I’m Still Thinking About the Gnarly Murder Weapon in ‘Is God Is’ [VIDEO]
If you haven’t seen Is God Is yet, what are you doing? Aleshea Harris’ film continues to catch fire, with some drawing comparisons to the Southern gothic-fueled Sinners mania of last year. Whether that comparison is fair or not, this revenge thriller of epic proportions is already bringing moviegoers back for second and third watches. Part of what makes this film feel so epic for me is how Racine the Rough One, Kara Young’s fierce foil to Mallori Johnson as Anaia the Quiet One, wields her murder weapon of choice.
From main characters’ demises to bystanders as collateral damage, I can’t count the number of deaths I’ve seen on screen. But something that stood out to me about Is God Is was that our final girls didn’t keep a Glock on their hip. They carried no daggers or barbed-wire baseball bats. They were uninterested in pipes, or crowbars, or kitchen knives. Instead, they fought their way to their final boss with a singular rock, plucked from off the ground… And I honestly can’t stop thinking about this creative murder weapon, because it’s the antithesis of everything horror seems to be about these days.
Think about it: Slashers have been the cornerstone of the horror genre since the ’70s, right? Because of this trope of victims getting, well, slashed, the menacing glint of a kitchen knife has always been a key visual in the genre. Every October, you see a glistening chef’s knife, and you can’t help but think about Halloween (1978). You see a gleaming Buck 120 hunting knife, with its slightly curved tip, and you imagine what it would be like for Ghostface to shank you in Scream.
You flinch thinking about getting side-swiped by Freddy Krueger’s metal talons. And if you’re anything like me, you hear a chainsaw rev, and your stomach drops thinking about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Of course, the Final Destination franchise, with all of its inventive ways to die, is a whole ‘nother can of worms: Plane crashes, log trucks, tanning beds, and a rollercoaster from hell. All of these manners of death, including all of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s slashers, reek of modernity. The murder weapon in Is God Is feels intimate and old-school and Biblical, and it parallels the most gnarly death scene in Curry Barker’s Obsession. Are rocks in?
Our antagonists getting bludgeoned to death by a rock feels right on the money for a movie like Is God Is, where spirituality is honored but organized religion is satirized. I felt early on that the horror genre needed a movie like Is God Is — maybe that’s because we horror fans can’t get enough of how our favorite genre challenges us to think about Christianity. We love an exorcism, a cursed relic, a vampire in a church, a splash of holy water rendered useless.
When asked about the murder weapon, Aleshea Harris told me she knew from the beginning that she didn’t want her twins to use a gun or a knife. “I wanted the register of this story to be mythic,” Harris said. “I wanted it to have a kind of size. I wanted it to feel kind of ancient.” Harris acknowledged that the rock being wielded in a sock gave the murder weapon a “contemporary” twist, “But the rock to me is an age-old instrument that can do many things — including the things that it does in this film.”
Something I adored about the existence of twins in Is God Is — and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, too, for example — is how each sibling represents warring aspects of our desire. Twins serve as an allegory of an angel and a devil, sitting across from each other on the same set of shoulders. But unlike the Jeremy Ironses in Cronenberg’s incestuous medical drama, Racine and Anaia aren’t squarely good or perfectly evil.
If both are the direct manifestation of God, a.k.a. Vivica A. Fox, I like to think of Racine as the Old Testament and Anaia as the New Testament. And as uncomfortable as the Old Testament can be in the face of the glowing new Word, by the end of Is God Is, you’re left feeling like the redemption of the present couldn’t have been possible without the brutality of the past.
Categorized:Editorials Interviews