we have this God who is really caught up in his own bureaucratic nonsense, which places Jesus Christ and an evil Pontius Pilate guy on the same side of the law, and which subjects a suffering humanity to a series of basically arbitrary punishments. That part would be sort of cool, if it didn’t conclude with this sappy thing about how God is placated by Demi Moore’s piety and selflessness, which takes us back to a sense of justice and mercy. In one standout scene, a young Hassid named Avi, who is translating all the shit Demi Moore stole from Jesus’ luggage, goes to a Catholic church to argue with an incredibly smug priest (John Heard). While the latter laughs into his collar at the former’s apocalypse anxiety, Avi ruminates on the idea that though people of different faiths ardently condemn each other, “Maybe none of us are going to be saved--maybe we’re all wrong!” This elevates the perfectly acceptable idea that the word of God is just a collection of unfair punishments for victimless crimes, and/or a way of dealing with logistical problems in Heaven like a soul deficit, so maybe God is not that good of a guy, maybe he’s someone worth resisting. Unfortunately, THE SEVENTH SIGN isn’t willing to be that outright satanic, so instead of an excitingly weird secular thriller, we have this incomprehensible religious horror movie in which I can’t totally figure out how I’m supposed to feel about everything.

One thing is for sure: The movie could only have been made exactly when it was made, when shows like Highway to Heaven entered the mainstream, and rumors of widespread ritual abuse were a normal thing for the general public to entertain. There are two kinds of Satanic Panic movies: Occult fantasies like THE GATE and EVILSPEAK and ROCK’N’ROLL NIGHTMARE, and in a small but fascinating minority, films that seem to be motivated by earnest spiritual paranoia, like THE RAPTURE and THE SEVENTH SIGN. I haven’t been able to prove anything about what Carl Schultz was thinking when he made the latter film, although I’d be interested to find out. For now, I’m only left to wonder...and wonder whether a 1974 made for TV movie he directed called A HARD GOD, which is honestly a pretty fabulous thing to call something, bears any clues. I’ll probably never know.