Pure Review (Film, 2019)

content warning: violence against children, self harm

Shay has recently reconnected with her birth father Steve and agreed to join him and her half-sister Jo on a religious retreat. It is a Father/Daughter celebration of purity led by Pastor Seth. He preaches the responsibility of girls to follow the rules set out by their earthly and heavenly fathers to be a perfect untouched gift for their husbands on their inevitable wedding day.

As someone who considers Jesus Camp a horror film, I found just this opening concept of Pure to be prime grounds for horror. The girls at the camp push it further. Shay joins Jo, her friend Kellyanne, and Pastor Seth’s daughter Lacey on a ritual in the woods. Every year, Jo and Kellyanne perform a ritual to summon Lilith. It’s meant as an act of teenage rebellion against the strictness of the camp. Shay takes it a step further, offering a suggestion on how to improve the ritual. Something unexpected happens, and now Shay believes she sees the figure of Lilith following her on the retreat.

Writer/director Hannah Macpherson spins gold out of one of the most controversial texts connected to Abrahamic religions. Lilith is non-canonical in most of these faiths, though her story is still shared and expanded on in academic and religious study. Lilith is, at best, barely mentioned by name in early religious texts and at worse treated as a dangerous rumor designed to break the faithful. Her nature is ambiguous because of the lack of original source material. She is either part of a class of demons not given names or the fallen original wife of Adam.

In the latter, she is used as the justification for inequality between men and women. She was made equal in every way to Adam, from the same clay on the same day by God himself, and she is the one who strayed and gave up her purity. She was cast to hell as punishment and Eve was created from Adam’s rib to enshrine male superiority into the core structure of religion and society.

The validity of the story and interpretation of the material varies in different religions and contexts. It’s a fascinating subject to explore from an academic perspective. Adam and Eve are enshrined in most Western culture as the first man and woman. Lilith’s existence threatens one of the foundation texts of Abrahamic religions. If Lilith is considered real, the original sin is not Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge but Lilith (depending on interpretation) laying with an angel. That is, of course, if Lilith is even believed to be a real woman or actually a demon sent to tempt the faithful.

I could (and have, thanks religion as literature course*) go on, but I believe writer/director Hannah Macpherson does a wonderful job exploring that line of thinking. Pure is a world where a Father/Daughter religious retreat is based around the story of Lilith. Pastor Seth bases his entire program on acknowledging the story of Lilith. His chapel in the woods has custom stained glass windows depicting the creation, betrayal, and fall of Lilith. The image is unbalanced, with three panels on a wall that can hold four. The creation of Lilith is separated from the rest of her story by a cross.

When Lilith enters the picture, the first thing she does is throw the cross separating her story in parts. Her story will not be weaponized against others. Her story will not be exploited by a faith that refuses to acknowledge her existence. She will not have her story be controlled by men who want women to feel shame for wanting their own lives. Shay knows what is happening, but no one else will believe her. Lilith’s presence only escalates from here.

Pure checks off so many boxes for me in horror. Religious horror was one of my early obsessions, and I grew up watching and studying many intensely disturbing films that had similar premises. If someone rejects the god figure of their faith, then they are embracing the opposing evil side of the faith and are horrible villains by association. Pure flips the genre conventions, focusing on the hypocrisy and cruelty of the faithful at the expense of girls who do not believe that what they are being taught is actually good and just.

Like Carrie before it, Pure refuses to let the teenage girls stand for being shamed on the basis of not being enough for the authority figures in their lives. Pure goes further by surrounding the girls with only men and teenage boys; the role of women is reduced to either a projected vision of a perfect woman or the ungodly force of Lilith. The girls are one or the other in the eyes of the men in their lives, and those that follow Lilith’s path must be isolated and punished for not being as perfect as a figure created in the collected imagination of men.

Better still, each of the teenage girls who participate in the ritual have clear personalities. They have their own voices that they can only share with each other. The men in their lives will punish them for saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong clothes, eating the wrong food, or not being practically perfect in every way. Their strength and resolve is built on the bond they form in private. This is constantly tested by the men at the retreat who throw out accusations like they’re LARPing the Salem Witch Trials to break the teenage girls’ spirits and personalities. The Father/Daughter retreat is meant to act as a crucible forcing girls into the mold of the perfect woman and the girls grow tired of being forced into submission.

I’m a big fan of Modernism. One of my favorite conventions of that genre is long, descriptive titles that simultaneously suggest theme and declare their actual meaning. Pure plays on the purity pledge the girls are meant to sign at the end of their retreat and their role in society as defined by this church. It also hints at interpretation and recontextualization of text, setting up and exploring the range of readings regarding Lilith debated in academia for years. Lilith is treated as a cipher for the role of women in society as defined by centuries old text. Pure asks what would happen if Lilith was real and existed today. The film could easily be titled Pure; Or, Lilith Smashes the Patriarchy, but that would be the easy way out.

There is nothing easy about Pure. It is a frustrating and infuriating film. You are meant to be angry and pushed away by what you see happen during the retreat. It’s an aggressive act of storytelling and wholly successful. Pure is one of the more inventive religious horror films to come around in years, defined not by the patriarchal notions of the Sisters of Satan subgenre or the prescribed weakness of women but as an empowering story of quiet revolution.

Pure is currently streaming on Hulu.

*Where I was told to submit a new paper as Lilith is not canonical to Christianity, after being previously criticized for using the Catholic edition of the bible in conversation with the King James bible and other religious texts when asked to compare origin stories and other common myths in world religion; apparently the Catholic bible wasn’t really literature but any Protestant edition was. That class was something else.

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