Virgin screens in the Short Film Block #5 for Panic Fest, 30 March 2025
Although Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) made its (huge) box office from a ready-made mass Christian audience in America, it has often been observed that the film’s influences were as much horror cinema as the Gospels. In particular its tight focus on Jesus’ bodily sufferings aligned it with the then-nascent ‘torture porn’ subgenre (it came out in the same year as James Wan’s Saw, and one year before Eli Roth’s Hostel), while it also included an actual devil (played by Rosalinda Celentano) in its detail. Ramone Menon’s short film Virgin looks back to Jesus’ nativity (“One Day B.C.” reads an early text caption) rather than to his later passion, crucifixion and resurrection, and like Gibson’s film features dialogue in Aramaic (with elegantly stylised floating subtitles) and has The Beast played by a woman (Katie Lynn Stoddard) – but if anything it leans even harder into the horror, while remaining a study in suffering and faith.
It begins with a high-angle shot of Yosef (Herman Gambhir) leading his wife Miryam (Jessica Damouni) on a donkey, and as she casts her eyes heavenwards, he glances furtively at her heavily pregnant belly, and in an ominous gesture, picks up and pockets a stone from the ground. For where Miryam sees only God’s work in their situation, Yosef suspects adultery – and in the abandoned manger where they stop overnight for Miryam to give birth, the devil will bring Miryam anxiety and pain while easily exploiting Yosef’s doubt and anger. “Who’s the father?” is the question that recurs, heard on the wind and in the barn’s shadowy spaces, and eventually finding its way onto Yosef’s own lips – and as Miryam awaits her son’s arrival, praying for his safety and a celestial sign to make Yosef believe in her fidelity and virginal maternity, the tensions between this couple mount and manifest as a nightmarish Satanic incursion.
New Testament adaptations typically play upon Jesus’ contradictory dual status as son of God and mortal man. Here, though, in the absence of the as yet unborn Jesus, it is Yosef who comes to the fore, himself divided between being the father (yet also not the father) to the miraculous messiah, and a man very much of his times – and those were deeply patriarchal times, when woman who strayed could be stoned to death. So in this intense, heady atmosphere, as social norms and human jealousies clash with the divine will, devout Miryam finds herself at the mercy of her own conflicted, affronted, raging husband who does terrible things while repeatedly asking who’s the daddy (a phrase that resonates with today’s male privilege).
In a film that opens with the image of an inverted red cross, set in a time before even an upright cross had yet been established as the symbol of Jesus, Menon entertains an alternative gospel, with the possibility of the most famous birth in Western religion and culture being unduly, violently aborted – before a divine intervention is left to set the traditional story back on course. It is the kind of iconoclastic ‘what if?’ scenario that flirts with sacrilege – even if it is little different from the later Biblical episode where Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness. For what is playing out here is the tension between worldly, individual concerns and a more cosmic prescription. While the presentation of Yosef as a vicious wife beater, even as a potential uxoricide, may seem blasphemous, it also represents something that is otherwise sorely missing from the New Testament: a woman’s terrified perspective on a man’s world where female agency comes highly restricted, and where one father or another rules all.
strap: Ramone Menon’s short film reimagines the lead-up to the New Testament Nativity as a nightmare of patriarchal horror
© Anton Bitel
