There are a group of LGBT Christians who believe that being gay is an expression of sexual brokenness, a result of the fall from the Garden of Eden, but one that is fine in and of itself. Gay people are beautifully made in the image of our Creator, and to be LGBT is not in and of itself a sin. These people smile as they talk about the joys of being out of the closet, of being queer. When you shake their hand to congratulate them, they toss a handcuff on your wrist. Their smile turns deranged. Out from a horror movie, they have you. “It’s fine to be gay,” these people say, “but you must never act on it. You may never get married. You may never be in a romantic relationship. You may never have sex. Unless, of course, you want to do all of that in a godly, straight way.”
These people have sewn masks into their skin, looked at the mirror, and decided that mask was their face. Suddenly it isn’t homophobia to tell gay people they have to remain celibate or else they’re filthy sinners. You can say being gay is a result of sin if you just put in the caveat that it’s original sin. You can advocate for conversion therapy as long as you make it clear that the conversion is done by God at the Rapture. Aren’t you looking forward to being free of your queerness? Don’t you know it’s a bad thing to have?
That’s the promise of Revoice, an anti-gay Christian conference that pretends to be a pro-gay gathering of queer Christians. I’ve done a video on Revoice before. Those who buy their brand of homophobia tend to refer to themselves as Side B Christians. Side A are those who are affirming. Side B are those who believe bullshit. But they’ll jump through as many hoops as humanly possible to pretend their blatant homophobia isn’t homophobia because there exist worse bigots out in the world.
I imagine that if Revoice were to commission a horror movie, it would be M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin.
One - The Movie
If you’ve ever seen a YouTube video essay, you know the drill. First I have to go over the plot. Sometimes this helps you understand my points later on, sometimes it’s just boring drivel. It’s up to you to figure out which!
Knock at the Cabin is a 2023 horror film by M. Night Shyamalan based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.
So, a cute little girl is running about outside being an absolute freak by collecting bugs with her bare hands and putting them in a jar. While bug collecting, a gentle giant turns up and helps her catch a Scyther or whatever grasshopper Pokemon you think is the gayest. The giant’s name is Leonard. The girl is Wen. Leonard, played excellently by Dave Bautista, tells her that he and his friends need the help of her and her fathers to save the world. She spots more strangers in the woods.
Wen runs back to the cabin her fathers are renting for a little family vacation. She starts yelling at Daddy Andrew and Daddy Eric that scary people are there. Leonard knocks on the door and asks to come in. The adults scramble to lock the doors and block the windows, refusing to allow strangers with weapons inside. There’s a gun out in the truck, but to get to it, they’d have to deal with their attackers. They arm themselves with fireplace doohickeys. But then the four invaders break in. The adults attempt to fight, but they’re outnumbered and also it’s Dave Bautista versus two twinks. The math there is pretty simple. Eric gets a concussion.
The invaders tie Eric and Andrew up to some chairs and make their simple plea: the apocalypse is coming. They will not harm the family, but the three of them must choose to sacrifice one of them and kill them, else the world will end. They’ve had clear visions about this. Obviously, the two men accuse their attackers of being homophobic bigots targeting them for being gay. The group takes offense to this. They need them to choose though. When they refuse, the group kills one of their own, putting more red all over poor Rupert Grint, who Andrew thinks gaybashed him at a bar some time ago.
On the news, giant tsunamis cause devastation, just like the group said they would. Each time the family refuses and one of the four dies, a disaster will befall humanity until finally the world ends and leaves only Andrew, Eric, and Wen to live in the aftermath. Eric is starting to believe them. He’s more gentle, more prone to religion. He has a concussion. Andrew berates them. He doesn’t trust them one bit, and he’s worried about Eric’s willpower. Wen tries to run away, but she’s caught by the giant and brought back. Again they ask the family to choose one to die. “I have a son,” pleads one of the women of the group. The family refuses. The woman is killed. On the news, a deadly plague hospitalizes children.
The fathers get free. Andrew rushes to the car to get his gun, the one he bought after the bar attack. After a struggle, back inside, Andrew shoots the final woman, and Leonard finishes her off so her death can follow their psychotic dreams. They briefly trap the giant in the bathroom, but then he breaks free. On the news, planes are falling out of the sky. They send Wen to hide in a treehouse. Outside, Leonard slits his own throat. A storm brews. There’s fire. Eric believes the murder cult and begs Andrew to shoot him so Andrew and their daughter can live. He does.
Andrew and Wen leave the cabin. At a diner, they see the apocalypse ending. The cult was right. Eric’s sacrifice saved the day. In the car, before they drive off, the family’s theme song, “Boogie Shoes,” plays on the radio. Wen and Andrew turn it on and off until finally bonding over it together and they drive off, healing.
Two - The God of It All
In the text of the movie, the four invaders are painted as emissaries of God. They receive prophetic visions. They are avatars of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Each of their deaths summons near-Biblical plagues: tsunamis or a flood, a literal plague, and fire raining from above. You could even associate them with each horseman. Pestilence is the most obvious as the child-killling-virus. Leonard is Death, of course, as he is the one who brings death to the other horsemen and he warns there will be little time after his demise until the end of the world. Metaphorically, the crashing planes are reminiscent of war, bombs raining down. The massive tsunamis could be correlated with famine if you assume they’re a standin for climate change and the destruction it’s going to bring.
Each plague is true. The visions of the invaders are true. And in the end we realize their plea is true as well: sacrificing one of the three family members does end the apocalypse. There is no doubt at the end that they represent God, whoever that is. He is an angry god who demands sacrifice, who can and will end the world. The floor will come and no one will be allowed to repent.
Now this could be a legitimate expression of queer horror: What if the anti-gay God of the most horrible Christians is real? What do you do then?
The problem is that the movie explicitly paints Eric’s sacrifice as right. His death saves countless lives. It was a good action. Based on his own visions, we know Wen and Andrew are going to go onto happy lives. His death frees them. It looks like Andrew’s anger is gone in this vision. The happy song plays. They move on. The ending is bittersweet, but it’s meant to mostly be sweet.
When the couple accuse the invaders of homophobia, they insist that this was at random. It just happened to be a gay couple that was chosen. This has been going on for a while, after all. Different families have had to make this choice for all time. It would be selfish for the gay couple not to. One of them has to die.
When gay marriage was legalized due to Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, it was a couple of days before I shipped out to a summer camp, Kentucky’s Governors Scholar Program. Senior year of high school was fast approaching. People from my small Kentucky time went on social media to post about how surely this was a sign of the end times. Gay people being able to choose love would end the world. God surely wouldn’t stand for that.
One of my close friends in high school revealed to me my junior year that she’d spent our friendship hoping I would get in a relationship with her. That’s fine. We all have crushes. But she was hoping she could be my beard and, through that, turn me straight. She told me she thought I was going to hell for being gay and she wanted to save me. She was one of the first people I came out to. For a few months, she nearly ruined my life.
This one-two step the cultists in the movie deploy is often seen in anti-gay logic when they want to pretend they’re holding everyone to the same standards. It was frequent up until Obergefell for conservatives, especially the late Antonin Scalia, to argue that gay people had all the rights of straight people in that they too could get straight married. They weren’t banned from marriage. It was that everyone was banned from marrying someone of the same gender. That was his argument in Lawrence v. Texas too because Scalia was a bad person.
But the other problem is that… we don’t know if this actually has happened to anyone before. The invaders relay the information they have, but it’s clear they don’t know all of it. None of them knew the redhead had a homophobic history with the couple. They claim to have not known who was going to be there. There’s a non-zero chance this family is the first and only family to have to make this choice.
Eric says he thinks God chose them to make this sacrifice because their love is so pure. Because of that purity, it could be argued the film is aiming for a message that queer love can save the world. To be fair to the film, I do think that was the intent. Unfortunately, it comes across that gay love must be destroyed in order for the world to be saved. It plays into conservative paranoia. I think it would be easier to argue in defense of the film if it weren’t for…
Three - Chastity
In college, I was friends with someone who eventually became a nun. She was loud and artistically minded and extremely Catholic. It didn’t come up much at first. Over time, she re-found her faith, and it eventually led to her dropping out of college in order to go be a nun. Before she made that decision, I went to her seeking advice on what to do with some of my other Catholic friends, two young queer people who were torn between their religion and themselves. I made the mistake of thinking she was an ally. She told me they were right to seek out celibacy: that was the right way for gay people to be healthy and holy. To never hold love. To never hold intimacy. To never get married. I told her this was homophobic. We agreed to talk about it.
Before we met up, I asked her for information on her view so I could go into our talk understanding her as much as possible. She sent me to Father Mike Schmitz, telling me he was the most loving person she could think of on the subject. His website was anti-gay marriage in part out of concern that people would no longer be allowed to discriminate against gay people. Children will learn gay people exist and shouldn’t be hated. He compares gay marriage to incest. He plays the slippery slope game. Father Schmitz is an unrepentant homophobe who hits all the familiar talking points including the highly problematic Catholic Catechism which calls homosexuality intriscially disordered. But don’t worry! They don’t mean psychologically ill; they mean inherently ordered against all that is good. Which oh sounds like calling it an illness.
Our conversation ended our friendship. I have a feeling it ended several friendships I had at the time. This woman had slowly turned into a bigot who believed she was saving people and the world by telling them they were not allowed to love. By telling them God is real and he’s also insanely homophobic. One of the friends I was trying to help when I asked her for advice later admitted that his Catholic friends loved him, they just thought his being gay was disgusting and wrong and against god. It broke my heart. I despised the local Catholic ministry.
This eventually led me to the discovery of Side B Christians who, largely, hold the same position of the Catholic Church. They’re homophobes in practice and in language, but they feel bad if you point that out to them. When I asked another friend about the nun and how to handle the conversation, they told me everyone was entitled to an opinion. He wasn’t happy when I called it homophobia point blank. To point out cruelty makes the cruel feel bad, so they wrap themselves in defensive language to pretend they’re anything but. They’ll do anything to not be cruel… except analyze the harm they cause and actually stop being cruel.
In Knock at the Cabin, the gay couple are incredibly chaste. This is an R-rated horror movie in which their love for each other is challenged to the ultimate. Apparently in the book, after Wen is accidentally killed and doesn’t count as a sacrifice, they choose to both live, to let the world die rather than destroy themselves because some God or some cult wants them to. I think that would have been a more powerful ending. But Shyamalan changes things so that Eric dies. He sacrifices himself. Their love is “pure.” And by pure, it seems the film means it’s celibate. They do not kiss, not even in their final moments together. In flashbacks, there’s no physical intimacy between the two. In the flash forward about Andrew’s supposedly happy life, he isn’t seen with anyone. It doesn’t look like he finds someone after Eric. Maybe that’s because it isn’t a vision of the future but a moment of concussion-and-terror fueled hallucination. But it’s framed as a premonition. For Andrew to be happy, he must be alone. He must be unshackled from having a queer relationship.
Together that all builds an idea that for gay love to be pure, it must be chaste. It must be sacrificial. And it still has to die. It’s not the orientation towards love that’s wrong. Their ability to love is what saves the day. But gay love is the enemy of the world. In its destruction, the world is saved. And in the happy future, gay love isn’t rebuilt. Andrew stays alone. He might as well be celibate. A gay man sacrificing a chance at a relationship because God says it would be wrong for him to be in one. That meshes pretty tightly with homophobic Side B narratives.
Eric, the more religious of the two, the softer, the more effiminate, is quicker to believe the intruders. Andrew doesn’t. He doesn’t buy the homophobia or the religious nonsense. He insists that this is a homophobic attack by a group of bigots. And the narrative goes out of its way to say that he’s wrong. That he should have believed. That the wrath of god is real and it will bring hell to humanity. Perhaps then the other religious homophobia is real. Perhaps the people who say God will destroy us for allowing gay marriage have a point. If Andrew is so wrong about religion, about his homophobic abusers, about how his family deserved to live no matter what, then what if he’s wrong about the morality of being gay in the first place? Were his parents right to disown him after meeting Eric? It’s implied the adoption agency would not have let them adopt Wen if they knew the two were a gay couple. Could they be right? Well, their family is portrayed as pure love so… Well, in the future, Andrew remains Wen’s father. He raises and loves her. It’s almost like he adopted her as a single man. He doesn’t raise her with someone else. He stays single. There is no long term gay family.
The problem is that I’m not sure the film *thinks*. I don’t think it sat with any of the implications of the narratives and the changes from the source material that give this sinister edge to the film. Could this just be effective queer horror? I think it could if the final moments were different. But we don’t end in somberness, in pain, in misery. We end in hope. The death of a gay family is what brings hope. They did something good by destroying themselves, their love.
And yes, that can be horrifying for us, the audience. Dani is portrayed happy at the end of Midsommar, brainwashed victim of the cult. But that film is clearly anti-cult. That’s the entire thing. Is this film anti-God? Is it anti-homophobia? Then why is the gay couple never even remotely intimate? Do we see all the relief at the end of the film as a commentary on how the world continues even when we feel like it’s ending due to personal tragedy? That can’t be the case given that the world actually was ending. They saved everyone. By burying the gays.
But maybe this is just due to my priors. So obviously I went looking for the thoughts of…
Four - Critics
In a review for Variety, Richard Lawson finds both intrigue and worry in what he calls the murkiness of the film. He trusts Shyamalan isn’t intending for any sort of conservative bigotry or even murkiness, but in the murkiness, there’s an edge, an air of “What if the homophobes are right?” And he finds that potential, the unknown, enticing.
Over at Jezebel, Rich Juzwiak doesn’t share that enticement, wishing the film was more didactic, saying, “(I)t seems reasonable to assume that what’s guiding it is not benevolence or optimism for unity in our divided times, but a kind of both-sides-ism that can make an inherently political movie palatable enough to a mass audience.” One thing you’ll find in queer Christian conversations is a painting of Side B as the reasonable centrist, stuck between the radicals of those who hate gays and those who say it’s fine for gay people to be in love. Sometimes you get people who think affirming and non-affirming are both wrong. There should be a third way. Both-sides-ism. Though, of course, when you look into Side B and third way, what you find isn’t centrality. It’s non-affirming bigotry just wrapped up in a different paper.
I think Lawson makes an interesting argument that a charitable reading of the film is as a horror movie about climate change. What will we give up to stop disaster, and how will we move past our defensive instincts against our traumas to get there? But the observation of his I found most engaging was where he says the four invaders are almost compared “to the myriad conspiracy theorists and internet-zealots ucrrently making so much noise in our world. Many of those people have dredged up old talking points and burnished them into new weapons, amond them the noxious idea that gay and trans people are causing civilizational collapse by co-opting children and upending the tradition nuclear family… It is one thing for a movie to tangle with what those people are saying. It is another to, at the end, present a scenario in which they’re kinda, maybe, sorta proven right.”
When the invaders come, they have makeshift weapons, creepy looking torture devices made out of gardening tools. The weapons that tend the garden have come to cull the sin. It is the apple that created queerness, and it is the gardeners that come to destroy it.
Riley Gillis writes for The Eagle, “The movie preaches religion and the necessity for conversion, uncomfortably juxtaposing these themes against a gay couple’s moral delimma. [It] handles its central gay couple with an unpleasant undercurrent of homophobia.”
As Steve Erickson puts it, “The Christian concept of the nobility, even necessity, of sacrifice can be put to very dubious uses.” In a lot of Side B Christian cirlces, self-denial is seen as the ultimate holy choice. It is a cross to bear that earns you God’s love, to sacrifice your ability to love. It’s noble. Just as the destruction of the queer family in the film. Earlier in the same review, Erickson claims the entire film carries a Christian aesthetic, saying, “‘Knock at the Cabin’ is a deeply misanthropic film, coated with a Christian patina for concealment. (The decision to move murder and suicide offscreen contributes ot the mood of sanitized cruelty.)” Interestingly, this vibes generally well with the horror adage that the best monster is the one we don’t see. Our imagination is always scarier than reality. Not seeing the deaths might make them more horrific. But I agree instead it gives a certain sanitization to the film, just like the lack of intimacy between Eric and Andrew. We see death only in the macro, zoomed out, massive in scale and yet painted over. The most visceral moment of violence we see is the homophobic attack in the bar, the one moment of violence that isn’t necessarily inspired by God. The deaths of the 4 horsemen are due to God’s wrath. We can’t see the graphic details of his horrors. Eric’s sacrifice, too, is holy violence. We don’t sit in it.
I’m specifically mentioning the difference between the depiction of holy and non-holy violence to point to the different ways Christian media often embraces the depiction of violence. When you think of bloody, torture flicks, one of the first that comes to mind is The Passion of the Christ. I watched that movie over the summer of 2023 and thought it was thoroughly awful. But it doesn’t shy away from the body horror of violence. It means to horrify you. But that’s because it is not the violence of God. It’s the sinful violence of man. Christian media won’t shy away from the most horrifying things you can put to film, but who is doing the violence is what determines how much of the graphic details we get to see.
If Knock at the Cabin contains religious undertones, can we imagine the santized violence is because it is holy violence? Do we not see even a kiss with Eric and Andrew because that would ruin the holy purity of their love, marring the sacrifice they’re called to make?
Writing for Horror Homeroom, Lida Bach also picked up on that “sanctification” of violence in the film. The other violence we get to mostly witness is when the couple resists against their attackers. Is this too meant to be seen as unholy violence? To resist is to be horrid. Bach doesn’t point to that, but she does claim Shyamalan’s changes from the source material “shift(s) sympathies against the victims.” Speaking of the ending, she says, “The song plays on the radio like one more celestial confirmation that everything that just happened was god’s plan … yet coding this moment as “happy ending,” installs hostile heteronormaticity as prerequisite for some kind of sacred cosmic order…”
She’s not the only one to note both the disturbing use of the Bougie Shoes song and the weird treatment of violence. Sam Adams at Slate notes how in the book, the violence tends to be described in deep detail. What I find most interesting in his discussion of the violence is pointing out how Eric’s death is the most sanitized of all. The gunshot sounds and we’re not even in the same room. In the film’s logic of violence depiction re: the more holy the violence, the less it’s shown, that makes Eric’s death the ultimate holy act of the film. This is the thing god wants. I agree with how Adams ends his review. “They’ve settled into a monogamous relationship, adopted a child, done everything the world has told them to do in order to win acceptance, and god still sends a homophobic bigot to tell them to kill themselves? No thanks.”
Now obviously, my reading of the film isn’t the only one and it isn’t the “most valid” one either. Stef Rubino sees the film as giving queer people a rare agency, the ability to be the ones to save the world, to change the path we’re on. Assimilation might not save us. The world is often violent and cruel, especially to queer people. But we can choose to let our pain end with us, to not pass it onto the next generation, to not allow our pain to turn us hateful.
Several of the reviews I read zoomed out on a meta level and talked about having a film centered around a gay couple going on to be a box office success. Even more than that, the queer characters were played by queer actors. In an interview with Pink News, Ben Aldridge who played Andrew, also pointed out how important that is to him specifically. He said, “I think more attention is being paid to casting authentically. Not that I think that should be the rule, either. I think rules are the opposite of creativity. As gay actors, we want to still be able to play parts that aren’t defined by their sexuality. … They’re just a loving family, that’s what they are. … ‘Love is Love.’ In its own way, this film really speaks to that.” And who the hell am I to say he’s wrong about that? I just have a different reading.
Benjamin Lee does point out the homophobic tendencies of the plot, but he says, “I genuinely don’t believe that the film is coming from a place of bigotry.” And I agree. Or, at least, I don’t think it comes from a place of active bigotry.
It comes from a place of Side B bigotry, a soft homophobia. Or, rather, that’s a narrative that life has primed me to be wary of. And from what I’ve seen, this film would play to cheers at a Revoice conference. “You can save the world by turning away from building queer families.” But I agree the conclusion Eric and Andrew come to in the book. If that’s what god needs, if the world will end because I will one day have a husband? Then call me the harbinger, because the apocalypse is coming.
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