Good grief. I read the headline and had an instant hot flash. Oh, the memories: Late ’70s, church lock in, cool basement, sheet hanging on the wall, popcorn, rickety projector followed by…
Scariest. Movie. EVER.
The older girls would leave the room breathless and pale, murmuring whispers, using words like, “powerful,” and “incredible.” “It’ll transform your walk with the Lord.”
Who wouldn’t want that?
I hadn’t heard the song that opens the 1972 Christian apocalyptic film A Thief in the Night in decades, and my impression of it was: slow, dull, bizarre, not catchy at all. I watched the first five minutes on YouTube, through the church meeting where an early-era praise band sings “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The song, which was one of the first contemporary Christian pop hits, describes the terrible things that will take place during the end times, with a refrain that laments, “there’s no time to change your mind/the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” As I watched, I could not help but laugh at the film’s campy quality and poor acting. Then I turned it off, and I could not get the song out of my head. The hypnotic rhythms lodged themselves in my brain and there I was, making a piece of toast, with the refrain repeating itself relentlessly.
Ah, Larry Norman. And that song. It became our mantra after seeing that movie, young kids positive the end of the world was nigh and yes… we wished we’d all been ready.
I wasn’t the only person deeply affected by this movie:
The film had an enormous impact on evangelical culture and shaped its attempts to influence American popular culture more directly through music, film, and books. Religion scholar John Walliss, who has written extensively on the movie and its aftermath, says, “Just as Alfred North Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, so we might say that all of evangelical Christian film is a footnote to A Thief in the Night.” This film inspired people from across the political and social spectrum. Marilyn Manson, who like so many saw the film at church as a child, wrote in his autobiography The Long Road Out of Hell, “I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it, watching movies like … A Thief in the Night, which described very graphically people getting their heads cut off because they hadn’t received 666 tattoos on their forehead.” At the other end of the social spectrum, young Christian filmmakers Peter and Paul LaLonde likewise saw the film as children, and later founded Cloud Ten Pictures, which produced the Left Behind: The Movie, which was adapted from Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ massively popular book.
The concept of “scaring ’em into the Kingdom” is hardly new, but this movie ratcheted the experience up to a whole new level. We now had visuals (yeah, they were bad, cheesy, and quite grainy), but they were state of the art back then. We had real people (ok, they were actors… but they were good actors, denied entrance into Hollywood because of their deep faith), dealing with real problems (again, they may not be real problems, but they’ll be real problems once the rapture happens).
High on sugary pop, sleep deprived, and overwhelmed by the platonic love of our youth leaders we left the experience “on fire for the lord” back to happy parents who knew none of us could possibly fall into sin after such a powerful spiritual experience.
Ah, the memories.
At the end of A Thief in the Night, Patty wakes up from her apocalyptic nightmare, wondering if it was in fact only a dream. Then the radio clicks on and she learns, once again, that the rapture has occurred, and she has, in fact, been left behind. The horror continues. Recently, Doughten has been trying to raise money for a fifth film in the Mark IV repertoire called The Battle of Armageddon. The website for the film was last updated in 2007 and includes this message, “You can be a part of this thrilling and life changing motion picture through your prayers and your tax-deductible donations.” The American fascination with the end times goes on.
To this day, whenever my clock radio goes off, I cringe as I listen to the top headlines, hoping all is well…
