Frailty: The Anti-Stephen King Movie

Twenty years after its release, Bill Paxton’s supernatural thriller Frailty remains one of the most superversive horror films ever made. And not because it sets out to overturn genre expectations with cheap twists or gimmicky premises. No, Frailty commits a far graver sin in the eyes of modern Hollywood: it takes God seriously. Not as a metaphor; not as a narrative device; as a living actor in the story.

In an industry where supernatural horror is filtered almost exclusively through the grimy window of Stephen King style nihilism, Frailty busts through the status quo like a thrown brick. Nor is that defiance accidental, because the brick has a note attached.

Screencap; Lion’s Gate Entertainment

Credit to author JD Cowan for nailing down the King formula: In his cosmology, evil is omnipresent and inscrutable. You’re a puppet yanked around by vices you didn’t choose. God, if He exists, is either drunk or on vacation. Protagonists aren't heroes; they’re survivors.

If they get lucky.

In King’s world, faith is a punchline. Priests are predators. Christians are rubes; useful idiots for whatever demonic force happens to be rampaging through Maine that week. That author has been vocal about his moral vision of evil as self-thwarting. Which boils down to the ugly conclusion that only evil defeats evil. Good is reduced to prey or specatator.

Enter Frailty, the anti-King movie.

Screencap: Lion’s Gate Entertainment (Note: There is no character in the movie named Otis.)

Bill Paxton’s 2001 directorial debut tells the story of a widowed father raising two boys in small-town Texas. One day, he announces that God has given him a mission: Destroy demons masquerading as human beings. He says he's been shown their names, their sins, and the divine weapons with which to smite them. What follows is part psychological thriller, part supernatural mystery. But the heart of the film lies far deeper, in spiritual horror of the oldest kind.

You already know how King would have written the father character. He’d have been an earnest but hapless hick driven to mayhem by a demon in a bottle; his faith only a fig leaf for the ineffable evil forces possessing him.

But Paxton takes the archetype of the zeal-driven demon slayer and dares to ask, “What if he’s telling the truth?”

That question is the axis around which the whole movie revolves—and it never falters. Frailty doesn’t just accept the possibility of divine agency. The movie builds its entire moral structure around those two mysterious but complementary doctrines: God is active in history, and He gives us the choice to cooperate with His plan or not.

And whichever path we choose, the consequences are on us—not some irresistible outside force.

Related: The Problem of Evil

Even more anathema to the King school of soft nihilism, Frailty acknowledges that God calls men to be warriors. Yes, some are called to battle personal vice and addiction; others to confront actual demons. Either way, those whom the Almighty calls, He informs and equips. The calling isn’t imposed, it’s proposed. How a man answers reveals who he is. And if he chooses poorly, it’s not because some ancient curse made him; it’s because he was weak.

Frailty shows this moral struggle as a secret but terrifying real war. Demons walk among us, wearing human faces; some not even knowing they’re demons. They commit heinous crimes as the opening salvos of Armageddon. The good men called to oppose them aren’t symbolic placeholders for "overcoming trauma" or "the darker side of the human condition." They’re hunters. And when they act in obedience to God’s will, their aim is inerrant.

That is Frailty’s most transgressive aspect. Outside of the exorcism subgenre, every modern horror movie that even engages with Christianity treats the faith as the pledge in a magic trick: the assumed norm that the plot overturns to show reality as cruel and random. It’s a turn meant not to scare anyone, but to deliver a smirking jab at Christians while making secular viewers feel smugly superior.

Frailty doesn’t treat Christian belief as a strawman to torch in effigy for the crowd’s amusement. Instead, it presents the one milieu that does terrify Late Moderns: the one in which Daddy, who made them get up early for church on Sunday, was right.

Don’t believe me? Consider that the only characters who mock the film’s Christian visionaries are actual demons. Note to aspiring Christian writers: That is how you instill fun storytelling with subtle messaging.

Too many horror stories now try to downplay evil as a virus or the excusable result of past trauma. Paxton rejects such materialistic psychologizing. In his vision, evil is a moral category. And its servants have names and addresses. God’s soldiers can knock on those doors—or better, kick them in.

Screencap: Lion’s Gate Entertainment

What elevates Frailty above its contemporaries isn't just its cosmology; it's the strength of its conviction. The final act doesn't cop out. There’s no last-minute ambiguity, no nod-and-wink parting shot that suggests maybe it was all a delusion. Evil is real. God is real, and His judgment comes.

Check out the trailer:

We say this a lot around here, but it’s hard to imagine a studio greenlighting this movie today. A father who teaches his sons that demons exist? A plot where God’s wrath is not just real but righteous? A world where Christians are genuinely terrifying—because they're the only ones who know how to fight the real threat?

The script would never make it past the first round of sensitivity readings.

But we didn’t get this movie today. We got it at the tail end of an era when a few directors still understood what horror is for. And Paxton, God rest his soul, understood it better than most.

Frailty is not just a good horror film. It's essential; maybe even necessary—especially now. Because it reminds us that evil doesn’t defeat itself. Demons don’t trip over their shoelaces and fall back into Hell. Someone has to drag them there.

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