If the plot is a bit obvious in places, it’s also quite compelling, especially when shown in an evangelical setting to people reared to take the apocalyptic passages of the Bible literally.
Balmer also highlights this “literally scare the hell out of kids” aspect of these movies: Religious historian Randall Balmer grew up in Thompson’s church and profiled him fondly in a chapter of Balmer’s book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. “It was the filmmakers’ goal to ‘literally scare the hell out of kids.’” Halloween, Lindvall notes, was a popular time for viewing.
Lindvall points out that A Thief in the Night was one of the only films available to young people coming from fundamentalist backgrounds who “were not allowed to go to movies to even see The Sound of Music.” When an organization called the Christian Film Distributors Association started in 1974, they stocked copies of the film and saw bookings of 1500 showings a month, mostly at Baptist churches and schools and youth retreats. The capacity to show the film through this network was already in place. Army donated film projector equipment to churches and schools. According to film historian Terry Lindvall, the makers of A Thief in the Night were helped by the fact that after World War II, the U.S. But when the film came out in 1972, the evangelical establishment was in the midst of an extraordinary expansion that included inroads into mainstream radio, publishing, and television.
Movie a thief in the night movie#
… All of this might just be a low-budget, poorly-acted, B-grade movie long since constrained to the dust bin of film history. 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.” 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. … This film inspired people from across the political and social spectrum. … 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. (Because viewing and distribution has largely been through alternative mechanisms, an accurate accounting is impossible.) “Today, many teen evangelicals have not seen A Thief in the Night, but virtually every evangelical over 30 I’ve talked to is familiar with it, and most have seen it,” writes Heather Hendershot in her book Shaking the World for Jesus. To date, the movie has been seen by perhaps more than 50 million people worldwide others estimate as high as 300 million. It has influenced a generation of Christians reared in the 1970s and ’80s. The film was released in 1972 and marks its 40th anniversary this year. If you have seen it, the setting was likely a church basement, a church camp, or some other quasi-authoritative space where the film’s sermonizing might have been accompanied by an earnest youth pastor worried for your soul. Here’s Frykholm on A Thief in the Night at 40:Ī Thief in the Night is a cult classic, where the word “cult” has more than one resonance. (Specifically, their splicing and twisting of several disparate verses in the Bible had them convinced the world had only a single “generation” after 1948.) They were absolutely certain, back when they made this movie, that the world was going to end long before 40 years had gone by. But it must be particularly strange for the filmmakers themselves. It’s jarring to realize this movie is 40 years old - another reminder that I’m getting older myself. She knows this world, having immersed herself in PMD prophecy-mania while writing Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America, which takes an empathetic and generous look at some of the tens of millions of fans of the World’s Worst Books. I’m a bit too brain-fried and bone-weary at the end of a long week to spend time today with the likes of Rayford Steele and Buck Williams, so instead let’s revisit this related classic with Frykholm.
Movie a thief in the night full#
The full movie of A Thief in the Night is also on YouTube.) (Here’s Larry Norman’s version of the song.
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