1. I recently saw the Last Witch Hunter too. I did like Vin Diesel’s character. I found the acting superior to the story line. I like how you brought it all together in your post. You rock Mark!

  2. Dane Tyler says:

    Well, you’re sort of leaving out the movie Van Helsing, wherein Hugh Jackman dons an epic Fedora and joins Kate Beckinsdale on a world-saving battle to save the universe from Dracula’s sinister plan to use Frankenstein’s (steampunked) monster as a living capacitor to spawn his army of “children” and conquer the Earth.

    And in this version, Van Helsing relies completely on muscle, guns, and becoming a werewolf to stop Nosferatu. God and faith find no mention there that I can recall. So even the good professor took a turn for the occult in modern cinema.

  3. G. K. Werner says:

    Hey, nice article and I wholeheartedly agree. (BTW, S. Kane is a Robert E. Howard character.) I’ll have to check out your books. Thanks. –G. K. Werner

  4. Lisa says:

    I have noticed that in many modern vampire tales the whole religious aspect that Stoker included in his Van Helsing character (the power of the cross and holy water, for example) are often dismissed. I forget what movie it was but the vampire tells the victim something to the effect that the cross that he is brandishing has no power over the vampire as the victim doesn’t believe in it (which is actually fairly accurate theology, I suppose, but still) and intimates that it is the power of belief only and not what you believe in that makes the talisman powerful. As with everything else, our culture consistently approves of the “all ways lead to God” path.

  5. Audie says:

    Several of Vin Diesel’s movies have a religious aspect to them. His character in the Fast and Furious movies talks about how his father hosting after-church barbeques for the neighbors, and there is at least one instance of prayer, as well as the flashback in the last movie to Dom and Hettie’s wedding. And it comes through in this movie, too. Not that his movies are what could be called “Christian”, or that his characters always act in Christian or even moral ways.

    In that sense, he reminds me some of Nicholas Cage, another actor whose movies often have religious themes worked into them.

    • Mark Carver says:

      Denzel Washington is the same way. He’ll do a religious-themed movie or a role where religion is an important factor, and then he’ll do something crass and brutish like Training Day.

  6. Julie D says:

    Has anyone here read any of the Dresden Files? The title character is a smart-ass wizard who ends up mixing with vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. While he doesn’t have faith, his friend Michael Carpenter does. In fact, I’d go so far as to say Michael is the best ‘religious’ (Catholic, actually) character in speculative fiction these days

What do you think?