Unto Us a Scary Child Is Born

What if Jesus used his omnipotence not only to curse barren fig trees but also to kill those who annoyed him?

That’s a premise director Lotfy Nathan explores in The Carpenter’s Son. The supernatural horror film imagines Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’ time in Egyptian exile after they flee King Herod (though curiously, none of the characters in the film are directly called by those names). Nicolas Cage plays the Carpenter, who, along with the Mother (FKA twigs), tries to protect their son (played by Noah Jupe, credited only as The Boy) from the suspicious townspeople around him. The Boy’s miracles are awe-inspiring, but they’re also terrifying: In one sequence, he pulls a snake out of a woman’s mouth. While the Carpenter and Mother try to control the Boy’s power, they’re not able to stop his wanderings. Eventually, his curiosities lead him to a devil figure—a character known only as the Stranger (Isla Johnston), who tries to use his powers for her own ends.

The film is based on the second-century writings known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Lotfy was first introduced to the apocryphal text by his father, who was a collector of religious writings. The Jesus depicted in that book is different from the selfless savior we’ve come to know and worship. This adolescent Jesus feels closer to someone like Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist or Jackson A. Dunn from Brightburn: youths endowed with supernatural powers who lack the maturity to rein in their impulses (in one scene in the Infancy Gospel, Jesus curses and kills a child who accidentally bumps him on the shoulder).

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The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, like other apocryphal gospels, is considered noncanonical in relation to the four gospels. According to Rev. Jacob Rodriguez and Markus Bockmuehl, many gospel texts were developed and produced during the second century. Today, they recommend we view them as “insights into the diverse and creative ways early Christians interpreted the traditions about Jesus.” For Nathan, directing The Carpenter’s Son was a way for him to not only process his own Coptic Christian background, but also exercise his imagination, particularly imagining a Jesus who wrestled with being both fully human and fully divine.

A lot of Coptic Christians “wouldn’t abide the idea of Jesus having human doubt and the potential of sin, but for me to depict that, that makes for a picture of him that’s better to identify with,” Nathan told Sojourners. 

I interviewed Nathan on Zoom twice in the past few weeks; this piece combines our interviews into one fluid conversation. We spoke about the film’s depiction of hell, tapping into the horror DNA of the Bible, and the trepidations around filming projects that directly tackle spirituality.

The Carpenter’s Son is now playing in theaters. 

This interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, contains spoilers for The Carpenter’s Son.

Zachary Lee, Sojourners: In preparation for this interview, I listened to an audiobook of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  If you can remember,  what was your reaction and response to reading that book?

Lotfy Nathan: I immediately thought, “This is a story that feels like a great film that I haven’t seen before.” I was excited by it for all of these different reasons, one of which was that it hadn’t been told before. If you squint your eyes at it, it is sort of a superhero origin story. It’s novel to transpose that framework onto Jesus and the Holy Family. The genre spin that felt inherent to the text was interesting. So much of the Bible, as well as centuries of Christian art, has that DNA.

I’m happy you brought that up because I was reflecting on how a lot of stories in the Bible would make for some great horror movie moments, from Balaam’s donkey suddenly speaking to him or Saul conjuring the spirit of Samuel.

What I think is interesting is the conversation around that—if my choice to imbue [horror] genre elements into a biblical story is an affront to the faith. For some, I’m sure it is, but for me, that’s not at all the intention. Horror is just a color on a color palette that I can use to paint a story; it’s a great strength of Christian art over the years that they’ve been able to depict what’s at stake.

I was reading about how you were envisioning the relationship between the Carpenter and his son as the kind of relationship Antonio Salieri had with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; there’s this person who’s older and seasoned who simply can’t compete with someone who is much more talented and powerful. You’re playing with a common narrative archetype.

I think that was my effort to make these people relatable. Yes, they’re the holy family, but there’s a dynamic that’s probably not too unfamiliar.

Is that also why you chose not to name the characters “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, etc.”? I noticed in the credits they’re listed just by their vocation.

That’s a good question. At the script stage, I initially had everybody named, and then as I was writing, I felt that myself trying  to show a family that, as legendary as they were, they were trying to live in obscurity because they were in exile. Jesus wasn’t the Jesus we might think we know … he’s just the carpenter’s son. I wanted to remove some of the scope of the story and to try to narrow in to help with my own bearings as a storyteller. Noah Jupe (the Boy) shared that when he read the script, he didn’t even know what the premise was. That’s funny now that I think of it …

Surprise! You’re actually playing Jesus.

(Laughs) Right, but I think that not having the character be named helped him access the Boy. The story is so big that it helped narrow it down.

Perhaps in contrast with your narrowed focus, you add the character of the Stranger, who’s later revealed to be Satan, in this film. Satan wasn’t present in the original text, so what made you want to include him here?

My earlier drafts of the script did not have Satan in the story because I was working off the original text. As time went on, I was letting go of more of that text, because it’s not quite a story in and of itself. I just took the kernel of years where Jesus might’ve been coming of age, finding his own strength as well as some of the set pieces, and then I started writing my own interpretation of what could exist in the missing chapters of the New Testament. One of the questions I had was: Did Jesus meet Satan before the temptation in the desert? It was exciting for me to endeavor to do that, but I always tried to find a way to respect the New Testament and fit it into the narrative timeline.

In another ambitious sequence, you try your hand at depicting hell; we only see it on-screen for a few brief moments, but can you talk about your vision for constructing what it would look like and how you collaborated with Jon Rafman and Madeleine Kunkle, who designed it?

I mean, that was a big swing to try to take, but it’s only about five seconds of the movie. In art, I’ve always found it to be interesting when artists attempt to render both heaven and hell. Those two poles inspire so much in the imagination. Ever since I was a kid, I grew up looking at a lot of fine art and Renaissance paintings, and I was always really startled and disturbed by some specific details of The Last Judgement. In particular, Charon the Ferryman, that face always scared the heck out of me. There’s another painting of a male figure sitting anguished on a rock, and demons are pulling him down. I think the story behind that art is that he murdered his own parents and was wracked with guilt. We thought about Dante’s Inferno a lot. But one of the editors, Monika Willi, when we were brainstorming what hell could look like, she said, “It would probably be a crowded place.” So that was an early riff.

I’ve always found it to be interesting when artists attempt to render both heaven and hell. Those two poles inspire so much in the imagination.

In the canonical Gospels, we really only get one story that offers a glimpse of Jesus as a youth, and that’s when he’s in the temple. There’s a lot of life he lived before he started his ministry, and I wondered whether he wrestled with his humanity and divinity, especially in his youth. It was interesting to see someone put some language to that in the context of the film. 

I appreciate you saying that, but there are plenty of Christians who just won’t agree with that fundamentally. I’m aware that there’s the splintering of sects and all these different readings of the Bible. I think that for a lot of Coptic Christians–which is where I come from–they wouldn’t abide the idea of Jesus having human doubt and the potential of sin, but for me to depict that, that makes for a picture of him that’s easier to identify with, which is actually a good thing.

The relatability felt most apparent in the scene where Jesus is among those people who are about to be crucified. He’s standing with those who are suffering. It’s fascinating that it’s Satan, though, who says, “You can find me amongst the poor or the destitute,” because that’s something I think Jesus would say.

Yeah, the idea was that the devil would be posting up around the sick and the wretched because that’s where Jesus would be inclined to go, so Satan would try to manipulate him wherever he was.

I found the choice to cast Nicolas Cage an inspired one because he has an interesting through line of spirituality in his work. I think of the Left Behind films, and even a film like Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, where he plays another character who’s tasked with protecting youth from the influence of the devil. He grew up Catholic, and I’m curious if you two connected on y’all’s faith background.

I would rather not speak for him with that, but I will say that he approached this with a lot of sincerity and in earnest, and I think he’s endlessly interested in the world around him, and he brought that into playing this character.

I was speaking with director Osgood Perkins about his film The Monkey, and he shared how he gets some trepidation whenever he’s making films that deal overtly with devils, spirits, etc. I’m wondering if you found yourself nervous or superstitious when making this movie?

I felt that a lot, to be totally honest. I can honestly say that I didn’t go into this film with a way to antagonize or to kick the bees’ nest, but there were a lot of times when I was making this, and I thought, “What am I touching on here? Am I way out of my depth?”  In general, I’m very superstitious, and it amounts to some kind of neurotic, OCD things. There was a Roman Catholic church down the street from my old apartment in New York, and I would compulsively sign the cross whenever I walked by it. When we were doing pre-production in Greece, the office where we were doing work was about a 10-minute walk away, and as I’d walk, I passed a church, and I’d do the same signing of the cross (laughs).