There are two kinds of people reading this article: those for whom the title A Thief in the Night produces at least a small tremor of guilty fear, and those for whom it does not. If you grew up around a certain strain of American fundamentalist Christianity over the past several decades, the 1972 film, along with other "rapture movies" has a terrifying cultural resonance that probably still haunts you to this day.

A Thief in the Night, along with its sequels and others of its ilk are the only cinematic artifacts of a very specific set of Christian apocalyptic beliefs that found its widest acceptance during the 1970s, but continues in varying forms. Popularized in the 1970s by Hal Lindsey, the Christian Carlos Castaneda, these beliefs have had a profound impact on the United States at every level over the past two decades. The notoriously weird doomsday resignation of the Reagan administration, typified by James Watt's offhand public observation that the environment didn't matter as Jesus was going to be back soon anyway, is at one end of the scale. Somewhere at the shallower end comes the emergence of Marilyn Manson, who credits A Thief in the Night as a formative influence in his autobiography. These beliefs, though, remainlargely misunderstood or only barely, their cultural detritus still known primarily to the faithful or apostate.

The secret is understandable. These films are "cult films" in the truest sense: to experience their full power, you have to have undergone a terrible initiation into them, one only an evangelist would encourage anyone else to undertake. No one, having gone through this initiation and since rejected the beliefs that produced it, would hope to share the experience with another.

The films' availability also adds to their mystery. You're not going to find most of them in Blockbuster's "Inspirational," "Science Fiction" or "Horror" sections, and whatever their camp or cult value, you probably won't at your local speciality video store, either. In order to view these films, a trip into the fundamentalist Christian subculture is required, a journey that the once-faithful are loath to make and most others have no idea how to begin.

These are films, however, that need to be discovered and rediscovered, films of wide interest and appeal. Their cultural impact establishes that in itself — I promise you, if you weren't affected at an early age by one of these movies, someone close to you was. More than that, though, these are just fantastically bad movies, on a level with, say, those of Herschell Gordon Lewis or Ron Ormond. (The similarity to the latter may not be an accident — more on that below.) They are a treasure-trove of lousy writing, insane plots, hilarious special effects, the full gamut of unfortunate acting choices, and more of the usual perils of cheap filmmaking. They're also deeply disturbing films whose power is not limited to true or ex-believers. What more could you want from a "cult movie?"

In The Beginning...

A history of Christian speculation about the end of the world (called "eschatology" when you do it for a living) is well beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say that it's as old as Christ's "Back In a Minute" message at the end of the Gospels, and a consistent simmering pot of contention. Some history of the latest mass wave is needed, though, to fully appreciate these films' significance.

The latest large-scale Christian apocalyptic craze is fascinating because it's so closely tied to almost all of the changes that have occurred in the world over the past century or so. It began with the "Plymouth Brethren" and John Darby's reintroduction of "modalism," an old heresy repackaged for a New World in the 1830s as "dispensationalism." Dispensationalism/modalism is an essentially evolutionary attempt to work around the fact that despite numerous claims in scripture to the contrary, Jehovah doesn't seem like the same person from passage to passage, let alone Testament to Testament. The idea is that while God's nature remains the same, the manner in which he chooses to express himself to humanity changes from age to age. Dispensationalism isn't simply key in understanding the apocalyptic beliefs of 20th century American Christian fundamentalism, it's at the heart of the entire movement. Events like the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s could not have taken place without the reintroduction of a god whose next actions were anyone's guess. Astonishing as it may sound, what "fundamentalists" believe is based on a heresy that nearly split the church in its infancy. (It's also not much different at base from New Age nonsense about "manifestations of Christ consciousness" or any other postmodern riff on ancient faith.)

The modern Christian apocalyptic wave actually crosses nineteenth century roots with the rise of the Third Reich, which should come as a surprise to no one but the faithful. (They both share roots with the Seventh Day Adventists, Latter Day Saints, Christian Science, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the New Age movement, to be fair.) A heady mixture of geometrically progressive scientific achievement, brewing social change, Protestant anti-Papist sentiment, popular anti-Semitism and conspiracy mania and a sudden burst of anti-authoritarianism in the church that had been brewing since the Reformation was just waiting for a spark.

That spark was the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, a dispensational attempt to reconcile all of scripture at one fell swoop. In the process, Cyrus Scofield, former drunken attorney turned two-fisted missionary and major anal retentive, homogenized and expanded apocalyptic notions that had arisen throughout the 1800s, embellished them through his apparently divinely-inspired notion of cross-referencing the entire Bible, and ended up with a script that should sound familiar:

• First, the world returns to a state of Godless savagery rivaling "the days of Noah," whatever that means. Scripture doesn't help much. Jesus says in Matthew and Luke that people will be eating and drinking and getting married, and in Matthew and Mark that there will be natural disasters and wars. Paul, in his second letter to Timothy, says that people will be selfish, greedy, mean, unloving, disobedient, unforgiving, slanderous ingrates who are also religious hypocrites. Peter says, in his second letter, that scoffers will ask where Jesus is, anyway, and observe that the world has always been pretty much the same. There's more, but you get the general idea: basically, any era in which people are acting like people and cataclysms occur is "the last days." (That third point, of course, makes this article a sign of the apocalypse. Then again, it also similarly tars the book of Ecclesiastes, so I'm in good company, at least.)
  
  
• Next, the nation of Israel is reestablished. This may seem prescient, given the century's events, until one realizes that the groundwork for the modern state of Israel was laid concurrently with the rise of this apocalyptic movement. This is also the first apocalyptic wave to attach such importance to the establishment of a new Jewish nation. (The scriptures on this one are iffy at best, and the church has had a rather erratic historical attitude toward the Jews, bouncing from hatred to near-worship.) That the moods, moves and events that led to the postwar establishment of modern Israel influenced the burgeoning movement is much more likely than this event's fulfilling any sort of prophecy.
• At some point, Christ transports his followers bodily to heaven in an event known as "The Rapture," although there is no agreement about the event's timing. The consensus of the church through most of its history has been that the rapture briefly mentioned in 1 Thessalonians is a part of Christ's return to earth prior to his one thousand year rule, or "The Millenium." (See below.) Post-Darby-and-Scofield, and a significant historical distinction for the recent apocalyptic wave, the rapture is separated from the Second Coming. Whether by a minute or seven years or a thousand matters only to the faithful.
• Then a great leader ("The Antichrist/The Beast") arises, charms the world by bringing it peace for three and a half years, takes it over entirely, and is worshipped as god, all the while persecuting whatever Christians still remain. At that point, he turns his wrath on the Jews as well, and for the next three and a half years God punishes the earth. This period ("The Tribulation") culminates in the Battle of Armageddon, in which the Antichrist unites all the armies of the world to fight a returning Christ. ("The Second Coming/Advent.")
• Lastly, Christ reigns for one thousand years in a sort of warm-up for eternity called "The Millenium." Satan is held captive, there is no sin, and no one dies. Apparently God tires quickly of the whole "Earth thing," and releases Satan at the end of the Millenium, bringing back sin and death, and finally destroying his creation forever after another battle with the combined armies of the world.

Spread the Virus

Although the first examples of popular premillenial dispensationalism, Sydney Watson's In the Twinkling Of An Eye (1916) and The Mark of the Beast (1918), appeared right after the publication of the Scofield Bible, these apocalyptic notions still needed a few kicks to really get them started. (Watson's novels, incidentally and predictably, betray their roots in the chaos of the nineteenth century in their solid anti-Catholicism — the Antichrist, in these books, is The Pope.) The American twentieth century fundamentalist church is peppered with the odd outbreak of "Mark of the Beast Fever," the largest and most noted being reactions to the New Deal and the NRA symbol in the 1930s.

The whole thing gets its first serious push into motion though, with the "Red Scares" of the 1950s. Mid-century apocalyptic literature — televangelist Ernest Angley's novels Raptured and its sequel being the best examples — seem to be as much about Stalin as the Antichrist. Angley's "Beast Patrol" (I shit you not — that's what the Antichrist's Gestapo is called) is manned by horribly violent thugs who are indistinguishable from most contemporary portrayals of the KGB or Soviet spies. The anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s had the unintended backlash result, though, of spawning a wider liberalism and mistrust of government, setting the stage for the events of the 1960s.

The social tumult of the 1960s adds one more key element to the mix: during that decade, it becomes increasingly obvious to the fundamentalist and anti-modernist church that whatever power and influence Christianity once had has been on the wane for decades. As if in reaction to changes in attitude around them, fundamentalist literature during that decade provides very few examples of end times or rapture literature, and a serious boom in Christian anti-communist sentiment and literature. This is also the point at which American fundamentalism, an eternal enemy of "the social gospel," begins to complete a long turn inward, its focus not on changing the world so much as fleeing its evils and impending judgment, a state which it will only begin to exit more than a decade later. This is, again, both a change that could not have come about prior to the widespread acceptance of dispensationalism, and one without which the modern Christian Right would not have arisen, at least not in the form that it has.

Enter The Ormonds

Our first film, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), is a sort of "proto-rapture movie." Its subject matter, a hypothetical near-future communist takeover of the United States, was old hat even when it was released, but it isn't this subject matter that distinguishes the film. What's interesting about If Footmen... — and makes it a nice cultural segue into the full-blown rapture hysteria that followed close on its heels — is its focus on Christians as sole targets of the United States' new masters. A wide range of social, religious and philosophical misfits have stood in the way of the Communist ideal's fulfillment over the past century and been crushed as a result, but that doesn't matter to If Footmen... In the film's philosophy, reflecting that of fundamentalists of the time, the only important evil Marxism has wrought on is an extreme hatred and persecution of Christianity. There are no dissidents in the film but fundamentalist Christians, and the Communist rulers of the US take no oppressive or murderous action against anyone but fundamentalist Christians.

The film's title is explained in early narration, and basically means "If the church can't deal with all the nasty little changes in society today, what will happen when the forces behind those changes fully reveal themselves?" Nasty, nasty shit, apparently, is what will happen. If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? was the brainchild of Ron Ormond, one of the most singular and interesting characters in the histories of both exploitation and Christian filmmaking. Ormond started out as "the southern drive-in king," primarily focusing on westerns in the 1950s, like the Lash LaRue proto-S&M epic The Black Lash. He finished his secular filmmaking career with the bizarre country music star-riddled musical Forty Acre Feud (1968). In between came oddities ranging from 1960s white-trash sexploitation like White Lightnin' Road (1965) to jungle epics like 1953's Untamed Mistress and harder-to-classify weirdies like the infamous Mesa of Lost Women (1952). Along the way, Ormond also worked with Ed Wood and other exploitation notables.

Ormond was involved in a plane crash near the end of the sixties and experienced a conversion to Christianity which he spread quickly to his entire filmmaking family. The "Ormond Organization" (worth a piece of its own, a sort of mid-century cinematic Joad family, traveling the countryside looking for movie business gold) began churning out Christian films, of which If Footmen... was one of the first. These are no ordinary Christian films though — the Ormonds continued merrily in the same vein they had previously, only now selling fundamentalist paranoia instead of popcorn. Ormond's films are easily the most wildly fucked-up Christian movies ever, including the "rapture movies" that are the focus of this piece. They are brutal, vicious, no holds-barred assaults on senses you might not even know you had, and there's simply nothing else quite like them. Anyone who remembers seeing a "hell movie," in which the tortures of the damned are detailed in gory detail is probably remembering an Ormond movie like The Grim Reaper.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? gives a nod to Ormond's exploitation-days peer, H.G. Lewis, in its boundless enthusiasm for inventing bizarre atrocities. There isn't much story to If Footmen... A "bad girl," Judy, sits in church, listening to a preacher named Estus Pirkle rant about the approaching Commie hordes. She eventually repents of her evil ways, which would seem to be restricted to smoking, snogging and hanging out in "bars" that look more like soda shops or Christian youth centers. (You wonder at the end what became of Judy's "scared straight" faith when Pirkle's warning that the US would go Communist "within twenty-four months" turned out to be bogus.)

Fantasy bits, visualizing Pirkle's dire predictions, are the dark heart of If Footmen... and in them Ormond pulls out every piece of infamous anti-Communist lore he can find and renders it even worse with his own bloody embellishments. Scenes that should be familiar to anyone with an interest in anti-Communist propaganda include the "Why don't we ask Jesus for candy, then ask Lenin for candy?" classroom bit James Michener later popularized with The Children's Story. Even the most ardent fan of anti-Commie propaganda though, is on his own in Ormondland with scenes like the following:

• A Christian farmer is hogtied and strung from a tree. His young sons are given the end of the rope, hoisting and dangling their father over a half-dozen pitchforks buried in the ground, business end up. Soldiers then force them at gunpoint to drop dad onto the pitchforks over and over until he dies.
  
  
• A secret Sunday School meeting in a meadow is broken up by Communist goons. The teacher is shot immediately, after which the soldiers turn their attentions to the other adults and the children. A little boy, screaming piteously, has chopsticks driven into his ears in extreme close up. Still holding the same close shot, the boy then vomits from the pain, right at the camera.
  
  
• A commie goon wanders out of a house to find a little boy standing on the porch. (Said commie goon is, to put it baldly, a total Bubba.) The little boy asks the goon matter-of-factly if his parents have just been killed. The goon answers yes, and that the little boy doesn't have to suffer the same fate if he renounces Christ. The boy refuses. The goon then pulls out a machete, roars "WHY, YOU STOOPID L'IL FOO!," lops off the boy's head and throws it in the driveway. This actor's attempts throughout the film to affect an accent bring about some of the best trashy highlights, but this moment is particularly special. In trying to drawl, scream and come off like a menacing Russian all at the same time, he sounds vaguely Swedish.
  
  

If Footmen... shares its anti-Commie gorelust with Ernest Angley's Raptured, mentioned previously. Raptured and its sequel are unbelievably grisly pieces of work. One long and vivid scene in Raptured, in which a Christian is tortured to death by having his limbs hacked off one by one and barbecued in his presence, is still burned into my memory from the first time I read the book at the age of twelve. (It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone at this point that Brian Warner, aka Marilyn Manson, attended Angley's church as a kid.)

The Ormonds were Baptists (although of late they've become some sort of UFO-addled New Agers), as is Pirkle, so If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is filled with side attacks on dancing ("The doorway to adultery!") and public schools. The section pleading for the return of the McGuffey Reader is particularly hysterical, although not as much so as the scene in which a teacher drones to his students, "Today we will discuss the seven erotic zones in every woman." The film also reflects its time, slamming "those rioting college students" and "the way young people dress these days." In one bizarre, proud moment, Estus Pirkle tells how a congregation hooted a singer down because she was wearing a miniskirt.

Pirkle's obvious hatred of "all those weird people coming into churches" is ironic in the extreme. "Those weird people," post-sixties dropouts and hippies, were providing the final piece needed to kick rapture mania into high gear even as Pirkle spoke. The United States' last great and least-known fundamentalist revival was in progress, and by the time it was over, Pirkle's brand of paranoia would jump to the mainstream, albeit with a radically different focus. The work that resembles If Footmen... most closely followed it by only a year, a year that made all the difference in the world between the two movies and in the increasingly entrenched subculture that spawned them.

When that movie came, a good part of a generation had its collective mind permanently fucked.

Part Two: Take the Mark

Part One, Appendix A: Dispensationalist Diagrams and Illustrations

The following Charts and Illustrations come from the Rev. Clarence Larkin's 1918 book, Dispensational Truth. Don't ask for explanations, because even when they're explained, they still don't make a lot of sense. They are, however, highly amusing.

"The Seven Cosmic Phases of the Earth"
"The Seven Thousand Years of Human History"
"Messages To the Seven Churches Compared To Church History"
"Daniel's Seventy Weeks"
"Dispensation of Judgement"
"The First and Second Comings"
"Creation of the Universe"
"The Kingdom of God"
"The New Heavens and Earth"
"Renovation of the Earth By Fire"
"Restitution of the Universe"
"The Man of Sin (The Antichrist)"

Part One, Appendix B: Finding These Materials

Your home on the Internet for Christian apocalyptic material is Armageddon Books, which advertises itself as "the World's largest Bible prophecy bookstore."

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is available from Shocking Video, packaged on a single tape with Ormond's tortures-of-the-damned epic, The Grim Reaper. Unfortunately, we were unable to come up with contact information for the company by press time, but you can rent or buy the tape from this URL: http://www.hotweird.com/forbidden/videos.html. The film also turns up at cult and specialty video stores, so look around. Several other Ormond videos are available from CarrMond Productions.

Part One, Appendix C: URLs

Center for Millenial Studies

Secular site covering all varieties of premillenial tension.

   Federation of American Scientists Millenia Monitor

Not even remotely as dry as it sounds, this is a fairly cheeky site with a good, if short, list of millenial films, among other attractions.

   Page on Cyrus Scofield at The Christian Hall of Fame
   Ernest Angley's Web Site
   CarrMond Productions (The Ormonds' Web Site)
   Estus Pirkle's Web Site
   Chick Publications
   Jack Chick doesn't make movies, but he's had more of an influence on Christian apocalyptic culture over the past three decades than just about anyone else. He's also an interesting case, as he's still stuck in the early, anti-Catholic model of dispensationalism. His Antichrists are all Popes.

Part One, Appendix D: Bibliography

William M. Alnor, Soothsayers of the Second Advent. F.H. Revell: 1989.
Ernest Angley, Raptured: a novel of the second coming of the Lord. Winston Press: 1950.
Robert Fuller, Naming the Antichrist : the history of an American obsession. Oxford University Press: 1995.
Clarence Larkin, Dispensational Truth. Self-published: 1918.
Marilyn Manson, Neil Strauss, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. HarperCollins: 1998.
Bernard McGinn, Antichrist : two thousand years of the human fascination with evil. HarperSanFrancisco: 1994.
Cyrus Scofield, The Scofield Reference Bible. Oxford University Press: 1909.
Sydney Watson, In the Twinkling Of An Eye. Bible Institute of Los Angeles: 1916; F. H. Revell: 1933.
Sydney Watson, The Mark of the Beast. Bible Institute of Los Angeles: 1918; F. H. Revell: 1933.