The Paradox of Belief, the Ritual of Memory, and the Manipulation of Reality

Fling on your flannel, slink into your baggy jeans, and slide on your Airwalks. On a fall Friday night in the ’90s, there is only one place to be. Bustle through the doors of your local Blockbuster to find it eerie in its emptiness. Fumbling toward the exit, you rattle the handle to a locked door. Stumble through the shelves to the horror section where a stack of films teeter. These are no direct-to-videos that spare you the scares.

For this year’s edition of Sinister Cinema, we’re trapped at a rental store for a night of the ’90s. In the age of metafictional commentary and technological anxiety, postmodern narratives blur the line between fiction and reality. Movies of heightened self-awareness satirize the media saturation and moral panic of the decade as well as invite the viewer to anticipate a formula that the director can either fulfill or subvert. The transition from analog to digital signifies the erosion of embodied participation, replacing the tactile with the abstract. The ’90s are a liminal period though, and — for one more night at least — presence prevails over proxy. Shared spaces, like our video store, are not shuttered yet. Stare at the beige desktop computer, thumping the mouse in desperation to log onto the internet, but the service lags.

In short, the chirp and ping of the dial-up modem warbles and whines, and it is not connecting you with the outside world.

To survive the night, congregate with the other kids of Derry and process through the sewers. Chant the Sursum Corda instead of the name of Candyman. Intone the Apostle’s Creed, buffeting you from the words of Sutter Cane. Sadako slithers through the television. The Fisherman rakes the wall with his hook. The Blair Witch snaps twigs and skitters rocks. As the sun emerges to a new day and a new millennium while the final reel of terror flickers, sip the cup of the Eucharist rather than drain the dregs of Y2K paranoia.

This week we’re looking at: It (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), Candyman (1992), Needful Things (1993), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and Lord of Illusions (1995).

At the climax of Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel It, Eddie Kaspbrak (Adam Faraizl/Dennis Christopher) says, “I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in the Easter Bunny. I believe in the Tooth Fairy. But I don’t believe in you” while spraying his inhaler directly into Pennywise the Clown’s face. This declaration coupled with the placebo drug that Eddie had been taking for years for his asthma best epitomizes the paradoxical nature of the motif of belief throughout It. During the entire three-hour, twelve-minute runtime, belief is both an agent that empowers evil and a mechanism of salvation for the characters of Derry. In the first half of the film, we witness a group of kids, misfits and outcasts, who are united by their own flaws and shortcomings. Bill Denbrough (Jonathan Brandis/Richard Thomas), the leader of the group, is a stutterer and an allusion to Moses. As implied before, Eddie Kaspbrak is a hypochondriac and perpetually henpecked by his mother. Beverly Marsh (Emily Perkins/Annette O’Toole) is the lone girl in the bunch and seeks refuge from her abusive father. Ben Hanscom (Brandon Crane/John Ritter) is the overweight new kid. Richie Tozier (Seth Green/Harry Anderson) has no filter and uses comedy to cope with being a social outcast. Mike Hanlon’s (Marlon Taylor/Tim Reid) otherness and ostracization is owing to his being Black in the 1960s. And Stan Uris (Ben Heller/Richard Masur) assumes another oppressed minority by being a Jew. Taken together, this self-proclaimed “Losers Club” epitomizes what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:26–28:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

Separately, each member of the club is inadequate on their own against the antics of the bully, Henry Bowers (Jarred Blancard/Michael Cole), but collectively they are — as Mike Hanlon identifies — ”The Lucky Seven.” Viewed through a theological lens, we recognize seven as a divine number, and the Derry boys will wield nothing less than belief to destroy the evil that lurks beneath their town.

Memory is inseparable from belief in that belief is both forged from our memories and our memories are constructed by belief. Recalling an event involves not a perfect replication of a previous occurrence but a process of retrieval that requires us to reconstruct based on our own beliefs. Such a reconstitution of the past is why we often have false memories, because even when corrected with more accurate information, that information does not cohere with our own beliefs. Simultaneously, our beliefs about reality are determined by our memories of lived experience. Because of the entangled nature of belief and memory, repetition of memory and of our belief in those memories is an essential formative practice in the church. Therefore, scripture continuously calls on us to remember, not simply because we are forgetful creatures but because memory is not a rigid construct. It’s a flexible entity that demands we participate in a memorized retelling to reform and renew our belief.

For the kids of Derry, we see the malleability and pliability of memory in how they forget so much of what happened during that tragic summer when they were stalked and terrorized by a cosmic evil manifesting as a clown. Forgetting is what allows It to return. In fact, it is not until an adult Mike, who has remained at Derry as the so-called lighthouse, calls each individual to remember a promise they made to return to their childhood town should the evil resurface. What is revelatory in the second half of the movie is how each character begins to restructure their memories only when they retrace their childhood haunts and when they gather together again as a community at a Chinese restaurant. Location and community are conduits through which faith and memory are fostered and perpetuated.

Before the Loser’s Club can confront Pennywise (Tim Curry) again, they have to remember. Mike ritualizes memory by reunion; he summons them back to Derry and exposes them to It’s historic malevolence in the town. The cycle of corruption seems to repeat every thirty years. In the first part of the film, the boys make a covenant by swearing to return if It is not defeated. Thus, the climax of the movie is itself a repetition of an event that must be remembered, and, since Pennywise feeds off fear and belief, he can only be banished by the Losers’ belief in their shared bond. The wonder of such belief is exemplified in a pair of silver earrings plucked from Richie Tozier’s mother’s jewelry box that are, through faith, endued with magical power. Such childlike belief in the sacramental nature of such mundane objects is absurd because faith is absurd, which is why adults whose epistemological lens is exclusively reason are unable to see such primal horror as It. As a young Bill reasons, “When you grow up, you stop believing.” As a result, the kids’ belief must not only be an apprehension of an abstraction, but an encountering and experiencing of a narrative of mystery and wonder where the mundane and the ordinary (like earrings) are infused with grace and mystery to conquer a competing belief in an ominous entity. Like the Losers Club, we are empowered against the darkness when we reenact the memory of redemption and adhere to a shared belief in its power.

If It (1990) dramatizes belief as communal salvation, then Sometimes They Come Back (1991) exposes its counterfeit form, belief as obsessive repetition, where memory refuses to redeem and instead condemns.

Ensnared by his past and imprisoned to repeat it, Jim Norman (Tim Matheson) returns to his hometown of Liberty after accepting a teaching job. When Jim was nine, he witnessed the murder of his brother Wayne (Chris Demetral) by a gang of greasers in a train tunnel. Similar to It (1990), Jim begins to have flashbacks as he revisits the places of his childhood. Likewise, the past is recapitulated in that members of his class die in tragic ways only to be replaced by one of the greasers who killed his brother.

What Sometimes They Come Back (1991) contributes is a sense of survivor’s guilt and a dark inversion of the ritual of memory. The greasers restage the traumatic day for purposes of retribution rather than shared redemption. For the tenuous reason that Jim had stolen the gangster’s car keys, which led to their death by an oncoming train, his brother Wayne is stuck in limbo. Metaphorically, Jim is also in limbo by repeating the past tragedy. Sheltering in a church that serves as a habitat of grace, Jim and his family are duped into fleeing and into performing a re-enactment in order to liberate Wayne. Juxtaposing Jim and his family’s re-enactment with the one exercised by the Losers Club, we observe how the Derry kids’ ritual was rooted in grace and community; this one is nothing but Law.

Candyman (1992) expands our notion of memory and belief by showing the power of these constructs on marginalized communities. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) attempts to disempower the belief in Candyman by locating the urban legend in an ethnicity’s coping mechanism for racial injustice. Influenced by modernity and post-Enlightenment thinking, Helen employs deductive reasoning and sleuthing to try to resolve the mysteries of belief. In investigating the urban legend, Helen travels through Black spaces, believing she is inoculated from the violent crime that her Black colleague Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) senses. In particular, the housing projects she inspects are in Cabrini-Green, the site of where Candyman, a slave that impregnated a white woman was lynched and burned on a funeral pyre. Ritualized memory manifests itself not only in the promulgating of the story by chanting Candyman’s name five times but also because it is predicated upon the fact that Candyman himself is an inherited memory, a historic retelling of racial injustice. And though Helen seems to disprove the communal belief of the residents of Cabrini-Green when she is ambushed by a gangster with a hook who is later charged with Candyman’s murders, she ultimately becomes the instrument through which the Candyman myth continues to be propagated.

Ontologically, belief is both conduit and corrosion of monstrosity, which is why the real Candyman (Tony Todd) appears to Helen in a parking garage and commands her to “believe in me. Be my victim.” Since Helen has disenchanted the community by discrediting the Candyman mythology, the Candyman must shed innocent blood to perpetuate the narrative, which he states by asserting, “Your disbelief destroyed the faith of my congregation.” Through the final act of the film, Helen is staged and framed by Candyman for various murders, which lands her in a position of being disbelieved by her husband, Trevor (Xander Berkeley), and police authorities. This shows that her power is derivative as it diminishes the further she is removed from whiteness. Her status of credibility is contingent upon her being married to a white male professor.

Belief determines our acceptance and belonging in community. Rehearsing the collective memory of a people generates belief, and Helen participates in this by succumbing to Candyman, which includes her crawling through a funeral pyre in Cabrini-Green — itself a re-enactment of the past — to rescue Anne-Marie’s (Vanessa Estelle Williams) missing infant only to be immolated herself. Sacrifice validates Helen as one of the Black community as masses from the projects attend her funeral. Because Helen believed in their communal story, the residents of Cabrini-Green believe in her, and she is immortalized through the ritualized memory of Candyman, a revised tale that now has Helen in the role of reincarnated lover.

If earlier films externalize the power of belief and memory through reconstructing experience, then the later works reveal what happens when reality is deconstructed and distorted by language and compacts. In another Stephen King adaptation Needful Things (1993), such distortions originate from shop owner Leland Gaunt. Through Castle Rock’s fragmentation from tribalism, notably the feuding between the Baptists and Roman Catholics, Leland is able to exploit the friction and the animosity that predates his arrival. To accelerate the quarreling, Leland entices residents with some alluring talisman from his store, and then obliges them to commit a deed that arouses mutual distrust and suspicion between the factions in the town. Such deals are performative speech acts, promises that become binding realities. Language is denuded of its ability to reveal truth or engender understanding.

Words are not words of grace but linguistic traps, and Leland is a priest of consumerism, remaking moral reality and contracting residents to engage in wickedness for material desire. As a result, neighbors are solidified as enemies — although Leland is not inventing rivalries; he is simply awakening dormant prejudices that exist in the townsfolk. Prejudice itself is a kind of belief that manipulative language co-opts for the purposes of alienating each of the characters from one another. In the face of such polarizing speech, the symbol of the Law in the film, Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris), must propound a higher law — that of forgiveness. In fact, it is the appeal of forgiveness that Alan makes at the climax which finally evicts Leland.

Although language as exchange erodes our humanity and morality, a higher corruption emerges in the film In the Mouth of Madness (1994), when reality is authored such that belief becomes subordinate to subjective textual control. Contractually obliging himself to find the missing horror writer Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), John Trent (Sam Neil) inoculates himself against the literal viral nature of the author’s works with an exterior of cynicism. However, language is a contagion for which logical faculties are inferior buffers since logic itself is language dependent. Language mutates from medium to master, precipitating Trent’s psychological deterioration in a way that mirrors a reader’s surrender to fiction. The more Trent investigates Sutter Cane, the more he succumbs to metaphysical regression. Resembling Lovecraftian mythos as well as the God of Genesis, Sutter Cane rewrites reality and causes ontological instability. Cane’s crafting of the external world is metatextual also in that the audience is implicated in the act of belief. The film’s recurring motif — ”Did I ever tell you my favorite color is blue?” — illustrates the erosion of signifier and signified. Belief no longer redeems, it obeys. Here, the word is not made flesh. It devours it.

While language is apocalyptic in In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Lord of Illusions (1995) revisits ritual not to restore truth but to portray illusion as its own theology. Faith and illusion are collapsed into identical compulsions: the desire to see what cannot be seen and to speak what should remain ineffable. Similar to the manipulating power of language, magic and illusion are visible lies that invite belief. Nix’s (Daniel von Bargen) false messianic nature and Swann’s theatrical illusions are both contingent on collective faith. Belief is sustained through a ritual of deception and is no longer the redemptive vehicle that it was in It (1990). Because Nix is able to wield real magic, the lie is not in the falseness of his miracles but in the falseness of his identity as savior that the miracles authenticate. Throughout these movies, language has replaced ritual — a way of unifying communities shaped by common belief — with a distorted reality that subjugates us to authoritarian figures.

Collectively, these films reflect cultural anxieties and the human urge to defend ourselves against chaos through belief, memory, and language. Yet each poses a potential channel for corruption. Faith makes monsters real; memory resurrects what should remain dead and buried; words unmake the world they seek to order. By the 1990s, the very structures of meaning are unmoored and porous. To believe is to create; to speak is to summon. Horror endures because the oldest and most dangerous ritual of all is the need to believe, remember, and speak.

See you next week for Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), The Ring (1998), and The Blair Witch Project (1999).