Friday, May 20, 2011
Film A Sneak Preview of The Rapture
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, May 20, 2011 at 10:46 AM
Laugh all you want about predictions of the impending Rapture, but if you were traumatized early in your religious upbringing by a "soul winner" — one of a genre of lurid 1970s religious scare films designed to stampede backsliders to the altar — you may flinch anyway. Movies like this played in church basements and fellowship halls throughout the South for decades after they were made, and their resemblance to the grimy grindhouse fare of the era only makes them harder to shake off.
Above is the infamous Rapture sequence from the Yahweh of the genre, Donald W. Thompson's 1972 A Thief in the Night, a movie that caused more nightmares than Freddy and Jason combined. (Thompson actually shot a movie in my hometown of Murfreesboro when I was a kid, A Stranger in My Forest, and crowds gathered on East Main Street to catch a glimpse of its top-billed star, Susan Backlinie — you know, the chick who gets chomped in the first scene of Jaws.)
I'm glad to see someone is making a documentary on the genre, whose pioneers included "Nashville's First Family of Film," the Ormonds. Their notorious If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? — a filmed sermon envisioning America overrun by godless Commies — is one of the most flabbergasting things you'll ever see. Assuming you live to see it.
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