Creature Feature: god

That's right, I'm doing a creature feature on god, or God, however you choose to spell it. Makes sense, after all, as he (or she, I suppose) has been the force to reckon with in no less than six Asylum films: Countdown: Jerusalem, The Apocalypse, Meteor Apocalypse, 2012 Doomsday, 2012 Supernova and Sunday School Musical. Now, obviously, one of these films is not like the others, and to call god the "villain" in Sunday School Musical would be a gross exaggeration and a scoch blasphemous, but there's no doubt that in the other five, he's chock-full of that Old Testament piss and vinegar than made humanity bow at his feet and call him Daddy.

In all of these films the pitch is pretty much the same: g(G)od is pissed at/fed-up with/testing the faith of humanity and so sends a plague of natural disasters including earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, droughts, crazy storms and even barrages of meteors. This, as I alluded to above, is that old-school god of wrath and vengeance, all my-way-or-the-highway, the kind of guy who would wipe out an entire universe just to prove a point, the kind of dude who told Abraham to kill his son as a gesture of faith and then stopped him just before he did, that kind of shit. Sure, he's still cool to his faithful - in Countdown: Jerusalem in particular, he does the whole Rapture thing where he plucks the souls of the righteous before unleashing Hell upon the rest of us wicked - but for those who have forgotten, forsaken or insulted him, there will be no mercy. 

Perhaps I'm painting too dour a picture of the presence of god in these films. After all, these films are meant to be faith-affirming, and sure, they use a scare tactic or two to get you there, but that is absolutely nothing new in religion. But in the end, in each of these films, the same god who is seen as angered and thus responsible for global cataclysm is always somehow appeased or satisfied and sees or re-sees the good in humanity and gives us one more chance to make a go of this crazy gift called Life.Thus is the dichotomy of god, and the element that makes him such an interesting character (in Asylum films, I mean, not in, you know, The Bible): he loves us enough to destroy us. That's some heavy shit, y'all.

No doubt we haven't seen the last of god. With 2012 right around the corner, he's sure to catch some flack in a disaster flick here or there, and if not, he can always extend a helping hand in a demon-plagued horror film or two, or even lend a benevolent ear in a faith-based family drama. That's the nice thing - or rather, one of the nice things, I guess - about being god: you're good at everything.