There’s a new movie coming out in March (it’s already available on In Demand, too) about people disappearing, but spoilers suggest it’s not the Rapture like I guessed it would be. This has me thinking, though.
Is the following the plot of any movie you can think of?
A group of people wake up one morning/come to after losing consciousness and discover that there are a lot of people missing. Family members, neighbors, coworkers, friends…This plays out to varying degrees in every country in the world. None of the people still there has any idea what happened to the missing people, so it of course scares the hell out of them. They go off half-cocked, watching out for the bad guys who have apparently erased a good portion of the population.
…and in an eye-rolling twist, they discover they are the bad people. Because, you know, when Jesus came a knockin’ they hadn’t prepared him a room, so they are the ones left behind after all the good people are magically whisked away to heaven.
The fact that it was the Rapture is a twist would need to be key, though. Not where the audience knows all along (like Left Behind) what is going on. If it was done the right way, it sounds like it could really piss people off in a similar way to
how Knowing did. Maybe I should e-mail M. Night Shyamalan…
So, anyway, are there any existing “surprise! it was the Rapture and you weren’t good enough!” movies out there?
Had nothing to do with the Rapture, but there was the movie The Quiet Earth, about a handful of people left on Earth discovering that everyone else has vanished due to a botched physics experiment, which only left people who had been on the brink of death but who survived
I can’t think of any satisfactory way to plot it out. Either the choices of who is missing and who is left behind is cartoonish and self-congratulary, or they’re surprising and thoughtful and therefore the movie gets labeled a heresy.
There IS a book- THE DEAD by Mark Rogers, in which the Rapture takes truly virtuous people of various faiths. Everyone left behind had a dream in which a voice said to them “Numbered, numbered, weighed & found wanting” (the Handwriting on the Wall in the Book of Daniel the night Babylon fell to the Medes & the Persians). The group of people the story followed included a small-time televangelist, two liberal priests & a knowlegeable devout lay Catholic left behind due to his arrogance. The latter is kinda the author’s Mary Sue. With them are about three or four couples who are just baffled by the whole thing.
Especially as they must face down demon-possessed cannibal zombies led by Legion.
And no Rapture movie thread can advance without a mention of the 1970s series A THIEF IN THE NIGHT!!!
Not really about the Rapture, but I saw this really bad B-movie horror film one night called “The End of the Line” about religious fundamentalist cult members who all of a sudden one night get a mysterious phone call saying “It’s time” and then go about slaughtering as many people as they can, their reasoning being that Armageddon is coming and anyone who is left alive will be turned into a demon, so by killing people they are really saving their souls. The film follows a band of strangers on the run from the murdering horde. At the end,
the cult members give each other a cyanide capsule to kill each other (so that they don’t commit suicide) and the remaining protagonists start to cheer as they think it’s over. They soon find out that the cult was *right *and the demons are now here! The end.
by Dean Koontz. I was not expecting The Rapture and it made a pretty good book into an awesome book. It even explains why a bunch of “good” people were left behind after all the rapturin’ was over.
In this day and age of Hollywood niche marketing and instant spoilers just about everywhere you look, I really doubt a movie as described by the OP could really surprise anyone. The studio will want to market any such film to Born-Again Christians and fundamentalists (“Hey, here’s a big-budget movie about the Rapture, just for you and your family!”), and boom, there goes your twist ending.
Or you could market it as an ironic dark comedy, in which the twist is that the hard-core fundie, Jack Chick version of realty turns out to be true, and all the well-meaning humanist liberal people discover they’re all damned to hell. IOW, the Rapture as a dystopian nightmare.
Well Told Tales, a podcast that no longer updates, had a cool story about some deeply religious people of varying faiths who are awakened by a voice in the night. They make their way to a spot in the forest where all of them , except a couple children, are taken up in what they believe to be something like the rapture. They are all shown to be genuinely good people, too.
The story then changes POV to the captain of an alien spaceship wherein it is revealed that the voice was basically bait for collecting biologic specimens. The officers of the ship are happily discussing the success of this new device while awaiting dinner. The newly collected specimens are in the galley being boned and fileted while they are talking.
And damned if those movies don’t have a lot more raw energy than any slicked up Left Behind production. Although I will say that II-IV of the APOCALYPSE video series almost matches it because Nick Mancuso is such a kick-ass AntiChrist.
