Heretic

horror films that feature religion have never been more popular. These films come in different types. Some cast demons as real and tell what happens when the supernatural runs amok in our world. Others treat religion as a human creation. They imagine the terrible things that beliefs, rituals, and pieties can do to human bodies and psyches. A third type of horror film refuses to adjudicate between the supernatural and the human made. These films find their terror in uncertainty. Does religion and its terrible possibilities come from us, or do they come from God?The film Heretic uses Mormonism to ask this last question explicitly. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the film follows a pair of young Latter-day Saint missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), as they pay a visit to a potential convert. Their would-be proselyte is Mr. Reed (played by Hugh Grant). Reed is an aging man who lives in a deteriorating house amid shelves crammed with books. We learn he is a student of religion whose life has been an effort to get “closer to God through . . . rigorous study.” At first Reed appears good-natured, engaging the missionaries about Mormonism. Soon though his hospitality gives way to something dark, and Barnes and Paxton find themselves trapped. They are, it turns out, a captive audience to Reed's lessons about the history of religion and—it soon becomes clear—unwilling subjects for his “is religion real?” experimentation.The first half of Heretic takes place in the church-like interior of Reed's home; he lectures the missionaries in a study filled with books, church pews, and icons. Midway through the film, however, Barnes and Paxton are forced to choose between two doors marked “Belief” and “Disbelief.” Here the setting changes abruptly, as the women descend stairs and enter a network of cellars carved out beneath the home. Reed has forced the missionaries underground to test their faith, and to draw them into a pseudo-religious prison of his own making.Reed's sinister tutelage of Sisters Barnes and Paxton marks Heretic as a film that's not only about religion but also about how and why people study it. But it is the film's later scenes, with their subterranean terrors, that situate Heretic firmly within a canon of “religious horror” film and literature. Many classic films, from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), feature ill-fated descents into basements. But as Barnes and Paxton head underground, the missionaries don't just find scary things—they enter a well-trodden world of religious captivity.Gothically inflected stories of captivity, often starring young women, are a mainstay of religious horror. The best known of these are about Catholicism; their claustrophobic spaces are often the interiors of convents and monasteries, and the earthen chambers beneath them. Their captors are priests or nuns. In the United States, Catholic captivity narratives stretch back to antebellum pulp literature like The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) and are alive and well in recent films like Immaculate (2024), in which it-girl Sydney Sweeney plays a nun who is exploited but defiantly sexy.While Mormon captivity hasn't (yet) translated to screen in the same way, Mormonism too has inspired plenty of captivity horror, particularly in stories of women trapped in plural marriages by insatiable Mormon men. Heretic draws on tropes of both Catholic and Mormon captivity: Reed's cellar is like a Catholic catacomb, with skulls and candles resting adjacent to images of the crucified Christ. The women he keeps caged in its darkest corners reference the polygamy of the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But directors Beck and Woods also offer a twist: The man who holds Sisters Barnes and Paxton captive is not an instrument of religion. Rather he is a student of religion who has concluded that there is no God, and that religion is his instrument—one he can manipulate to control his fellow humans. Reed fancies himself puppet master rather than priest. Near the film's end, Paxton confronts Reed in the depths of his cellar: “You want me to believe the one true religion is control.”There is critique of the LDS Church embedded in Heretic. “You are here because others have controlled your decisions since the day you were born,” Reed tells Paxton. “They decide who you worship. . . . They even dictate the garments you wear under your clothes” (Mormon garments are called “magic underwear” repeatedly in the film). But Heretic is not anti-religion. Sisters Barnes and Paxton are endearingly faithful (both Thatcher and East grew up Latter-day Saint and bring believability to their characters). Even after Reed “pulls back the curtain,” unveiling the mechanisms by which religious institutions compel obedience from their faithful, Paxton insists on praying. She prays for herself and for Reed: “I think it's beautiful we all pray for each other, even though we all probably know it doesn't make a difference.” And when the young missionary prays, something happens. Is it a miracle? Coincidence? Beck and Woods leave us guessing. By the film's final scene, Paxton—like religious captives before her—has escaped from darkness back to daylight. In the end, Heretic affirms the goodness and power of religion, albeit let loose from its most rigid institutional scaffoldings. There is, as Barnes says to Reed, “an entire spectrum [to religion] that your game is neglecting.”Heretic is not an especially original horror movie—there are many recent films that feature religious and/or subterranean captivity (both Immaculate and Barbarian [2022] are two that Heretic shares things with). That said, the movie is a lot of fun, largely because of Hugh Grant and the mix of Four Weddings charm and sociopathy he brings to his role. Heretic will translate well to the classroom, especially as a source for thinking about captivity narratives as a genre that is both remarkably perennial and inclusive of Mormonism. It is also an interesting entry in an emerging genre of “Mormon horror” that resists being (at least in any simple way) anti-Mormon.