A Former Mormon Missionary Watches “Heretic”

The new horror thriller offers a heady clash between opposing ideas about faith and belief. But how realistic is its depiction of LDS doctrine and culture?

Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) from Heretic (A24).

It’s a buddy pairing we’ve seen in a thousand movies. The wide-eyed, chatty newb harboring idealistic and nervous visions of the work ahead. The cynical, taciturn veteran who’s seen too much and may be losing faith in their job. These roles are established quickly—after a darkly hilarious “porno-ographical” conversation—through a familiar shorthand that lets us see the two distinct individuals who make up this otherwise all-too-easily stereotyped partnership.

With that, the cerebral new horror thriller Heretic puts us firmly on the side of two characters of a type more commonly deployed as punchlines (when deployed in popular culture at all)—young LDS missionaries. I’ve written before about how rare it is to see Mormon characters on screen, let alone depicted with any depth or nuance. Squeaky-clean kids on bikes knocking on doors and handing out religious tracts are ripe for caricature, and it is to this movie’s credit that the script and portrayals rarely stray that way.

Under the Hammer of Heaven

Much has been made in the press of the fact both Sophie Thatcher (Sister Barnes) and Chloe East (Sister Paxton, surely a hat tip to Big Love’s hapless patriarch) grew up in LDS households. This does bring a certain authenticity to their performances, especially East’s (who with her dirty blond hair and glasses looks and sounds eerily like one of my Utah-raised sisters). They both sound fluent in the language of Mormonism, which for me made the early comedic scenes of the sisters out proselytizing around what looks like Vancouver resonate with an eerie familiarity.

I grew up Mormon too. From 1986 to 1988 I served a proselytizing mission in southern Alberta, eastern Washington, and northern Idaho. I could relate all too well to the humiliations small and large they suffer as they try to interest random strangers in “learning more” about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a name so unwieldy that it’s hard to spit it out in less than the time it takes impatient passersby to wave them off).

Me (right) with a fellow elder near Porthill, Idaho, summer 1987. (Note my Swatch watch with Swatch Guard. What a fashion plate!)

Things don’t get much friendlier for Barnes and Paxton when they shift from street-contacting to followup calls on people who had previously expressed interest in a visit from the missionaries. Given the ever-present hope and faith in finding a “golden investigator” if they just knock on one more door, it’s only natural that they allow themselves to be lulled into incaution, even with stormy weather descending, when the owner of a secluded house, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant at his smarmiest), invites them inside.

It’s a horror movie, so obviously this is where Heretic takes its first swerve into nightmare territory. I don’t know if the writer/director team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are aware of the case, but in 1974 two young LDS missionaries, Gary Darley and Mark Fischer, disappeared in Austin, Texas, while visiting a recent convert named Robert Elmer Kleasen—presumably dismembered in the taxidermy shop behind his trailer home. Blood and hair belonging to both young men was recovered from the housing of a band saw, while Elder Fischer’s bloody watch and a name tag with a bullet hole through it were discovered in Kleasen’s trailer. No other traces of their bodies ever turned up.

The shocking case—sometimes mistakenly mentioned as an inspiration for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—was splashed all over Utah headlines when I was young, and put to gruesome lie the common Mormon sentiment that God would always look out for his missionaries. I thought about it often when I was knocking on doors, wondering whether some sick psycho lay in wait on the other. Thankfully, though, rather than plunging straight into slasher territory, Beck and Woods’s script takes a more interesting tack. Mr. Reed, at least at first, seems more interested in engaging the missionaries in a theological debate than anything physically threatening.

Let’s talk about whose Book of Mormon has more sticky notes. Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) from Heretic (A24).

The spiritual danger, though, would be palpable to these sisters. As a missionary, I found little more terrifying than a debate with an opponent who seemed to know my church’s scriptures, doctrine, and history better than I did. The Devil after all is cunning, and his lying, flattering words an invitation to damnation more subtle than any blade.

Still, though I could feel Barnes and Paxton’s unease acutely, I have to be honest. I felt as much of a kinship with Mr. Reed. Not with his obvious malignance, of course, but with his argument and his need to lay it out. After a harrowing experience of my own as a missionary and a lot of unsanctioned study, I left the church in 1995 and embarked on a ten-year online campaign to convince other unhappy Mormons to get out too. This brought me reams of hate email and a handful of death threats for my troubles.

These days I live in Harlem, a few blocks from shiny new LDS meetinghouse, and I’ve been accosted more times by missionaries on the street than ever before in my life. I’m always sure to let them know I’m a former missionary myself, and the responses to my challenges have led to everything from a respectful exchange of views to the snotty suggestion that I haven’t done enough research.

The Long and Winding Road to Idaho

All this is by way of saying that I’ve played both sides in the theological debate that takes up what is probably the strongest stretch of Heretic. Neither Scott Beck nor Bryan Woods comes from a Mormon background, but they’ve absorbed the history and doctrine in a way that lets them craft a compelling and convincing argument between Mr. Reed and the sisters. I was frankly delighted to see such a authentic discussion play out on the big screen. Yes, there are the requisite “magic underwear” references, but there is also a realistic engagement with subtle problems and inconsistencies in LDS belief.

One moment in particular landed hard with me, which is when Reed dismisses the sisters as mere salespeople for their particular corporate flavor of Christianity. This is a truth I’ve long understood, a role I resented the church for making me play, and it’s possible a few stray tears leaked in the darkness upon hearing Hugh Grant give voice to it.

Standing apart from my fellow salespeople at the Canadian border in 1987. A foretaste of schism to come?

The debate scenes are absorbing and tense, no mean feat for material like this, but never exactly what I would call frightening. Even after the players had moved on to a more physical (and conventional) manifestation of the conflict, I didn’t experience any real fear until maybe the last fifteen minutes. But I did notice that I wasn’t always buying into the cultural presentation of Mormonism.

Part of this comes from details most viewers wouldn’t realize were off, such as the elder played by Topher Grace, who is presented either as a stake president (the leader of a group of local wards) or as a ward missionary (a local member who aids the full-timers) or as a fellow missionary to the sisters. Which one he is supposed to be is never quite clear, nor is the idea that he and the sisters would be the only ones on the roster for cleaning bathrooms at the meetinghouse. (The church relies on help from all members to keep things clean.) The structure and hierarchy of the mission are hazy at best, without a fully imagined feel, giving the sense that Elder Kennedy’s scenes take place in some liminal zone where the edges of the map fade out into nothingness.

This is a small nit to pick, especially for a modest production with a necessarily limited cast, but it did make me begin to see that Mormonism is more of a convenience to the story (as it is with the musical The Book of Mormon) than an integral element of it.

Without getting into spoilers, this was never more clear to me than at the moment when one character professes to have worked out the nature of the “one true religion.” As they explained, I felt my pulse quickening because I thought we were about to unpack one of the truly distinctive features of LDS theology, the concept of the War in Heaven. I did laugh at an earlier point where Mr. Reed compares the Bible to the board game Monopoly, and the Book of Mormon to the special Bob Ross edition, but that comparison disregards the hard work Joseph Smith put in expanding and deepening his theology into something awe-inspiring and cosmic over the fourteen years that followed the publication of the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith’s First Novel

In Joseph’s cosmology, we all were spirits in the preexistence, and we all chose a side in the war that followed the great Council in Heaven where Elohim announced his plan to send us to Earth to be tested and sought candidates for a Savior. Lucifer promised to force obedience upon us so not one soul would be lost. Jehovah promised to uphold our free agency, with the understanding that not all of us would make it back. The shit hit the fan, Lucifer was banished to walk the Earth, and here the rest of us are, trapped with him and his followers.

I suppose if you squint you could read that subtext into the character’s final insight, but for such a talky movie to leave it unsaid makes me doubt it’s there. It’s a shame, because Heretic could have delved a little deeper and carved out an ending that grew organically from the fertile and often terrifying soil of Mormon cosmology. Instead it presents a pretty good simulacrum of LDS life without ever quite making it breathe or touching on what makes it so compelling to so many believers.

Like figurines in a model house, it’s easy to figure out how to set two Mormons down in a psychopath’s living room. It’s much harder to make the case that they’re the only ones who could have fit that space. ∅

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that LDS meetinghouses employ paid custodians. As several readers have pointed out, that’s the way it was when I was growing up, but today, as it sits on a fortune worth billions upon billions of dollars, the Church relies on voluntary service from its members to keep things clean. I apologize for the error.

For the full story of my own harrowing adventure as a naïve young representative of Jesus Inc., see my 2015 memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. It’s available from all the usual sources online, both in print and as an ebook, though I hope you’ll order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.