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| 171 7 Mark IV and Apocalyptic Film The Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards recommended a sort of salutary terror in the communication of the Gospel. Although delivered in a staid monotone, his classic jeremiad sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” goaded sinners into repentance and toward a great awakening . The threat of God’s wrath on unrepentant sinners, dangling like spiders over the raging fires of hell, has been an efficacious tool in the hands of prophets and evangelists for centuries, particularly with regard to impending end-times terror. While the use of shock aesthetic techniques of the horror genre in Christian films has been criticized, scholars like Will Rockett and Michael Lieb find a fascinating interrelationship among Christian faith, the eschatological, the technological, and the fantastic.1 From the wild merkabah chariot literature of Ezekiel to the enduring presence of evil and the devil in popular culture, all with an impending sense of imminent political , ecological, and cosmic disaster in a secular Armageddon, the seemingly bizarre links of Christian faith and horror film are not as far-fetched as one might think.2 Rockett identifies a terrible “downward” transcendence of evil in Hollywood cinema, a discovery not only of a “heart of darkness” but of evil itself, which parallels a similar strand in the Christian film industry . Dim and foreboding echoes of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, as well as the fire-and-brimstone sermon of Edwards, reverberate in the “Rapture” productions of Mark IV Pictures. The 19th-century development of the notion of the rapture is rooted in the traditional and orthodox doctrine of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, an apocalypse of judgment and reward. In the parable of the separation of sheep from goats, it is at the end of time that some are welcomed into eternal bliss and others sent (or choose to go) into eternal torment. Around 1830, a New England sect led by John Newton Darby, a former member of the Plymouth Brethren, published the idea that the church would escape a future season of tribulation by being literally plucked out of the world, believing Christians would be raptured (i.e., abruptly transported from earth to heaven with 172 | Mark IV and Apocalyptic Film the second coming of Jesus) and thus escape the suffering of an impending apocalyptic time of tribulation. Fundamentalists rallied to the impending judgment on this world and embraced the idea of being rescued from the cataclysms of the last days, leading to the spread of a pre-millennial and pre-tribulation hope. In contrast to the post-millennial idea of creating the Kingdom of God on earth through progressive Social Gospel programs, the pre-tribulation devotees feared being left behind. Predicting the end of the world still requires a distribution network to attract congregants to your message, something beyond the kind of sandwich board signs of New Yorker cartoons warning of the end of the world and calling for repentance. The visual rhetoric scholar David Morgan documented how various eschatological messages of the 19th-century were disseminated through various pictorial charts of the prophet Daniel’s visions, illustrated prophecies of the beasts of Revelation, and the visual pedagogy diagrams chronicling the end days (e.g., Clarence Larkin’s well-circulated dispensational chart of the “Great Tribulation”).3 Just as efforts of spreading visual apocalyptic tracts and charts throughout fundamentalist churches in the 19th century were coordinated by savvy distributors, conservative Christians would utilize a synchronized system for distributing the apocalyptic films of the 20th century. The organization that would systematize and manage the need for films to be spread throughout the nation would be the Christian Film Distributors Association. Mark IV Pictures and Heartland Productions A key part of the apocalyptic narrative involves the setting up of an Antichrist , whose government will mark those left behind with the numbers 666 on their forehead or hand. Such riveting devices of pre-millennial tropes provided screenwriters with a fertile field for the dramatic invention of suspense and terror. While Carlos Baptista had produced The Rapture (1941) and Blessed Hope (1943) during the war, the first Christian filmmaker to effectively employ such shock-and-awe narrative techniques was Russell S. Doughten Jr., a creative young man from Drake University who had studied at Yale and USC. At Good News Productions (becoming the more visible Valley Forge Studios) in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Doughten providentially met up with Shorty Yeaworth, who trained him in filmmaking. As director of the...

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