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Is The Rapture you speak of the one with Mimi Rogers? I haven't see it, but I've heard some good things about it.

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That's the one. It's one of those movies where you're not sure if you're watching a low-key fantasy movie or an art house film. It casts a very dubious and critical eye on the certainty of faith. I saw parallels of it in Silent Hill, which also for me boasts shades of The Beyond, Dellamorte Dellamore, and The Mothman Prophecies. You might end up hating Silent Hill (opinion on the film seems very tellingly and sharply divided), but I personally saw some very compelling diamonds in the murk. It made me think. I won't claim my interpretation is universal, though. I tend to see inspiration in the most unlikely places. Some have found the movie unwieldy, ponderous, and pretentious. I'd hate to see you spend ten bucks and find the same. It might be nice to check out on DVD if you don't want to brave the ever-perilous multiplex.

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I found the town's witchburning fundamentalist sect to be one-dimensional zealots and their mission as harbingers of the coming apocalypse perfunctory.

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What won me over is that what I thought what was initially clearly Evil was by the end not so easily defined. The characters in this film all seem positive of what the Sacred and Profane are when they lay eyes upon them. It's only the women branded as "witches" who truly understand. In past horror films, the faithful and those who clutch at the cross are the arbiters of Good. Here they've become arrogant, spiteful, and depraved. Though they consider themselves chosen, they live in a pathological ignorance of the squalor and doom that hangs over them. They've become the cruel, faceless, and indistinguishable evil that their faith should repel. Instead, it is modern, liberated women who guard the innocent and face the horror. As for what Sharon/Alessa represent, I would argue that they are/were the mortal incarnation of a central figure of the Catholic faith. They just don't come in the form that organized religion expects. The answer was with them all the while and they were too blind and arrogant to see. I always wonder if the righteous and morally justified would actually be able to accept or even know a God if it made itself truly known to them. And would it be pleased with their worship? These zealots are hatefully sick and wrong and the film shows them no mercy. Ancient and current faiths were and continue to be responsible for the atrocities the story depicts. In the end I saw what I took as one of the most simple and wrathful depictions of God that I think I've ever encountered. What better form for the Holy to assume than that of the world's weakest and most sinned-against members? And a child shall lead them.

There was a South Park episode where God was revealed to be a giant spider straight out of Bert I. Gordon. It's nicely pointed: God and Christ are thought to be gentle-looking men, but what if they actually made themselves manifest in a form that was difficult for their followers to project their own likenesses upon? The whole belief system is built upon the idea that some are close to the Creator while others are distanced. What if his chosen were not the pillars of the community, but the drug addicts, the abused, the infirm, and the marginalized--- those who have no accepted place in the canon? That would be a Rapture that would turn the world upside down. If the presence of God can be found in Silent Hill (I believe it can), then it is a flawed, resentful, morally indignant, and even vicious deity who allies itself with the wrong and the damaged. The true evil that damns Silent Hill comes not from lack of devotion, but because of the crimes that faith condones as justified for the greater good.