Light Where You Least Expect It

Every time I tell someone I am making a Christian horror film, I can see the question forming before it is spoken. How can those two words even exist together? How can horror and faith share the same space?

I understand the tension. I wrestled with it myself for years. I grew up loving horror films on Saturday nights and hearing the Gospel preached on Sunday mornings. For a long time those two loves felt incompatible, as if only one could be “allowed” to shape who I was meant to be. Over time I came to see that the conflict was false. Scripture never treats darkness as something to be avoided. Darkness is something Christ enters, confronts, and ultimately overcomes. Horror simply happens to be one of the most direct storytelling tools we have for acknowledging that darkness honestly.

Many of the storytellers I admire have openly spoken about why horror is uniquely suited for spiritual exploration. Guillermo del Toro once said that “horror is the most truthful genre,” because it allows us to talk about beliefs, guilt, fear, and morality without pretending the world is simple. Stephen King has written that horror exists to help us “make sense of the darkness inside us,” giving shape to our deepest anxieties so we can confront them instead of suppress them. Even C.S. Lewis touched on this idea when he wrote that fairy tales and darker stories give us “imaginative knowledge,” preparing our hearts to recognize good and evil before we can articulate them logically. These voices echo the heart behind Wretch Like Me. Horror does not exist to glorify darkness. It exists to stare it down honestly so that light has somewhere real to land.

*Wretch Like Me* exists because of that realization. It is a parable disguised as a genre film. It speaks in the emotional language of fear so it can reach people who would otherwise never allow their guard down long enough to hear about grace.

The story opens with Hank Powell waking in a hospital covered in blood that is not his. He is disoriented and terrified, fleeing from both the police and something far worse that we initially only sense in shadows. Right away he is presented as a man running from consequence and from guilt. He is not noble. He is broken before the audience even understands why. That brokenness is not an accident. From the start the film is asking a question many people secretly live with every day. What happens when you believe you are beyond forgiveness.

Later we learn that Hank once tried to save his young daughter from an inherited demonic affliction. He believed the only way to protect her was through sacrifice. That decision cost his wife Beth her life and landed him in prison. It hardened him into someone who no longer sees himself as redeemable. When we meet him again years later, the physical illness destroying his body mirrors the spiritual sickness eating away at his soul. He tells his old friend James plainly, “This is me.” He believes his brokenness is his identity. He believes his story is already finished.

That belief is the core lie the Gospel confronts.

James, who has become a Lutheran pastor, never once approaches Hank as a project or a sermon. He approaches him as a friend who refuses to leave. He doesn’t minimize Hank’s sins, but he also will not allow Hank to define himself by them. His presence throughout the story is not preachy or performative. It is patient and grounded. He shows up over and over, even when Hank pushes him away, even when Hank tells him to get lost, because love is stubborn that way. Grace does not stop moving just because someone refuses to accept it.

One of the most powerful moments in the script comes when Hank’s teenage daughter Becca finds and confronts him after years of separation. She does not discover a redeemed hero. She discovers a homeless addict shooting up with needles hidden inside a hollowed-out Bible. That image is intentional and difficult to look at. It represents what happens when the Word is emptied of power and turned into a container for coping rather than transformation. Yet even in this scene, Becca refuses to abandon him. She lays beside his broken body in his tent and rests her head on his chest while he is barely conscious. A dark figure watches from outside, but she feels no fear for the first time since losing her mother. The courage of love begins to push back the darkness before anyone realizes it is happening.

Eventually the story arrives at what may be its most overtly Christian moment. Hank takes Becca to see his dying father at a nursing home. His father is possessed and restrained. The scene embodies generational bondage in literal form. The curse that has followed this family is no longer symbolic. It is breathing and violent and personal. When the demon attacks, James intervenes not with theatrics, but with Scripture. He recites Isaiah: “I will carry you and I will save you.” The monster’s power breaks. Hank collapses but lives.

It is here that the central question of faith surfaces. James realizes that Becca has never been baptized. Hank had delayed it amid his own spiraling guilt. Suddenly the rituals many of us treat casually take on real weight. Baptism is not sentimental. It becomes spiritual warfare.

In a quiet dining room, with a small Dixie cup of water, James kneels and baptizes Becca. He recites Luther’s explanation of baptism as a means of grace that creates faith itself. No choir sings. No dramatic light shines down. There is only water, the Word, and an exhausted father watching his daughter receive new life. The sacred does not arrive with spectacle. It arrives with simplicity.

Later, toward the end of the film, Hank and Becca sit in his childhood home with an old guitar. His body fails him as he tries to play. He cannot form the chords. He lashes out in anger and immediately regrets it. Becca gently takes the guitar from him and starts to sing.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”

Then Hank joins her.

“I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see.”

This is not a performance. It is confession set to melody. Hank finally admits out loud what he has been living in denial of for decades.

He is the wretch.

And grace is still for him.

That moment encapsulates everything *Wretch Like Me* is trying to say. The horror surrounding the story only exists to build tension toward this emotional and spiritual release. Without the darkness the light does not land. Without despair redemption feels theoretical. Without fear grace feels unnecessary.

Red Braille exists to tell stories just like this. Stories that do not soften reality but walk directly into it. Stories that allow broken people to see themselves on screen without being shamed. Stories that speak the Gospel without preaching it. Stories that operate as parables for a generation that no longer listens to sermons.

Jesus did not speak in theological essays. He spoke in stories about lost sons, wounded strangers, and good shepherds who walked into danger to rescue the stray. Horror films operate as parables for modern audiences who already understand fear but have forgotten hope. *Wretch Like Me* simply takes that language and bends it toward grace.

This film is not Christian because it is clean. It is Christian because it is honest.

It is Christian because it insists that grace belongs even to the wretch.

It is Christian because it believes darkness is not something to hide from, but something Christ came to defeat.

It is Christian because it trusts that the Gospel is strong enough to live inside difficult stories and still shine through.

That belief is the backbone of Red Braille.

We tell stories not to entertain believers alone, but to reach the lost. To meet them where they already are. To give them a parable before they ever hear a sermon. To let them feel grace before they know its name.

*Wretch Like Me* stands as our clearest expression of that mission.

No matter how frightening the genre may be, the story still ends in the same place every Christian story must end.

With grace singing louder than fear.