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WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Horror films, one would think, are generally about death. The writer and director of "Wraith" said his movie is about life.
Michael O. Sajbel said his tale of a ghost protecting the life of the inhabitants in a small-town Wisconsin house is "life-affirming," and a bit of a necessity after his 13-year-old daughter wanted to bring some friends to the family home to watch a horror flick themselves.
Sajbel, the dutiful dad, rented the movie and watched it in advance. "It was raunchy and inappropriate in every area," he recalled, telling his daughter, "No way you're going to watch this. I'm not going to have parents come after me with rakes and torches and shovels."
"I kind of realized there was a gap between the Disney-type 'Night on Witch Mountain' and these really intense, R-rated horror films," Sajbel told Catholic News Service in a May 2 telephone interview to promote the May 8 release of "Wraith" on DVD, Blu-ray and video-on-demand platforms. Outside the "Harry Potter" series, now ended, "I wanted to make a film that was scary and not overly offensive to anyone's values."
The kick in "Wraith" comes when Mom and Dad, in their early 40s, get a little frisky one night after a party and Mom gets pregnant." They consider an abortion, although Sajbel noted the word "abortion" "and the C-word" -- for choice -- are never used in the movie. It's then that the ghost starts making its presence known -- first to young teen Lucy, the daughter. Catherine Frances, like Sajbel a Wisconsin native, has the aggrieved-teen countenance down pat.
But the decision about the pregnancy's future grows more complicated with Dad being out of work, the family living in a costly-to-maintain house and the prospect of another mouth to feed. As the decision looms nearer, the ghost (Lily Hansen) reveals herself to Lucy, who finally convinces her folks that she's not just hearing and seeing things.
Yet it's not the ghost who's at the root of the disquiet, but Molech, a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice, who is referenced in the Old Testament books of Leviticus, 2 Kings and Jeremiah. In comes the cavalry, in the form of Father Ehrlich, played by Lance Henriksen, to rid the house of the demon.
Henriksen, Sajbel learned, grew up in a Catholic orphanage in New York City. Sajbel himself is Catholic, although he admitted to "falling away" in high school and spending "many decades" among evangelical Protestants. He got to meet Chuck Colson, the noted Watergate "hatchet man" for President Richard Nixon who later founded Prison Fellowship after serving his jail sentence, and whose wife, Patty, was a Catholic -- which modeled for Sajbel how Catholics and evangelicals can find common ground.
Sajbel's wife, born an evangelical, joined the Catholic Church after seeing her husband, in his own words, "bawling like a baby" at their daughter's first Communion. "We never had that rite of passage in the evangelical world," he said she told him. Now she's active in the local chapter of the Catholic Medical Guild.
"My wife would beat me over the head," Sajbel said, "if I have the wrong stuff (in the script) medically. Or if I put in stuff that's incendiary."
Sajbel, who filmed "Wraith" in Wisconsin, said he had Bishop David C. Ricken of Green Bay bless the script. "I don't know if he knew what was in the script," Sajbel told CNS. The filmmaker also got advice from priests on house blessings.
"Wraith" had a theatrical run a year ago at one multiplex chain in the upper Midwest, where, according to Sajbel, it did twice the business -- "the numbers speak for themselves" -- of most first-run features that don't have the word "Avengers" in the title. But the chain balked at showing "Wraith" nationwide: "No way are we going to show that kind of thing" was how he remembered the chain's reaction. Efforts to get it shown by other chains met with no success.
So now it's the DVD route, and Sajbel can live with that. "The film I did 10 years ago, 'The Ultimate Gift,' did phenomenally well on DVD -- over $20 million in its first two months," he said. "Even three years later it was the No. 1 family drama at Walmart."