While many Neopagan responses to cyberspace are innovative and essentially positive, there is an underbelly – a darker realm which feeds on fear and powerlessness in a rapidly changing world. One of the archetypes that embodies these feelings most strongly is that of the Alien – the space-entity created by H. R. Giger, which featured in the Oscar-winning film of the same name and which has since become an icon of the cyberculture.

Drury continues:

Many of Giger’s most surreal artworks are now on permanent display at his museum in Castle St. Germain in Gruyeres, Switzerland, which opened in June 1998. The paintings draw strongly on the left-hand path of Western magic as well as on fantasy and horror fictions, as in his extraordinary The Necronomicon of 1978. There is an unquestionable potency – even a macabre beauty – in his biomechanoid creations, but his nightmare fusions of the human and mechanical also breathe a sense of no escape- a sense that we are all trapped in a virtual hell of our own making. Perhaps this is a portent of our times. …There is no doubt that, in terms of his art, Giger is a magician – conjuring dramatic visions that propel us into the darker recesses of the psyche.

But while placing Giger in the category of techno and digital magician, Drury clarifies his interpretation of Giger and his work in this context:

While he has studied the works of Aleister Crowley, like many other cyberspace enthusiasts, eh is not a magician in the conventional sense. He does not perform rituals, engage in invocations, or summon spirits. But one could hardly find a better temple of the black arts than the Spell Room at the H. R. Giger Museum, where the walls display several of his most powerful paintings and murals. It would seem that, when the thin veil across Giger’s psyche is slightly drawn aside, tempestuous visions of evil and alienation come forth. It is almost as if the dark gods were emerging from his nightmares.

Giger’s work and other material can be found at his website.

I remember as I enjoyed the fantastic as a kid that many of my teenage friends enjoyed horror (few teens don’t), and a few fellow geeks liked science fiction, but very few shared my love for fantasy films (until Star Wars, that is). Unless fantasy is framed in children’s garb (e.g., Harry Potter) or dark action (e.g., The Dark Knight), it tends not to receive the popular or critical attention that I believe it deserves. And very few filmmakers even attempt to put together good fantasy films for adults. That is, until Guillermo del Toro.

I have long been a fan of del Toro’s work who has proven himself a competent director and storyteller with horror films such as Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), and The Devil’s Backbone (2001), as well as comic action films like Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004). All of these films are very enjoyable but it was his work in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) that established him as a visionary filmmaker, not only as a director, but also as a writer with a special gift for fantasy films.

As I have posted previously, Pan’s Labyrinth incorporate myth, archetype, and symbol into his a story that provides for multiple levels of meaning and interpretation. This film caught the attention of the viewing public and garnerd three Oscar awards. In many ways Hellboy II is a sequel to Pan’s Labyrinth, at least in terms of the mythic dimension it incorporates. With this second installment in the Hellboy series based upon the comics of Mike Mignola, del Toro creates an expansive mythic and fairytale world for the characters to inhabit that is multifacted, rich in depth and detail (e.g., the words on a portal to Troll Market relate to a Jungian concept), and visually stunning. For fans of fantasy films and mythmaking, Hellboy II is a true pleasure to watch, and additional rewards come from multiple viewings so that more of the depth and detail can be appreciated.

For many years I have been, and remain, a Ray Harryhausen fan. For generations of people he has been the king of fantasy films who brought creatures to life through stop-motion animation who appeared to live and breathe in mythic worlds. But in many ways in my opinion, and I say this as a serious fan, Harryhausen’s films lacked a depth of mythology that interfered with their ability to be appreciated by broader aspects of popular culture. Even so, Harryhausen is an icon in fantasy films who inspired a number of filmmakers, including del Toro. Perhaps del Toro might be considered in some sense as Harryhausen’s successor, the next generation of fantasy filmmakers, who is able to put together fantasy films that not only entertain on a surface level, but also incorporate aspects of myth, archetype, and symbol that make for a rich tapestry that rewards deeper reflection.

Guillermo del Toro has expressed an interest in making another Hellboy film to complete a trilogy. As a fan of his myth-making I hope is able to make it. If not, perhaps another cinematic endeavor will enable him to build on the mythic vision of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II. The realm of imagination will be the richer for his continued artistic expression.

Alien romance in fantasy art

“Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond,” October 30-November 2, 2008, Chicago, Illinois, www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

Second-Round Deadline: September 1, 2008

Area: Cinematic Extraterrestrials

As film made its way into 20^th-century popular culture, depictions of extraterrestrial aliens became more prolific and specialized, eventually becoming fixed in the imagination as cultural archetypes, while varying significantly in physical, emotional and intellectual attributes. But is there any pattern to this variety? Does the cinematic alien represent a new cultural archetype of any kind? Or does it merely evoke older archetypes? Are extraterrestrials, for example, the xenophobic hallucinations of a technologically advanced Western Hemisphere striving to decode the subaltern voices of those who have been displaced, or do extraterrestrials represent that advancement itself?

More questions emerge. What new cinematic techniques accompanied the depiction of the 20^th-century alien extraterrestrial? How did contemporary scientific methods shape these film narratives? How, for example, did studies in artificial intelligence or developments in special effects affect the character potential of the extraterrestrial? Also, in what ways might films within this genre use the characters of extraterrestrial aliens to challenge assumptions about the attitudes, perspectives, and values of scientists and Science Fiction filmmakers, who seem to stand objectively apart from the world?

Paper topics may treat specific cinematic extraterrestrials in the context of social, scientific, and/or intellectual history, as well as religious studies, sociolinguistics, and astrobiology. Although the most popular images of cinematic extraterrestrials are of primary concern here, unheralded depictions of cinematic extraterrestrials may provide valuable insights. Historical and contemporary analogs to cinematic extraterrestrials may also be considered.

Please send your 300-word proposal by September 1, 2008, to the area chair:

Jim Webb, Chair, Cinematic Extraterrestrials Area

P. O. Box 3536

Chino Valley, AZ 86323

Email: zerzura@sbcglobal.net

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal.

This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O’Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).

Dr. Rankin is Deputy Associate Dean and an affiliate associate professor of English and German at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He made some time recently to talk about issues related to the thesis of his fascinating book.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Rankin, when I came across your intriguing book the title and thesis caught my eye. As the description in the masthead of this blog indicates, an exploration of archetypes in popular culture such as horror and suspense films is in keeping with the areas of interest for this forum. Before we discuss your book, can you tell me how you came to be involved with such interests? How does your work as a professor of English and German intersect with an exploration of archetype in horror?

Walter Rankin: The Grimm Fairy Tales have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother used to read the original tales to me as good-night stories, and she had no problems with the violence and horror in them. There’s a nice simplicity to most of the tales that everyone can relate to, especially children: Good people go through a tough trial against a worthy foe and emerge victorious. And despite their fantastic elements, the tales have real-life themes. For example, Hansel and Gretel are starving children in a poor home, while both Snow White and Cinderella have to face the loss of their beloved mothers and then deal with their scheming stepmothers. As a professor, I’ve found that works of horror and suspense – and certainly popular culture – do not always get the respect that they are due. The truth is, it’s hard to construct a good, scary story with compelling characters with whom your audience can identify. The Grimm Fairy Tales do this is a way that has allowed them to remain popular and to serve as archetypes for other works of horror and suspense.

TheoFantastique: I think most adults would not associate Grimm’s Fairy Tales and its archetypes with horror and suspense. How did you make this connection?

Walter Rankin: Whenever I teach the Grimm Fairy Tales, my students are always surprised at the level of horror and suspense maintained in the tales. The canonical tales (like Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, and Rumpelstilskin) have been sanitized and watered down quite a bit in modern retellings and children’s books. In Disney’s Cinderella, for example, we see the heroine communing with nature and singing to little birds. In the Grimm version, Cinderella still talks to birds, but this time she has them peck out the eyes of her stepsisters. Similarly, Rapunzel doesn’t just wake up to a handsome prince in the Grimm tale; rather, while she sleeps for a hundred years, we learn that many other princes have endured agonizing deaths in the thorny brier surrounding her castle. My favorite is dear Snow White who invites her stepmother to her wedding so that she can have red-hot iron boots strapped to her legs. The wicked queen is then forced to dance to death in them.

TheoFantastique: So in some senses then would you consider the various archetypes that surface in horror as functioning as a form of fairy tales for adults?

Walter Rankin: Absolutely – I think these archetypes become a part of our shared, subliminal consciousness that informs how we – as adults – then view horror and suspense films. The Grimm Fairy Tales include strong messages for adults as well as for children, and these translate easily to modern horror. A lot of the tales are about really bad parents, for example. In “Hansel and Gretel,” the father takes his children into the forest twice and leaves them for dead so that he and his wife will have enough food; in “Rapunzel,” the parents essentially sell their daughter to the neighboring sorceress in exchange for a good salad; in “Cinderella,” the stepmother has her own daughters cut off their toes and heels so that they can fit their bloody feet into the famed slipper. We can identify with these tales, because these parents really exist in our own world – babies get left in dumpsters, mothers drown their own children, and child abuse exists in all levels of society.

TheoFantastique: What types of archetypal images, themes and symbols have you identified from Grimm that you see surfacing in contemporary films?

Walter Rankin: Films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and, more recently, Scream, all give us the archetypical Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty. The heroine feels safe and secure in her home environment only to discover that a male “suitor” is determined to get her. Like the suitors in the Grimm tale, they are relentless stalkers who will stop at nothing to get their prize. Films like Single White Female and The Talented Mr. Ripley hit upon the Snow White themes of same-sex jealousy and obsession, as the popular characters find themselves losing their lives to their rivals. The central theme in these works is that there really is only one fairest in the land. Perhaps the most enduring archetype is that of the disguised wolf. In the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap,” our heroine is tricked by a smooth-talking wolf who then impersonates her grandmother and eats her. The best example of the disguised wolf comes from The Silence of the Lambs (both the novel and, my primary focus, the Oscar-winning film starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins).

TheoFantastique: One of the films you look at is the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby directed by Roman Polanski. Can you discuss the fairy tale aspects you see in this film and how this is portrayed for a contemporary audience?

Walter Rankin: I tie this film directly to “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which a young woman sells her first-born child to the strange little man so that he will spin straw into gold. By doing this, she gets to marry the king. Then the only way that she gets to keep her baby is by guessing his name (which she does by having servants spy on him). We know nothing about Rumpelstilskin really, other than he wants a living child. He’s considered devilish, but he is not specifically labeled a devil in the tale. In Rosemary’s Baby, we get another young woman (Mia Farrow) whose baby is sold by her husband to a group of devil-worshippers. As in the fairy tale, her husband benefits greatly by this bargain. Like the fairy tale queen, Rosemary can only figure out what has happened by deciphering a name (in this case, her neighbor, Roman Castevet). Both the film and the tale also have amazingly ambiguous endings that leave their audience guessing. Most fairy tales end happily ever after. In “Rumpelstilskin,” however, the queen has kept all of her dealings with the little man a secret from the king. If he ever asks her to spin gold again, her lies would be discovered, and she would be killed. As Rosemary’s Baby concludes, the initially horrified mother comes to accept her baby and love it. The camera pans out over the city as a lullaby plays, and we’re left wondering what will happen to her, the baby, and the world itself.

TheoFantastique: The cover of your book includes images from a fairy tale illustration and one of my favorite contemporary horror films The Ring. What connections do you make between these two?

Walter Rankin: This film hits a number of archetypes found in the story of “Rapunzel.” Let’s start with the main image in both – flowing tendrils of hair define Samara in the film and Rapunzel herself. Both characters are isolated from the outside world in remarkably similar settings. Rapunzel is hidden away in a tower with only a small opening at the top; likewise, Samara is kept hidden first in a barn attic with a tiny ladder leading up to a loft and then, most strikingly, in a well that has just the one entrance. Both of these tales focus on extreme isolation and lonliness as well as parental betrayal. In “Rapunzel,” the parents have sold their daughter to the neighboring sorceress, while Samara’s own (adopted) mother is the one who plunges her into the well.

TheoFantastique: You also discuss parallels between the fairy tale story of “Little Red Cap” and the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Can you touch on some of this?

Walter Rankin: The Silence of the Lambs has so many incredible images and themes that tie it to “Little Red Cap,” in my opinion. Right from the beginning of the film, the audience sees a lone, red-haired woman (Clarice Starling) running down a forest path. Thus, we are plunged immediately into an archetypal fairy tale realm. Once here, we learn of two wolves: Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill. Hannibal acts like the charming wolf on the path who sweet-talks the young girl so that he can get information. He also seems to feed off of Clarice, particularly her painful childhood memories. Buffalo Bill gives us an even more direct link, since he’s making a dress out of real women. In the famous tale, of course, the wolf eats the grandmother and puts on her clothes and nightcap. The Grimm tale has a hunter come along to cut Little Red and her grandmother out of the belly of the wolf; however, the little girl doesn’t just run home. She gathers stones and sews them back into the dozing wolf’s stomach. When he wakes up, he topples over and dies from the weight. She’s also learned a valuable lesson, and the next time she visits her grandmother she avoids another wolf and manages to bring about his downfall as well. The moral is clear: Dangerous wolves can be disguised anywhere and are ready to pounce, so be on your guard. Starling, too, must learn this lesson, which is beautfully realized at the end of the film. She encounters Buffalo Bill in his home alone, and he retreats to the basement. Here, he turns out the lights and puts on his own night-vision goggles. This is, metaphorically, the dark belly of the wolf. Despite his physical advantages, Starling is shown to be smart and thorough. When she almost instinctively turns and kills him, a bullet breaks through the darkened basement window and light streams in. Thus, she is like Little Red emerging from the fairy tale wolf’s stomach into the clear daylight. She graduates from the FBI academy and Dr. Lecter calls her, letting her know that even with one wolf gone, another one is always nearby.

TheoFantastique: In my view some of our most popular stories like Harry Potter also draw upon archetype and myth and function as fairy tales for young and old alike. Would you agree with this sentiment?

Walter Rankin: I definitely agree – what’s fun about Harry Potter and similar tales is how they take familiar archetypes and images (witches and wizards, wands and spells) and update them in unique ways while keeping the heart of a good story. Harry Potter is similar to any number of fairy tale heroes – his parents are dead, his caregivers, such as they are, are cruel – who have to go through great trials to become fully developed adults. While many readers were sorry to see Rowling bring the story to a close, I think she made the best artistic decision, giving the story the kind of closure found in most fairy tales.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Rankin, thanks again for these thoughts. I hope this interview helps generate interest in your book among its readers.

There are a few of his films that I have never seen, but have heard quite a bit about. One of them is A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. I had heard that it did not do well at the box office, and I was curious as to why. This weekend while channel surfing I was fortunate to come across this film just as it started and I decided to give it a viewing. I’m glad I did, but after doing so it is easy to see why it was not a box office smash as this science fiction adventure is very different from anything previously done by Spielberg, whether the light-hearted E.T. or the more serious Minority Report.

A.I. tells the story of a young couple with a son who is suffering from some type of terrible disease. His illness appears to be incurable, and while he is in cryogenic suspension his father, who works for a cyber-technology company, decides to bring home an experimental piece of artificial intelligence in the form of a young boy named David. The family eventually decides to activate his software that bonds him to the family in love, but this turns out to be problematic in that the couple’s natural son (an “organic”) soon recovers from his illness and returns home. Now the couple is faced with their real son and David (the “mecha”), and everyone’s adjustment to this situation turns out poorly, eventually resulting in the mother deciding to abandon David in the forest rather than returning him to the production company for destruction. This abandonment sets the stage for David’s journey through the rest of the film which echoes Pinocchio in that David believes if he can find the blue fairy and she turns him into a real boy his mother will love him once again.

This film is complex and intriguing on a number of levels. Not only does it address the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence and the questions surrounding the issues of mind and personhood, but it also raises serious questions that relate to spirituality and the interpretation of reality. After viewing this film and desiring more critical reflection on it I pulled an article from my research files by Frances Flannery-Dailey titled “Robot Heavens and Robot Dreams: Ultimate Reality in A.I. and Other Recent Films” from the Journal of Religion and Film 7/2 (October 2003). Flannery-Dailey’s article focuses on “A.I. as an illustration of intelligent, postmodern myth-making that constructs a multi-layered reality by interweaving dreaming, technology, ontological confusion, non-linear time, religion and myth.” And as if this wasn’t multi-layered and complex enough for a film, Flannery-Dailey’s article goes on to consider nine possible endings for it that are possible through consideration of various interpretive possibilities that engage the film’s symbolism and cinematic devices.

After surveying the possible endings and interpretive possibilities Flannery-Daily offers some final reflections.

“A.I. is a paradigm of the postmodern allegory in that signs/signifiers (objects the viewer sees) point to multiple significations (meanings the viewer construes from this viewing). Each strand of possibility points the audience not only in clever but also in meaningful ways towards important questions worthy of deep consideration regarding technology, ontology, the nature of the real, and morality. It would be impossible for me to delineate all interpretations of the film, since each viewer actively and repeatedly participates, if only unconsciously, in constructing the narratival flow of the film as well as its meaning. In my subjectivity, A.I. is a supremely intelligent film that successfully articulates the theme of ultimate reality as a nested, multi-layered one by using the language of hypertexts: religion, myths and dreams.”

The author continutes with a mention of the film’s lack of critical and popular acclaim and suggests possible reasons for it and the unease that viewers likewise experience with the film:

“The film draws on ancient traditions such as Genesis and on mythic artchetypes, but recasts them in a postmodern way: there is no God that watches over us once we are expelled from the garden and the moon is not really the mother of the world. We are left only with our own psyches as the transcendent referent to repair profound loss, with a pastiche of possible interpretations of our past at hand. I believe many people find this message unsettling, and A.I. further exacerbates the tension by falsely casting this complexity in a fairy-tale ending. That is, postmodern films that wrestle with ultimate reality have succeeded in deconstructing reality for us, in turn also deconstructing many of the religious and mythic referents on which they draw.”

Regardless of whether this film makes you feel uneasy as you watch it critically, or whether you are content to accept the simple fairytale interpretion ending suggestion in the first of Flannery-Dailey’s interpretive options, this film is rewarding as a piece of art and cinema that wrestles with some of the key issues of the Western world in late modernity. Perhaps Spielberg might be considered not only a gifted filmmaker and storyteller, but also a budding armchair philosopher.

The first is titled “Dark Shadows and People in the Shadows.” It refers to the television series Dark Shadows that ran on daytime television from 1966-1971 and which involved a fictional family known as the Collinses and which included active involvement with the supernatural. Ellwood writes that this clan was “involved in everything that made up the Sixties spiritual counterculture,” including astrology, time-travel, and the appropriation of Gothic horror themes. Ellwood attributes the shows success, in part, to “its enactment of archetypal images,” and that the show “reflected a widespread worldview emerging in reaction against the rationalism” of the establishment culture in a shift toward “magical mystery theater.” Ellwood places this within a cultural milieu of “postmodern neoromantic subjectivism.”

A little later in the book Ellwood includes another “counterpoint,” and one titled “New Mythologies, Easy Rides in Space and Time.” This piece looks at the religious or spiritual significance of science fiction and fantasy in the late 1960s and quotes Michel Butor to the effect that “science fiction is ‘the normal form of mythology of our time.’” Ellwood discusses “the creation of new mythologies from the fabrics of science fiction and fantasy,” and he notes the “time of shifting religious imagination” of the Sixties “may yet turn out to be among the most far-reaching developments of the decade.”

I find all of this discussion, and its cultural context of the 1960s counter-culture, of great interest as it connects with a previous post of mine on the Sci Fi Boys program where I raised the question as to what cultural and social forces might be at play in the large numbers of young males in the late 1950s through the 1970s who connected deeply with science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Along with Ellwood, I’d suggest that the religious milieu of this location and time period was formative and significant in terms of the significance of these genres as the containers for the creation of new myths and the expressions of archetypal images.

This definition emphasizes that a myth is essentially a story – any story – that affects the way people live. Contrary to many writers, we do not believe that a myth is necessarily unhistorical. In itself a story that becomes a myth can be true or false, historical or unhistorical, fact or fiction. What is important is not the story itself but the function it serves in the life of an individual, a group or a whole story.

Myths are expressed in great abundance in the popular culture of postmodernity. Television programs, motion pictures, animation (especially Japanese anime), video games, comics, and books frequently depict the mythic, both drawing upon previously existing myths and creating new ones for a fantasy hungry culture. Star Trek and The X-Files from television, and the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings motion pictures provide well known examples of this phenomenon, and a plethora of other examples could be provided from video games, comics, and animation which are lesser known by the broader public but which find a large and growing base of consumers. These expressions of popular culture entertainment draw upon various mythic elements (Star Wars and The Matrix explicitly so), and provide a window into the spiritual yearnings of the culture.

But how are we to explain the existence of these myths? Why do they have such power in touching the psyche of people in various cultures? Why is there great similarity of myths across cultures? And why do many of these myths speak to our need for spiritual transformation and redemption? The answers to these questions may be found in the convergence of three disciplines – that of religious phenomenology, Jungian psychoanalysis, and folklore studies.
Each of these disciplines shed light on the existence of certain motifs, commonly referred to as archetypes. From within religious phenomenology, Mircea Eliade noted that religions draw upon archetypal patterns in their rituals which connect those in the group to the divine and their place in time and the historical process. In the arena of psychoanalysis Carl Jung has been influential in his work which described archetypes as a set of mental principles or cognitive structures that that are universal in the human race and which form the collective unconscious. In folklore studies a review of the Motif-Index of Folk Literature provides evidence of the similarity of mythic motifs from various regions around the world. The result of the convergence of these independent lines of scholarly research is important. As Philip Johnson has stated:

A few words must be said in critical interaction with Jung and Eliade’s views on archetypes. These ideas must not be accepted uncritically, and critique has been raised both in terms of the individuals who developed the notions of the archetypes, as well as the concepts themselves. It must be acknowledged that Jung and Eliade, as well as the mythologist who’s work provided a popular expression of Jung’s ideas on myth, Joseph Campbell, were “associated with the politics of the extreme right, even, according to some charges, with sympathy for fascism and anti-Semitism” according to Ellwood. Further, Noll has put forward the thesis that Jung “underwent a visionary initiation into the Hellenistic mysteries of Mithras,” and that he later developed his theories as part of “what was essentially a new religious movement.”

Finally with reference to critical interaction with archetypes, we must remember that the existence of a common collection of archetypal symbols in the human consciousness has been recognized by three independent disciplines of study. This would seem to suggest that a genuine phenomenon exists within the human psyche across cultures and times. This then becomes an important area for Christian interaction, particularly in light of cultural developments in the Western world.

One area where myths and archetypes are most clearly expressed in popular culture is science fiction films dealing with extraterrestrials which provide examples of the existence of alien Messiah figures. Ruppersberg notes that in science fiction films, “underlying the motif of the alien messiah is the mythos of the Christian messiah,” and that several films have drawn on this Christian myth in the construction of their science fiction stories. Examples include Starman, The Last Starfighter, and perhaps most explicitly, The Day the Earth Stood Still. At times the alien Messiah also dies and rises again as in The Last Starfighter and The Day the Earth Stood Still, drawing upon the resurrection archetype and Christian conceptions of a dying and rising Messiah.

We might also discern the archetype of a “yearning for Paradise” and with it hopes for restoration. This myth is closely connected to the idea of salvation from beyond, and hints of it may be discerned in science fiction films dealing with UFOs, such as Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the climactic final scene a giant alien “mother ship” descends upon an enraptured humanity appearing almost like an alien technology’s version of the Christian hope for the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.

Other examples could be provided of archetypes and myths that surface in horror films, and the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis provide explicit examples readily recognized by Christians. My hope with this blog is that through my own reflections on these issues as they surface in popular culture, and through interactions with other Christians interested in these topics that we can explore the sigificance of myth, archetypes, popular culture, religion, and what it means to be human.