CULTURE: Filmmakers raising hell

“What if you received a letter from hell?” is the opening line in a popular video, “A Letter from Hell,” about a usually off-limits topic.

Tonight, little children across the country will traipse from door to door costumed as various denizens of the underworld: goblins, devils, zombies, ghosts and demons. The holiday’s origins are borderline theological in that it acknowledges the existence of “hallows,” an old English word for dead spirits.

And a dead spirit is who wrote the “letter.”
Click to view the video:

“Dear Zack,” says a voice-over from “Josh,” a teenager. “I died today. It’s a lot different than what I expected.”

An accident scene and a ghostly tunnel flash onto the screen.

“Right after the wreck, I could feel my spirit leaving my body,” Josh says, his words appearing in red letters on a black background. “It was the weirdest thing, Zack.”

The teenager goes on to recount his appearance before several angels, one of whom casts him into a holding cell.

“He finally told me only those whose names were written in the Book of Life would get into heaven,” Josh says. His tone then turns accusatory.

“Why haven’t you ever told me how to become a Christian?” he asks. A note of terror enters Josh’s voice.

“I can smell the burning sulfur and brimstone,” he cries. “I am damned forever.”

Then, a deep, demonic voice cuts in.

“Wish you were here,” it says.

After doing well (ranked No. 10 with 135,209 views earlier this week) on GodTube.com, the five-minute video migrated to YouTube.com and then ended up on NBC’s “Nightline” on Oct. 18.

“A lot of teenagers are resonating with this,” said Greg Stier, president of Dare 2 Share Ministries, an evangelical Christian youth ministry in Denver. “They are hearing for the first time the reality of heaven and hell and the urgency of sharing with your friends before it’s too late. It is Christianity with a bite.”

Back in the days when life expectancy was short, hell was discussable in popular culture, said the Rev. Kendall Harmon. Now the in-house theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, he went to Oxford University for three years to research a doctoral thesis about hell.

“For the first 19 centuries of the church’s existence, you could not find a century where hell was not there in terms of mental furniture,” he said. “In the 20th century, it dropped off.”

But in the past 100 years, “the focus is on the here and now,” he added. “Anything about the afterlife is underplayed.”

What does capture the popular imagination is the drama that led to the creation of hell. Ray Griggs, a film producer in Simi Valley, Calif., is trying to raise the $160 million he says it will cost to film his trilogy on the fallen archangel Lucifer, described at www.luciferthemovie.com. An eight-minute film short won a best animation award at the 2007 Beverly Hills Film Festival.

Mr. Griggs is marketing his project as a drama about the fall of the most exalted created being in the universe, whose ambition corrupted his judgment, alienated him from other angels and caused him to foment division in heaven.

“I want to tell how he fell from pride, about the great battle in heaven, his dislike for Christ, his control over humans and his final end,” Mr. Griggs said. “But I didn’t want the stereotypical Christian film. I have made an exciting action and adventure story out of Lucifer, one that has really great biblical principles.”

This kind of backdoor approach may be one of the few ways people feel comfortable bringing up hell.

“While the church isn’t talking about hell, the very best people in the culture are,” Mr. Harmon said. “The single best depiction of hell in the 20th century is Jean Paul Sartre’s ’No Exit.’

“In the 19th century, there was a moral revolt inside the church against the God of the Bible, so the emphasis of theology on judgment, sin, hell and the wrath of God all got thrown into question. Now when I talk about it, I ask people when the last sermon you heard on hell. It is always a small number. And it’s usually the Baptists who’ve heard about it.

“But you cannot dislodge hell out of Christianity. If salvation means anything, there has to be something from which you are saved. It is a crucial part of the overall faith fabric but culturally the church has lost that.”

Mr. Stier was encountering the same blank wall 20 years ago. Frustrated by the failure of teenagers at a Wyoming youth camp to absorb his message, he devised a novel idea.

“I thought, what if they got a letter from a friend who ended up in hell and sent a letter back? I preached that, and I’ve never seen a response to a sermon like that before,” he said. “Kids were thinking about their friends with whom they have never shared the good news of Jesus with and their hearts were broken.”

About six years ago, another Christian ministry made the sermon into a video and word slowly spread.

“Hell is the crazy cousin that Protestants keep locking in the basement,” said Mr. Stier, who will conduct a youth evangelism workshop this weekend at Hylton Memorial Chapel in Woodbridge.

“It is mentioned 11 times in the New Testament by Christ himself. We think of him in the context of love and peace but he talked about hell literally and he talked about it a lot. It shocked his audience.

“A lot of people don’t want to talk about hell and engage it because if there is a hell, there’s a possibility they are going there.”