Right-wing media have promoted the Christian film Nefarious as one of the latest battlegrounds in so-called “spiritual warfare.” Through strategically cut trailers, influencer promotion, and a Coachella event, the film's creators have worked to “subversively” market it as a generic thriller to a mainstream audience in the hopes that it would “show them the light.”
The movie Nefarious is a prequel to A Nefarious Plot, a book by right-wing commentator and BlazeTV host Steve Deace, who partnered with directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon — the duo behind other right-wing faith-based movies such as Unplanned and God’s Not Dead 1 and 2. Deace has an extensive history of using virulently anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic, anti-abortion, and other bigoted rhetoric such as saying lessons for kids about Pride Month are “right out of the pit of hell.” He claimed that he and his company “invested millions of dollars that [he] frankly didn’t have to make this movie” because “storytelling” is the “last place left where real persuasion can occur.”
Though marketed to a mainstream audience as a standard horror movie, Nefarious serves as a “Christian allegory, and it is conveyed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer,” as the Washington Examiner put it, with the two main characters — an atheist psychiatrist and a death-row inmate who claims to be possessed by a demon — debating the existence of the devil and God. The movie also suggests humanity is engaged in a spiritual war against demonic forces, with the demon celebrating and mocking progressive political and social stances that have taken root in American society, like abortion rights and LGBTQ equality.
The movie’s theme is captured in a scene featuring bigoted conspiracy theorist and BlazeTV founder Glenn Beck, playing himself. Beck asks the psychiatrist, “What happens to an atheist that is confronted by demonic evil?” Later the psychiatrist notes, “There’s a great battle going on, whether we realize it or not — a battle between good and evil — and we’re all participants, willing or not.”
The film’s promotion of a right-wing Christian worldview on viewers is clear: On his BlazeTV podcast, Deace agreed with an online reviewer who described it as “Christo-facist propaganda.” Yet Deace, Solomon, and Konzelman repeatedly admitted that Nefarious was marketed as a standard horror film to reach viewers who might not choose to see a faith-based movie. The film started streaming on June 2 and it has been playing in hundreds of theaters nationwide for at least seven weeks, grossing over $5 million.
Nefarious’ creators marketed it as a standard horror film to attract “nonbelievers”
In April, Deace boasted to right-wing group The Family Leader that the film’s trailer was crafted “subversively” to portray Nefarious as a horror movie and hide from potential moviegoers that it was faith-based and contained right-wing ideological themes. Apparently, the trailer played ahead of the nonfaith-based movie Cocaine Bear in at least some theaters. In the same interview, Deace went on to call the Motion Picture Association “demonic” for the R rating that Nefarious received, claiming that it was given this rating only because the group was afraid “unbelieving” kids “would be impacted by it.”
Deace, as well as directors Solomon and Konzelman, repeatedly admitted to trying to attract a mainstream audience.
- In April, Deace described the movie’s marketing campaign as “tricking” the audience into thinking it was a horror movie rather than faith-based, saying: “Now that we're done tricking — I'm sorry, ‘marketing’ it as a horror film to the Ninevites — we're just gonna flat out now be honest about the movie now that it's in theaters. It's a faith-based film. It was always intended to be a faith-based film. We just packaged it in a way to bring people in that are being attracted to darkness to then get them in the theaters so that we can then show them the light.” (Ninevites descend from Nineveh, which is famous for its depiction in the Bible as a sinful city.)
