Newsbites: Biblical Exorcist! Herodian intrigue! Animated Ark! Animated Jesus!
Newsbites: Biblical Exorcist! Herodian intrigue! Animated Ark! Animated Jesus!
Quick updates on The First Exorcist, Testament, The Ark and the Aardvark, and Light of the World.
The First Exorcist — another biblical horror movie?
Deadline reports that Greg McLean, director of 2013’s Wolf Creek and 2016’s The Belko Experiment, is going to direct a biblical horror film called The First Exorcist:
The First Exorcist is billed as a “spellbinding fusion of religious and supernatural events set in Biblical times,” in which a mother goes on a harrowing quest to save her daughter from demonic possession. Plot reads: “As their lives descend into a nightmare, the mother learns of a mysterious healer with the power to expel demons, and embarks on a dangerous race against time – encountering hostile Roman authorities on her perilous mission to find the healer and save her daughter’s life.”
So… is it safe to assume this “mysterious healer” is Jesus?
Even better: is it safe to speculate that the woman and her daughter might be characters from the gospels, too? Like, is it safe to speculate that this movie might be based on the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman, as per Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28?
Either way, the juxtaposition of “biblical” and “exorcist” piques my interest, as the synoptic gospels are full of references to Jesus and his disciples casting demons out of people, but that aspect of their ministry hasn’t been dealt with very much in film. The occasional Jesus movie might feature an exorcism scene, but the centrality of exorcism to his ministry has never really been foregrounded in film the way it is in those gospels.1
It’s possible, of course, that this film won’t be about Jesus or one of his followers. But then, why set it in the biblical period if you’re not going to use a biblical character?
And if my hunch is correct, and the film does turn out to be based on the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman… well, that would be really remarkable, as her story has almost never been depicted onscreen. In fact, aside from the word-for-word adaptations of Mark and Matthew out there (one from the Visual Bible, two from the Lumo Project), I can think of only one film that’s done it, i.e. 1999’s The Bible Collection: Jesus.
This, incidentally, is the second biblical horror movie that has been announced in recent months. Back in May, we learned that Nicolas Cage is going to play Joseph in The Carpenter’s Son, a horror movie based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—and it’s being filmed right now as we speak.
(Singer-turned-actress FKA Twigs recently took a break from filming The Carpenter’s Son to promote The Crow, and she talked to the Associated Press about her passion for religion and spirituality, and how going from an album about Mary Magdalene to playing the Virgin Mary has been a “closing of the loop” for her.)
Testament hints at Herodian intrigue
The YouTube channel for Testament, the upcoming Angel Studios series that sets the book of Acts in an alternate version of the modern world, has a couple new behind-the-scenes videos, and they hint at how the show might be exploring some of the politics of the biblical era.
First, the Week 3 recap introduces two actors and characters we haven’t seen before (or at any rate, they aren’t in the cast lists that I compiled in February and July):
Majid Mehdizadeh Valoujerdy — Herod Agrippa
Stuart Reid — Cassian (a soldier)
Herod Agrippa, of course, is the king who executed one of the apostles (James the son of Zebedee) and almost killed another (Simon Peter) before dying quite suddenly himself in Acts 12.
The historical Agrippa was king for just a few years, and the book of Acts shows no interest in how or when he got the job. But Valoujerdy says his character has “ambitions to become king… soon,” so it sounds like Testament will introduce Agrippa at an earlier point in his story, before the events of Acts 12.
Beyond that, it looks like Testament is rearranging some of the narrative elements of the New Testament to support this larger political storyline:
Rosa Samuels, the actress who plays Joanna, says her character is “the aide to Herod”—which is interesting, because the biblical Joanna was married to the manager of the household for Herod Agrippa’s uncle, Herod Antipas (Luke 8:2), and neither she nor Antipas play any part in the events of Acts.2
Is the Joanna of Testament working for Herod-the-nephew just like her husband once worked for Herod-the-uncle? Or have the two Herods been fused into a single composite character? Since this is a reimagining of the biblical story, and not a literal re-creation of history, the writers have plenty of room to be creative here.
Likewise, the video seems to show Agrippa colluding with the high priest Caiaphas (played by Gary Oliver), and the historical Caiaphas actually lost his position in AD 36, a few years before Agrippa became king circa AD 40-41. So that, too, may be a narrative element that has been moved around for dramatic purposes.
One extra note about this video: It gives us our first look at what appear to be Herod’s troops, and their costume design definitely leans more towards the “ancient Roman” end of the spectrum than the “modern” end, shape-wise.
Here is the video itself:
The second video is this profile of Solomon Israel, the actor who is playing Minister Ananias, and I’m guessing this character is based on the high priest who opposed Paul and accused him before the Romans towards the end of the book of Acts (in Acts 23:2, 24:1)—so maybe we’re seeing him at an earlier phase of his career?:
The Ark and the Aardvark gets a new production partner
The Hollywood Reporter says Unified Pictures has teamed up with ReDefine Animation to produce The Ark and the Aardvark, an animated movie about Noah’s Ark that has been in development for at least the past seventeen years.
That’s right: seventeen years. Maybe even longer, but it was seventeen years ago that I first wrote about this film at my blog. A brief rundown of my earlier posts:
September 2007 — Unified Pictures hired Philip LaZebnik (The Prince of Egypt, etc.) to write the script for a computer-animated film called Noah’s Ark. The head of the studio said he expected it to be finished in two years.
![[noahsark.jpg]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12f5e35e-476c-4c8c-93bc-cbf462bae32f_743x253.jpeg "[noahsark.jpg]")
October 2009 — Unified Pictures teamed up with Rising India to produce Noah’s Ark. They said they hoped to have it finished within two years.
March 2013 — Unified Pictures hired John Stevenson, director of Kung Fu Panda, to direct Noah’s Ark, and they said its protagonist would be a groundhog named Gilbert who leads a bunch of animals to the Ark.
August 2014 — Unified Pictures announced that Gilbert was now an aardvark, which led me to wonder if the film was influenced at all by a movie called Aardvark Art’s Ark, which Casey Affleck had been developing at Warner Brothers circa 2006-2008. Unified said Noah’s Ark would be ready in two years.
October 2016 — Unified Pictures changed the movie’s name to The Ark and the Aardvark, and they hired Miles Teller to provide the voice of Gilbert.
October 2017 — Unified Pictures hired Aubrey Plaza, Jenny Slate, Craig Robinson, Rob Riggle, and Stephen Merchant to provide the voices of a spider, an ostrich, a bullfrog, an elephant, and a crocodile, respectively.
And… until now, that was pretty much the last I heard about this film.
Over the past seven years, I have kept getting Google News alerts about this film, usually when it is mentioned in articles about the people who are attached to it; when Teller starred in Top Gun: Maverick two years ago, a lot of the articles about him included this film in their lists of “things Teller is working on”.
But it increasingly seemed to me like the writers of those articles were simply recycling old, outdated information. In the absence of any new news about the film, I just assumed it had been abandoned at some point.
But apparently not! As of this week, it looks like The Ark and the Aardvark is still happening… and most of the original names are still attached to it.
Time will tell if the movie itself is ever actually finished.
The Salvation Poem Project announces animated Jesus film
Speaking of animated films, a multimedia outfit called the Salvation Poem Project announced recently that it has teamed up with a couple of veteran Disney animators, including one of the directors of Mulan, to produce an animated film about Jesus called Light of the World, which they hope to release next summer.
No actors have been announced yet, but the film is being directed by John J. Schafer, a producer on Superbook, and Tom Bancroft, an animator on most of the hand-drawn Disney features made between 1990 and 2003. Tom’s brother Tony, who co-directed 1998’s Mulan, is serving as this film’s animation director.
This is one of a few animated Jesus movies that have been announced in recent months. Earlier this year I wrote about The King of Kings, a South Korean adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord that boasts a star-studded cast and is aiming for an Easter 2025 release; and late last year I wrote about an animated version of Campus Crusade’s 1970s Jesus film, which was aiming for a Christmas 2025 release at the time but is now going to come out in 2026, according to the film’s website.
Unlike those other films, which are computer-animated, Light of the World is being done in traditional hand-drawn 2D animation—and the producers have indicated that they made this choice for both aesthetic and theological reasons. This is how they explain their choice on the film’s website:
Hand-drawn animation is a timeless medium that retains its beauty over many decades. It contains all the subtle flaws we’ve come to call “human.” To us, it’s a fitting way to express our love and adoration to Jesus—the only unflawed person to ever walk the earth.
This version of the Jesus story will be told from the perspective of “his beloved young friend, the Apostle John.” How young is John? Pretty young, from the look of it:
Notably, when you go to the ‘Meet the Characters’ section of the film’s website, the first thing you see is Jesus surrounded by members of John’s family:
You can learn more about the film via the Salvation Poem Project’s website. The Bancroft brothers also have a Facebook page where they have posted some of their concept art for the film.
A quick scan for all the verses in the gospels that mention “demons”, “impure spirits”, and “possession” gives us this:
Exorcisms performed by Jesus: Mark 1:23-28, 32-34, 39; 3:11, 22-30; 5:1-20; 7:24-30; 9:14-29; Matthew 4:24; 8:16, 28-34; 9:32-34; 12:22-28; 15:22-28; 17:14-20; Luke 4:33-37, 41; 6:18; 8:2, 26-39; 9:37-43; 11:14-20; 13:32.
Exorcisms performed by Jesus’ disciples during his ministry: Mark 3:15; 6:7, 13; Matthew 10:1, 8; Luke 9:1; 10:17.
Exorcisms performed in Jesus’ name by people who were not his disciples: Mark 9:38, Luke 9:49.
Interestingly, there are comparatively few references to exorcism after Jesus’ ministry. The apostles performed exorcisms along with other healings in Jerusalem in Acts 5:16; Philip cast impure spirits out of people in Samaria in Acts 8:7; Paul cast a spirit out of a fortune-teller in Philippi in Acts 16:16-18; and Paul cast evil spirits out of people remotely through blessed handkerchiefs and aprons in Ephesus in Acts 19:11-12. And that’s about it.
There is an amusing story that comes after that last passage, though, in which some people who didn’t believe in Jesus tried to cast a spirit out of someone “in the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches,” and the demon-possessed person beat them up (Acts 19:13-16).
I almost said Joanna and Antipas are never even mentioned in the book of Acts, but that isn’t quite true. Acts 4:27 refers to Antipas’s past role in Jesus’ death, and Acts 13:1 says one of the prophets and teachers in Antioch grew up with Antipas. But that’s all back-story; Antipas is not an active character within the events of Acts itself.