The Believers: The Horror of Repulsion.

Some movies problematic as they may be, just get the job done. As a moviegoer I tend to be on the fence about the importance of the political thrust of movies. I care about what they say, but I care more about where the movies good or whether it accomplishes what it’s supposed to. If it’s a comedy I expect to laugh, Romance I expect to be swept up off my feet, and if it’s horror I expect to be horrified. This is painfully oversimplified but you get the point. I bring all this up because it’s so much of how I felt seeing 1987's “The Believers”. Directed by John Schlesinger ( Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man ) and even adapted by Mark Frost who would go on to work with David Lynch in Twin Peaks you’d think this movie would at least have a cult following but it does not and I find myself somewhat thankful for that, but make no mistake this movie is startling, fascinating, and dastardly and the last one is most important. Behind a movie that loves its subject matter and seeks to both inform and horrify is a very anti-black film. When I say anti-black I MEAN anti-BLACK. It doesn't like black statues, black snakes, black spiders, black coffee, black shoes and damn sure not black people. In a movie that heavily features and focuses on the power of belief and religion, only the black practinoners are portrayed as ominous and dangerous, an unidentified threat seen but unseen, and to some extent what makes it worse is as a horror story this movie is frightfully effective. Great performances, wild visuals ( one woman ends up with the urban legend about a nest of spiders in one’s face as a fright ) and it’s mood and tone create a distinctive feeling of anxiousness and foreboding-ness, it’s too bad much of that is rooted in a sort of knitted grotesque mysticism around Africa and blackness itself that plays on tropes of Africa the dark continent, and frames black practinoners of Hoodoo/Santeria as polluters of the religion even though it’s origins are owed to us. The 80s had a small window of time where the subject matter became somewhat popularized by a few films that were centered around the practices of Hoodoo / Santeria . Angel Heart, Serpent and the Rainbow, and this one ( There was even an episode of Miami Vice that did the same. Most made ths same mistake or did it on purpose depending on whom you’re talking to, and that us demonizing the native religions of black folk and conceptualizing blackness something in and of itself to be feared choosing actors like Zakes Mokae, Clarence Williams III or here Malick Bowens ( one for the most underutilized faces in movie history) and republishing wonderful faces for the white gaze and more specifically to be feared.

Schlesinger's film starts out quite literally milk white and the first form of insidious danger we see brought out the black conspiracy theorist in me….because it was black.. coffee..Black and then a close up of it dropping onto a white surface whee it is foreshadowed harm is about to take place and it does. From that interesting note there we are swept across to an unknown black land where a white couple sits in the middle of a sea of black folk performing a ritualistic dance, the dance by from what little my research could produce on a scene from a movie very few people have seen is actually a healing dance, but this is where the intrusive nature of the white eye contaminates and taints. Schlesinger and composer J. Peter Robinson are not going for a match in tonality here. This is not meant to look like help, the dance much like that coffee signals foreboding, the forbidden, the savage, and the menacing and if the way Schlesinger’s camera invites us to look up on certain faces doesn't tell you that, Robinson's score will definitely make it clear for you. The white people in the midst are looked upon as naive travelers, people messing around and something they might not fully understand and though the movie somewhat backtracks on this by the end it's still nonetheless suggestive of the idea of the idea of assuming control over powers you cannot understand and it doesn't correct that to make those powers of that danger not be directly attached to blackness. Especially as it pertains to Malick Bowens and his face which the movie is clearly in a love/hate relationship with. I want to be clear here this is not the entire plate of the movie there is much interesting work here around discussing the hold belief has on us and it's sort of what of canonization amongst and across various people as compared to others as well as the sort of contagious nature of willful and hard fast faith in things we can’t see. The tangible effects of faith, religion, and belief outside of those whom even follow it and onto those who have no belief is always ample grounds for storytelling to me and especially in the world of horror and and it is mined for quite a bit in Schlesinger’s film. Alot of the same paranoia featured in “The Marathon Man” is presented in the same fashion here but the problem is on this plate there's a sort of juice seeping and surrounding all the rest of the meal, and whether you want it or not it’s apart of it now.

Right dead smack in the middle of Schlesinger’s film, yet another dancing scene serves as a centerpiece of all that makes this movie horrifying both within the context of a film and outside as a black viewer. Malick Bowens character whose name is “Palo” enters a party it’s one of those well to do, networking type parties where Sheen's character has been brought to further investigate the case of these murdered children, (because that’s what savage cultures do) now this is a “multicultural” event and by that I mean white people will be invited to gaze up on and and reflect upon their own whiteness as opposite of other cultures who are merely used as a sort of background to their own lives so there is this African music that begins to play as a means of entertainment to which Bowen steps into and begins to dance and the dance is instantly mid It's phase and and and eventually he starts to plant his gaze Upon some of these innocent whitefolk and one white woman in particular the 1 with whom Martin Sheen is in a love affair with it becomes sexual there is an undertone of a rousel and a tension between between he and this white woman and as he comes from her neck the neighborhood expoyet the nape of it exposed and her eyes also beginning to roll back but much more so an implication of arousal she has no control over than it's a application of harm though that undergirds it by proximity. It’s very vampiric the whole way the scene is executed - so that when he snatches the necklace off of her neck it is almost as if he bit her, The ritual was interrupted and stopped by a bruja who practices Santeria, (throughout this film presented as a good force with no other reason that I can perceive here other than its superficial disconnection from blackness. ) They have a bit of a face off and the scene is over, but it is the summarization of everything that makes this movie fascinating and grotesque. The power it has to convey and put on display what makes us fearful of people whose vested power of belief seems to go beyond the threshold of the natural is there. It’s everything that makes those videos of televangelist Kenneth Copeland so eerily terrifying..

These are not non Believers putting on a show nonsense or not they have an unrepentant assurity and confidence in their words that hold a over of their own and often times is repulsive, Schlesinger captures that, bottles it up and releases it through the lens of his camera which acts as a ventilator. It’s just as shame that Malick Bowens face and the face of anyone who looks like him is his chosen mode of transportation, worse still that he was not the only and not the last. The vilification of religious practices outside the context of those which sprung from Western civilization is bad enough, the vilification of even the faces of black people in and of itself, the horror and the repulsion being tied to those features distinctive to us is bordering on criminal and that much more when it is done so effectively and by a master craftsmen of paranoia. Now I'd love to have the answers to this of what to do and what to say about a film like this something distinctive, something hard lined, that summarizes with a thrust the reason to avoid this movie at all cost, but truth is through all this that I've said I actually enjoyed “The Believers” it stayed with me long after the revisit for a number of reasons. Schlesinger’s works have been underrated for their ability to convincingly ground what seem like implausible stories and relationships, and that continues here. Malick Bowens is a draw, an impossibly deep canvas, who effortlessly presents through his body and small subtle expressions- the power to be believable as the source code to all this catastrophe and chaos, and Jimmy Smits gives a banger of a performance as a Santeria practitioner who is also a cop who is first impacted by Palo's ( Bowens) work. It’s a tight, well paced thriller, that accomplishes everything it's supposed to do, but I found myself asking over and over at what cost? “The Believers” is a film that wants you to both question faith but also in a funny way believe in it, and reinstates and reinforces that belief. In a way I see that and feel that about movies themselves, my criticism is sometimes a form of a questioning of my faith in the power of movies especially when they come at the price that a movie like the believers ask me as a black viewer to pay for entertainment. That line at least for me is not clear many times. I think if someone was listening to me for a long enough time they would find contradictions along the lines of what it is I choose to direct and focus my anger on, and what it is I don't, and that in itself is a certain kind of horror at least for me and it's the horror I most readily identified intrusive film, the horror of being thrilled by something repulsive, which I guess is a major part of horror.