Friday Post: "The Angel"
Mormon Short Horror
This week we covered:
How to reduce the amount of patronizing advice you receive using your own agency
How to distinguish between male neuroticism and male sensitivity, and what to make of each
For my Friday post, I wanted to talk about a wonderful short film that I was really looking forward to watching. A number of familiar faces from the Mormon internet diaspora - a modern bloggernacle, for the few who read me who recognize the term - have been talking about this film for months, and I was thrilled to get a chance to watch and review it.
The movie has an atmospheric weight, focusing on a family of Mormon settlers in 19th century Southern Utah, rather than the more traditional depictions in Salt Lake or along the trail. The sense of place is felt - I grew up hiking in those canyons, and I remember as a child wondering if all the rocks of St. George or Goblin Valley might all come crashing down on me at once. They are beautiful, alien, and a bit threatening at once, for me, and the choice to set a short horror here, rather than in the open mountain valleys of the north, was an exceptional choice.
The remoteness of this settling project is felt, as well. Few outside the church are aware of the scope of Brigham Young’s ambitions to settle the state of Utah as a whole, sending new converts across the state before it had a name, often tasked with optimistic (to say the least) agricultural ventures. There’s a beautiful state park in Eastern Utah called Capitol Reef; it’s full of peach orchards as part of this project. Parts of northern Utah attempted to grow beets to make sugar, with one local high school’s mascot one of the last vestiges of that goal.
Known to Utahns but less known to anyone else, as far as I’m aware, is that southern Utah is still sometimes called Dixie, an intentional nod to the American south due to a hope of growing cotton in what is now Washington County. As with the beetdiggers, local schools are some of the only evidence remaining of this heritage - what is now Utah Tech University was Dixie State University for quite some time.
It’s a big world, these pioneer projects in Mormondom, and the history isn’t often all that interesting for the few left who have to learn it. It comes to life in an altogether different way in this short, imagining the lives of a small family - two wives, one husband - clearly sent off to a destination to make the best of life on the frontier. The loneliness and the uncertainty of a new life in a strange land are the weight drawing the string of the story forward, silently but surely.
The movie uses its sound design to remarkable effect, increasing the sense of dread and isolation with a pillowy darkness and fairly restrained but eerie score. There are several elements here, including the title card and the music, that seem almost like an older film, even the kind of movie a Mormon teenager would have watched in seminary (a high school-age educational program for church doctrine) made in the 60s or 70s. It’s technically minimalist, which really enforcess a sense of quiet unease. It gets under your skin, the sense that nothing is truly amiss but something is wrong here.
The film hinges on a particular chapter of the Doctrine and Covenants, a perhaps lesser-known book of scripture in the LDS Canon. Only nine verses long, D&C 129 was, according to its heading, given to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois with a description of ways to distinguish genuine heavenly messengers from false ones. Growing up in the church, this section is always something of a novelty: one way or another, in church or in the youth programs associated with it, someone will teach you from a manual about the chapter with the angels and the devils and how you distinguish them by handshakes, and you find yourself thinking it’s exotic and interesting and irrelevant to you all at the same time.
As the section tells it, when an angel appears claiming to be sent from God, you should extend your hand and ask him to shake it. If the angel is what he says he is, he will either shake your hand as a physical being, or, if a spirit, he will refuse to try. The false angel will attempt to shake your hand, says the scripture, but you’ll feel nothing.
Doug Jones, a horror movie legend standing some 6 foot 4 inches tall, plays the titular angel. He’s been in a lot of famous movies, from Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water to Hellboy II. (For me and my house, he will always be The Baron).
As the mechanical center of the film, his horror movie chops are well-used here. He brings an eerie knowingness to his performance that seems warm and discordant; his arrival is genuinely frightening, his advice is dubious, and the willingness to follow him is easy for our characters to pretend is righteous.
This is a compelling picture, one I wish were done in feature length. There is a lot of interesting heft here, theologically and in the horror realm, that would absolutely sing in a 90-120 minute format, and there is much that could have expanded on the dread and the uncertainty and the complicity that makes all of the elements present work so well. It’s a wonderful short, but I think it would make an even better full length film. I’m really hoping to see more from this filmmaker, especially in feature form.
Until next week!