‘No One Will Save You’ Has Evangelical Aliens
Written by admin on October 13, 2023
In his piece for CT, Aaron Earls explores what C. S. Lewis thought about evangelizing aliens—provided we discover they do indeed exist. But what if aliens came to proselytize us?
Directed by Brian Duffield and now streaming on Hulu, No One Will Save You is a mostly silent sci-fi horror film featuring only a single discernible line of dialogue. The film has already earned high praise from the likes of Stephen King and other horror genre heavyweights.
In it, a young woman named Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) must fight off an alien invasion in her small town, from which she’s been ostracized for reasons we don’t find out until later. The movie’s extraterrestrials are archetypal “grey man” aliens, hauntingly recognizable to many a sci-fi fan.
But Duffield and his team wanted the alien takeover to be marked with spiritual overtones. “Having these religious aspects felt like a way to differentiate the aliens from other pop culture,” Duffield told Christianity Today. “I wanted there to be an aspect to them where you couldn’t debate [the aliens] because they had this faith that told them what to do.”
I was tipped off about some of these religious nuances early on by a thread on Twitter/X from director Guillermo del Toro. Known for horror films himself (such as Pan’s Labyrinth), del Toro praised No One Will Save You and said it embodies an “essential principle in Catholic dogma” where “grace and salvation emerge from pain and suffering.”
While that may not be quite what Duffield had in mind when crafting his film, he admits it’s “exciting that it could be read through a Catholic lens,” and that the film’s undeniable religious imagery was both a conscious and subconscious decision birthed from his own background as a missionary kid. As a pastor’s kid myself and a lover of horror films, I was fascinated by how he weaved together the spiritual and the horrific.
Duffield spoke to CT about crafting the liturgy and prayer lives of the extraterrestrial(s), how his Christian upbringing may have influenced the religious aspects of the film, and why he loves using the horror genre to explore themes of faith and spirituality
