A Thief in the Night (film series)
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A Thief in the Night | |
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Directed by | Donald W. Thompson |
Written by | Russell S. Doughten, Jr. Jim Grant Donald W. Thompson |
Produced by | Donald W. Thompson |
Starring | Patty Dunning Mike Niday Colleen Niday Maryann Rachford Thom Rachford Duane Coller Russell S. Doughten, Jr. Clarence Balmer |
Cinematography | John P. Leiendecker, Jr. |
Edited by | Wes Phillippi |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
A Thief in the Night is an evangelical Christian film series about the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.[1] It consists of four films: A Thief in the Night (1972), A Distant Thunder (1978), Image of the Beast (1981), and The Prodigal Planet (1983).[2] The series focuses on the difficulties of those who miss out on the Rapture by having not trusted Christ as savior and thus find themselves in the Tribulation. Interspersed throughout the four films are many presentations of the Christian gospel.[3]
Plot
Patty Jo Myers is a young woman who considers herself a Christian because she occasionally reads her Bible and goes to church regularly, where the pastor is really an unbeliever. She refuses to believe the warnings of her friends and family that she will go through the Tribulation if she does not accept Jesus as her savior. One morning, she awakens to find that her family and millions of others have suddenly disappeared. Gradually, Patty realizes that the Rapture has happened; thus she and everyone else left behind are entering into the Tribulation, dominated by the Antichrist. The United Nations establishes an emergency government system called the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency (UNITE), and those who do not receive the Mark identifying them with UNITE will be arrested. Patty seems a strange breed of person who both refuses to trust Christ as her savior and also refuses to take the Mark. She desperately tries to avoid the law and the Mark but is captured by UNITE. She escapes but is cornered by UNITE on a bridge and falls from the bridge to her death.
Patty then awakens, this time for real, and realizes that all she had experienced was only a dream. Her relief is short-lived when the radio announces that millions of people have disappeared. Horrified, Patty frantically searches for her family only to find them missing too. Traumatized and distraught, Patty realizes that the Rapture has indeed occurred and that she has been left behind. In the ensuing plot the questions are whether or not she will be caught, as occurred in her dream, and whether or not she will take the Mark to escape execution.
In A Distant Thunder, the story of Patty is told in a flashback, which itself includes flashbacks. It begins with Patty awaiting her execution and, after fellow Christians awaiting execution ask her how she got there, she begins to tell the story and a flashback commences. The flashback begins where the previous film left off, with Patty awakening from her dream to realize that the Rapture has actually occurred. The film ends dramatically with Patty witnessing her friend Wenda being executed and arguing with Wenda's younger sister Sandy (who, along with Jerry and Diane, urges Patty to take the Mark) who betrayed them—and being prepped for her own execution.
The third film begins with Patty being forced by UNITE soldiers to decide to take the Mark or to be publicly executed by guillotine. Speechless and in shock, the soldiers strap her down to the guillotine, lying face-up. A sudden earthquake and storm appear, and the soldiers and others nearby run for safety, leaving Patty strapped to the guillotine. She cries, "I want the Mark!", yet no one was nearby to hear her or unstrap her. Alone, she attempts to unstrap herself, but the guillotine blade falls on its own, and Patty dies.
The film then turns to a new story, that of Dave, Leslie, and Connie. Leslie is with Patty at the guillotine, waiting her turn, when she escapes due to the eschatological earthquake. She runs, goes down into an underground room and meets Dave there. It is love at first sight. Dave and Leslie have a romance. While the plot is a bit difficult to understand, Dave's purpose seems to be to develop a counterfeit Mark so that a person can buy and sell without using the actual Beast's Mark and to destroy the master computer of the Beast by injecting into it a destructive code, which in fact is the song, "Onward Christian Soldiers." The story is presented with action scenes and interspersed long conversations. Connie is an agent of the Beast who pretends to cooperate with Dave.[4]
The fourth film involves life after a nuclear war, where mutants roam the Earth.
A fifth installment, The Battle of Armageddon, was planned but never finished.
Music
This film includes Larry Norman's composition "I Wish We'd All Been Ready", one of the earliest Christian rock hits and one of Norman's best-known releases.
Legacy
A Thief in the Night has been seen by an estimated 300 million people worldwide.[2] It was a pioneer in the genre of Christian film, bringing rock music and elements of horror film to a genre then dominated by family-friendly evangelism.[2] A quarter century later, the authors of the broadly successful Left Behind series of books and films acknowledged their debt to Thief.[2] Indeed, even the title Left Behind echoes the refrain of Norman's theme song for A Thief in the Night, "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," in which he sings, "There's no time to change your mind, the son has come and you've been left behind."
References
- ^ "Why Trump's evangelical supporters welcome his move on Jerusalem". WTOP. 2017-12-07. Retrieved 2018-01-02.
- ^ a b c d Dean A. Anderson, The original "Left Behind", Christianity Today, Published March 7, 2012, Retrieved December 9, 2017.
- ^ "Mark IV Rapture-rama". www.shockcinemamagazine.com. Retrieved 2018-01-02.
- ^ These paragraphs are supported by the primary sources, the four movies, readily available to all.