2 weeks Ago By Alexandra-pollard
On the surface, Hugh Grant’s horror debut Heretic is nothing new. Like countless villains before him, the film’s central character, Mr Reed, has an inflated ego, a charismatic disposition and a murderous, misogynistic penchant for luring young women into his house and inflicting psychological and physical harm on them. Yet whilst creepy man imprisoning and torturing female captives in his basement is hardly a new trope in the horror canon, I left the cinema feeling oddly refreshed after watching Heretic .
Beneath all the sadism and savagery, the film offered something that I have rarely seen on screen within any genre – least of all horror: a depiction of young, religious women that was, unexpectedly, both invigorating and validating to watch. The film follows two young, female Mormon missionaries (Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes) who are invited into Mr Reed’s home to spread the word of their faith. Yes, they are lured into the house on the false promise of meeting a blueberry-pie-baking Mrs Reed who never quite emerges, but as their characters develop, we see that they are anything but the typical gullible female victims the genre usually hands us on a plate.
For once, their faith hasn’t made them brainwashed or possessed, naive or infantile, but actually empowers them. They may be locked in a weird man’s house-turned-torture chamber, but they remain in charge of their own convictions and ultimately their belief is a strength rather than a character weakness – something that both Mr Reed and the viewer don’t expect. As a young, religious woman myself , I have become depressingly used to seeing faith presented as a deficiency in female characters on screen, as though our religiosity coupled with our supposed innate flaws as women makes us doubly sinister.
We already see this in the real world, where sensationalist newspaper headlines, reality television and even government policy focus on religious women as victims, threats and spectacles all at once, especially for faiths like Islam (my own) and Mormonism (that of Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes). But when it comes to horror films, this obsession with female religiosity is often taken to unsettling – but also highly reductive, offensive and patronising – lengths. Either religion and womanly hysteria collide to drive us to violence and murder like in St Maud , where a mentally troubled young nurse believes God has asked her to brutally kill her patient and eventually set herself on fire, or our religious observance is nothing but a sinister cover for our inner evil – like the devilish nun in The Nun and countless other films.
Often, we are cast as victims of some patriarchal cult or evil deity – possessed girls with flickering eyes and straggly hair litter horror films throughout history, from The Exorcist to The Ring . Other times, religion distorts our womanhood to disturbing extremes, like those birthing Antichrists in films like The Omen , or mothers driven to sadism and abuse through religious fanaticism, like the protagonist’s evil matriarch in the 1976 retelling of Stephen King’s Carrie . In Heretic , at first, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes seem like they might be your typical caricatures.
They appear childish and naive, giggling at a condom advert and getting taunted by teenage girls in the street about their magic underwear. But, midway through the film, there’s a scene where Mr Reed lectures the young women on how their faith cannot be true, accusing Mormonism of being a well-marketed rip-off of ancient origin stories. Every young woman belonging to a religion (myself included) has been gaslit this way by a (usually male) staunch atheist who over-inflates his own intellectual prowess and presumes our comparative stupidity.
Read Next Liam Payne was broken by fame - we all ignored the signs But then, despite knowing that she will probably be murdered, Sister Barnes does what the infantile, evil or possessed female religious characters on screen never do. She picks his argument to pieces, calling his metaphors offensive and predictable, his misconceptions about faiths like Judaism and Islam downright facile. And she chooses, despite Mr Reed’s best efforts, to stay true to her convictions and put her faith in God by entering a door to his dungeon arbitrarily labelled “belief” over the “disbelief” option.
If you want evidence, though, that this is no simplistic, stereotypical depiction of religion and young womanhood, then look no further than the way the whole thing ties together with a flair of poetic justice, when Mr Reed ominously refers to the “magic underwear” under Sister Paxton’s clothes – unknowingly uttering the code word the women had agreed earlier in the film to signify stabbing him through the neck. Ultimately, it’s his exoticising and underestimating of these two women that leads to his demise, empowering Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton in a way young religious women rarely are – both on the screen and in real life..
