R, 114 min.
Director: John Schlesinger
Writers: Mark Frost,
Nicholas Conde (novel “The Religion”)
Starring: Martin Sheen,
Helen Shaver, Harley Cross, Robert Loggia, Elizabeth Wilson, Harris Yulin, Lee
Richardson, Richard Masur, Carla Pinza, Jimmy Smits, Raúl Dávila, Malick
Bowens, Janet-Laine Green
Do you remember video
stores? I would go into a video store, and it would take me an hour to find
something to watch because they had everything. Even though everything at that
point was a whole lot less than it is today, it was too much. I wanted to see
so much and couldn’t decide what to see. I think the current streaming services
do a good job of eliminating that problem. Netflix really has an amazing amount
of titles available to stream, but you only ever seem to know about a limited
number of them at once. It makes choosing a title a much easier task. It also
opens the possibilities up to titles you might not have considered otherwise,
either because it was only on your periphery of knowledge, or you’d seen it
before, but had forgotten it to some degree, or many other reasons.
“The Believers” is a
thoughtful thriller/horror flick from 1987 that I’d most certainly seen before,
but probably not since circa 1989. It involves a man whose wife is killed in a
freak accident. He takes a job counseling New York City policemen and moves his
son there to help pick up the pieces. A homicide case pulls him into a
religious practice that is an amalgam of Catholicism and voodoo. This places
the counselor and son in grave danger.
I always held an
appreciation for this movie, even though it was never considered any sort of
classic. It came out at about the same time as Wes Craven’s voodoo horror flick
“The Serpent and the Rainbow”, which overshadowed it. “The Believers” practiced
a frequent style of 80s horror flicks by starting its story with an incident
that isn’t really related to the supernatural aspects that eventually come into
play, something more mundane and ordinary than where the plot eventually leads.
In this case, it is the
opening scene in which the wife is killed that gives us a more ordinary death
than the horrors we are about to witness. Yet somehow, it is this death that
has always struck the coldest cord with me. I think that’s because of its
everyday nature. The wife quite nonchalantly electrocutes herself in the
kitchen, right in front of her son. A coffee maker goes on the fritz right as
she’s cleaning up a milk spill on the floor. Not realizing the milk is completing
a circuit, she goes to switch off the shorting coffee maker and that’s all she
wrote. It’s a perfect death that is mundane and leaves the husband helpless to
do anything about it.
Of course, this scene serves
to let us know that we are all vulnerable. We don’t have to get in on the wrong
side of a voodoo cult to meet death. This tells us that this will not be an
exploitational horror film, but one that is really trying to tackle some
issues. In this case it is the issue of conformity. The man moves to New York
looking for the safety of familiarity. This is what drives us all toward
conformity. The religion he stumbles upon also provides this comfort of
familiarity to the people who follow it. Their atrocious actions to practice
their religion become secondary to them because it is an act of conformity.
They might be conforming to something out of the ordinary, but the people who
make up this cult are all people who have gone through the alienating act of
losing a loved one. This is also what our hero goes through, yet he is still
able to see the sins inherent in this religion. This can all apply to so many
aspects of our real everyday lives, just like the opening scene said it would.
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