Looking Back: 25 Years After ‘The Prophecy’
It begins when you’re young. You’re up late one Saturday night—probably past your bedtime—and you’re watching the kind of movie that your parents always warned you about. “It’ll give you nightmares!” went the deterrent mantra. Images of a desert pass across the screen, and a grave narrator comes into view, speaking of a second war in Heaven. Soon, a man is screaming on a cathedral floor. The boundaries of faith and knowledge are not as fixed as they seem.
The Prophecy, written and directed by Gregory Widen and released in 1995, centers around failed-priest-turned-detective Thomas Daggett (Elias Koteas) who must deal with a sudden intrusion of angels and the imminent threat of the second war in Heaven. Gabriel (Christopher Walken) is now on Earth, looking to amplify his own fighting power with the soul of Col. Hawthorne (Patrick McAllister), a veteran who committed war crimes worthy of Hell itself. The angel Simon (Eric Stoltz) moves to prevent Gabriel’s acquisition of the soul, dragging Mary (Moriah 'Shining Dove' Snyder), an innocent Native American child, into the fray. Both Daggett and Mary’s teacher, Katherine (Virginia Madsen), must do everything they can to protect the child.
Though The Prophecy initially only brought home $16.1 million from the box office, it’s gained cult status over the years. What remains, for me, this film’s most compelling contribution to the religious horror subgenre is the dialog about knowledge and faith, and how that thread of discussion has continued through to later films like Constantine.
Early in The Prophecy, right at the threshold of his largest commitment, Daggett falls to the floor screaming, struck with visions of a war in Heaven—blood-spattered wings, screaming angels, assumedly maimed and broken bodies. What follows is a question that has continued to dog my own research over the years: “Some people lost their faith because Heaven shows them too little. But how many people lost their faith because Heaven shows them too much?”
In the wake of such trauma, it would be understandable to assume that Daggett wants to leave this aspect of his life behind entirely, but he doesn’t: He still has a copy of his dissertation from seminary school, A Thesis on Angels in Religious Scripture, in his home. The knowledge that he has now is the firsthand bodily knowledge of trauma; what he has seen, he can never unsee. This state of being reads almost as if it leaves no room for faith. But this level of knowledge, arguably, is also another lens through which Daggett and the viewer may come to understand and to know the Bible—an amended, hand-written and -illustrated creation that becomes its own character for how much it’s referenced. The Bible itself, though the Word of God and a purported record of the salvation of humankind, is also deeply horrifying.
The word “knowledge” likely gives rise to thoughts of extensive research, the scientific method, empirical data—fixed points, facts of the state of existence. But there is also a somewhat neglected component: knowledge that comes from lived experience. Faith, in seeming contrast, is often seen as belief in something without evidence. (I also recall here, with much chagrin, the unfortunate time where militant atheism was a major part of Reddit culture, and how “faith” was something only the mentally inept had.) But faith is also the inherent belief that things can and must improve, even if that feeling is not based on anything immediately tangible. In a better light, faith could be seen as something for the innocent, a child like Mary for example. But you grow up, get older. The faith of the innocent becomes something more like a fight when you acquire the knowledge of lived experience. The Prophecy features an incredibly engaging scene that explores this intersection on multiple levels.
“All too often we see predominant ideologies dismiss the vitality and fundamental reality of different beliefs and spiritual practices as anemic and without merit.”
When Mary first meets Simon in the abandoned part of the school, where her friends are playing hide and seek, Simon is taking shelter there, at first giving the impression of a person down on their luck. (Given the economic slump of the area brought on by the closing of the copper mine and later dialog alluding to this as being a regular occurrence, it isn’t hard to believe.) But there is something about the way Simon, a servant of God, looks at and speaks to Mary that puts us emotionally back on our heels. Mary is too young to sense that she may be in danger, but the lived experience of adult viewers brings up a need to protect this girl, to usher her out of the room. Mary is an innocent, and has a subconscious kind of faith that this man means her no harm. Simon’s gaze, however, is predatory. Katherine eventually does step in between them, but her confrontation with Simon is compassionate, not judgemental. As a later extension of this scene, Simon passes along the soul of the colonel into Mary, which saddles her with the hellish knowledge Hawthorne accumulated throughout his career. This is also a form of trauma and a level of unwanted, damaging knowledge that can only be healed through the care of her people and their spiritual leaders. (When Mary falls ill, Katherine notes that Mary has already seen a doctor when Daggett asserts that that’s what Mary needs to do to overcome this illness.)
There is a rather beautiful moment where Daggett speaks to Katherine intensely about his own inner voice, which can be seen as representative as some part of his faith, but the verbiage implies a level of knowledge here, too: “I had a voice once, Katherine. For as long as I could remember, I had a voice that called me to my God, that called me to church. And on the day that I needed that voice the most, it left me. It’s better never having known that voice. All I know is that I’m not going to let anything happen to Mary.”
There are also several moments that, although composed of single lines of dialog or taking up just one or two minutes of film, have heavy implications. For example, when the colonel’s spirit is exorcised from Mary’s body, one of the healers from the ceremony says, “The enemy ghost is gone.” All too often we see predominant ideologies dismiss the vitality and fundamental reality of different beliefs and spiritual practices as anemic and without merit. With that single line, the healer reduces the status of one of the most well-known practices of Catholic belief to a mere ghost itself.
The crisis of faith vs. knowledge is a thread that continues into Constantine, which came out 10 years later. Constantine (Keanu Reeves) speaks with Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) about how he has faith, that he believes, but Gabriel replies: “No, you know.”
For the sake of narrative conciseness, however, The Prophecy does not offer anything new when it comes to the demands of navigating the rather slippery ground between faith and knowledge: Daggett regains his faith, as is often found in religious horror movies, moving forward into life a once again whole man. Mary is healed, and Gabriel’s plans are thwarted. Ultimately, Daggett admits that faith means being comfortable with never knowing everything. “And in the end, I think it must be about faith, and that faith is a choice. And it can be lost, for a man, an angel, or the devil himself. And if faith means never completely understanding God’s plan, then maybe understanding a part of it, our part, is what it is to have a soul. And maybe, in the end, that’s what being human is after all.”
Article written by Laura Kemmerer
Laura tuned into horror with an interest in what these movies and books can tell us about ourselves and what societies fear. She is most interested in horror focused around the supernatural, folklore, the occult, Gothic themes, haunted media, landscape as a character, and hauntology (focusing on lost or broken futures).
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