The Reaping (2007)

Director: Stephen Hopkins
Writer: Carey W. and Chad Hayes, based on a story by Brian Rousso
Stars: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba, AnnaSophia Robb and Stephen Rea

Index: Make It a Double.

William Ragsdale was also in Fright Night—in fact he was its lead actor—and he did choose its sequel for his Double, but he chose this first and I wonder why.

For a start, he doesn’t have a huge role in it, playing the sheriff in the small town of Haven, which is proving anything but, given that it’s experiencing a rerun of the twelve plagues of Egypt visited by God on the Egyptians for their persecution of the Jews.

For another, it’s not a well received movie, with a pitiful 7% rating on the tomatometer, a single point above The Hottie and the Nottie and under half the remake of The Wicker Man. It’s a low enough score to worry going in.

However, while it’s certainly not without its flaws, I think it’s been given a bum rap. It’s set up well with an interesting lead character and the imagery is impressive, not just the visuals but the impact behind them. And AnnaSophia Robb, Violet Beauregarde two years earlier in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a revelation.

I wonder if Ragsdale is a religious man. It’s a subject he studied in college but that doesn’t necessarily translate. After all, the interesting lead character here, Katherine Winter, used to be an ordained minister but, as we meet her, is now a debunker of miracles. Maybe he merely likes religious horror movies. If so, then he’s not alone because I’d love to see more of them and I got a kick out of how this one built.

We get to see Winter in action after a brief prologue with Stephen Rea that seems freaky in isolation but builds into one of those flaws I mentioned. What Winter discovers in Chile at the makes a lot more sense to me. There’s a monk in Concepción who’s been dead for forty years but his tomb was broken open during an earthquake and his body is still pristine. Locals think it’s a miracle but Winter soon proves it’s just side effects from illegal dumping of toxic waste. As she points out It’s the latest in a long string of forty-eight miracles investigated and forty-eight explained scientifically.

She’s played by Hilary Swank and backed up by her colleague Ben, played by Idris Elba, who I haven’t yet seen earlier in film. Both do good work here but then both have also done better elsewhere. They’re not the biggest reasons to watch this film and neither are Rea, Ragsdale or the other main adult star, David Morrissey, who also do good work but have done better.

It’s Morrissey, as a teacher, Doug Blackwell, who invites them to Haven because their river has mysteriously turned red and the townsfolk are blaming a twelve year old girl. They think she killed her brother and doomed their town. It’s the worry about what they might do to the girl that draws them in and keeps them there.

Ben is a Christian, regardless of his work for Katherine, so what he sees has a major impact on him. It’s only gradually that we learn what went on in Katherine’s background to warrant such a major career change. I won’t spoil that but I will say that it involves her husband and daughter, neither of whom are still alive. That and a growing inability to rationalise what she experiences in Haven are why she’s so driven.

I liked Katherine’s story arc. She has plenty of reasons to have lost her faith and distanced herself from the church for whom she worked. She’s never found a reason to change that call even after forty-eight supposed miracles. You won’t be shocked to discover, given the setup, that this one’s different. However, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of Christianity.

Put simply, if we take all this as read, then whoever’s running things up there is hardly a loving deity. It’s a vengeful Old Testament god and, even if we’re certain that He’s real, why would we follow Him? In other words, while it must be said that The Reaping is Biblical horror, it’s a pretty awful Christian recruitment drive.

All that said, there are a few reasons why I’d talk this film up, not as a horror classic but as a movie worth a heck of a lot more than a 7% Tomatometer rating.

The most obvious is the visual element. The cinematography by Peter Levy and production designer by Graham “Grace” Walker are really strong. I bought into these plagues, right from our first look at a blood red river and swamp. The locusts are extremely well handled too, as are a number of the other plagues. David has a gorgeous barbecue lined up until the plague of flies descend in a heartbeat.

However, it’s not just the plagues; there’s a particularly powerful scene with a crazed bull attacking a car and director Stephen Hopkins doesn’t hold back from tough scenes. There’s a peach with Ben in a mausoleum that I refuse to spoil but farmers incinerating their cattle in huge pits and children being shaved en masse to help get rid of the plague of lice are highly impactful shots emotionally.

The other two tie together, namely how the story builds around that twelve year old girl, a swamp rat called Loren McConnell, played in a wonderfully intense performance by fourteen year old AnnaSophia Robb. Her family seem to be outcasts from the town of Haven, living in the swamp as a single mother and two kids—now just the one, after Brody’s death. There’s a wonderful scene when Mrs. McConnell asks Katherine if she’s in her house to kill her little girl. When she answers how you’d expect, the telling reply is “Why not?”

I don’t like everywhere the script goes, as it walks a little close to The Wicker Man at points for no good reason and the prophecy angle we began in the prologue remains oddly separate and ends poorly, but I did like how it built. I’m happy to say that, while I did see some of the twists coming, I didn’t see all of them.

Of course, the tagline on the poster is “What hath God wrought?” which is a real invitation to critics like me to answer the question. It’s a question that comes up with any horror movie with an overt religious theme, not merely the Christian ones, and the response is typically “a wild and overly complex mess”.

The problem we have is that to answer in a different way, we have to put ourselves in the place of whichever god or gods are in play and we inherently can’t do that because we’re just human beings and we operate on a completely different level. That’s not intended to be some sort of religious copout. It’s the nature of gods.

Looking at this from the angle of we’d have done things differently if we were God breaks the drama, but that’s always the case and the ensuing philosophical discussion gets painful.

Let’s just say I dug this more than most and so, it would seem, did William Ragsdale.