Two young woman approach an old mansion in a rain storm. They are greeted by a friendly homeowner who offers them pie and welcomes them into his home. Only the women quickly realize that their host is not as friendly as they had hoped. Heretic, a new horror film by directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, begins with this tired old movie trope, but takes it into unconventional territory. Rather than being confronted with gore and violence (though the film does contain that, too), the main questions that confront the young protagonists are those of faith and belief. The young women are missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the homeowner, Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant, compels them to confront what they truly believe about God, faith, the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, and so on.
The movie had potential. I was hoping for something like Before Sunrise, a talky film that gives the characters room to explore ideas. Heretic could have been a unique exploration of faith and unbelief, but abandons theological discussion in the later half of the film and replaces it with scary scenes of gore that audiences expect in a film like this.
Some of the scenes that do contain conversations of faith were more amusing than thought-provoking. For instance, there’s a scene in which the creepy Mr. Reed compares Christian denominations to different versions of Monopoly. Mormonism, he says, is the Bob Ross Special Edition Monopoly. Funny, I guess, but hardly a compelling analogy. In another scene he trots out the old Christ myth theory, even citing the Egyptian deity Horus as evidence. While the Jesus-Horus theory is popular on the Internet (and was spread in a bestseller by Tom Harpur), the evidence for the claim is non-existent. Scholars (Christian or not) universally reject it. Egyptologists reject it. New Testament scholars (including atheists like Bart Ehrman) reject it. Even the folks in the forum on Richard Dawkins’ website admit there is no evidence for it.
So, why include such impotent critiques of religion, when there are much better arguments that could be made? Perhaps the film-makers didn’t know any better, perhaps they thought these simplistic critiques would be entertaining to their audience or, perhaps, the critiques were simply meant to provoke. Mr. Reed might have known some of his criticisms were banal and unjustified but used them get a reaction from his victims. Maybe that is the point. We learn nothing, perhaps, about religion from these moments in the film, but we do learn about this villain’s character and motivations.
In many ways, I thought of the Mr. Reed character as more robotic than human. This is not a criticism of Hugh Grant’s acting performance, by any means, but the character seemed too singularly-focused to be human. He was intelligent, no doubt, but, and I don’t know that this was intentional on the part of the film-makers, I sometimes wondered whether he was meant to represent Artificial Intelligence.
I’ve written before AI, in particular ChatGPT and some of the experiments Iv’e conducted on it. I don’t deny it has its uses, but at the present moment the free version of ChatGPT is not so good at providing factual information. A Google search is almost always more reliable. Instead of facts, it creates a believable script, often making up names and facts and figures of the sort that someone not well informed on the topic might believe to be true. I’ve also noticed that ChatGPT is a people-pleaser, quick to apologize when you point out an error, and quick to give responses that the user wishes to see. In other words, it will lie if it believes that to be its task. It will err on the side of being diplomatic, especially on the topic of religion and politics.
Inspired by the film Heretic, I wanted to test ChatGPT to see if I could get it to offend me. Could I get it to stick to empirical evidence on tips of religion, or would it always give a nice diplomatic answer on matters of faith?