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I’ve come down with a nasty cold, so I’ll be fairly brief this week and take another dip into a familiar topic: the belief in werewolves within contemporary religious fundamentalist movements (see also my posts on Jon Watkins and David L. Brown).
The subject this time is the website of Cutting Edge Ministries, which features a review of the 2002 Spider-Man film by Berit Kjos. During her review, Kjos argues that such fantasies cloud the audience’s perception of reality; to back up her assertion, she provides an excerpt from an email sent to her by a reader who seems to have believed that Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs books may have been a prediction of the future:
Mike, a fan of the Animorphs books (published by Scholastic), visited our site. Then he wrote us a note saying, “Real science can never reproduce that shown in a book? … Sure, science now can’t create shape shifting, but wasn’t that also said about Cloning? … It is plausible for shape shifting to actually occur. Maybe not the exact way shown in Animorphs. They touch an animal and absorb its DNA, and then are able to become that animal. If… your DNA was able to form into that of an animal, programmed into the subject while still retaining the knowledge to return to being a human, then Shape Shifting is possible.” […] Cloning has become a reality and all kinds of medical advances prove the consequences as well as the rewards of today’s research. It fits within the domain of genetic research that humans can manipulate. But shape shifting, like Spider-Man’s superpowers, is confined to the realm of imagination, occult myths and spiritual illusion.
The review was originally posted on Kjos’ own website. When it was reposted at Cutting Edge, the people behind the latter site added some notes of their own. Apparently failing to notice that Kjos had changed the subject from Spider-Man to Animorphs, Cutting Edge framed Spidey as a werewolf-like shapeshifter:
Shape-shifting is one aspect to Spiderman about which I had never thought before Berit mentions it. This procedure, called “Shape-shifting “, is accomplished with demons that assume other forms than a wolf. If you have been paying attention, you have noticed several TV shows and movies that have depicted Shape-shifting: Roswell TV show, Werewolf with Jack Nicholson, American Werewolf in London, American Werewolf in Paris, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf with Michael J. Fox.
In the next paragraph, the writer makes clear that they do not see werewolves as being merely characters in films and TV shows; rather, they believe that transformation from human to animal can be brought about by “severe demonic possession”:
One of the most common type of shape-shifting in popular media is a werewolf. The Dictionary Definition of a werewolf: “… a person transformed into a wolf or capable of assuming the form of a wolf.” This transformation is not unique in Satanism, but it is done only at the highest levels of Witchcraft. Severe demonic possession is required. This procedure is also called “Shape-shifting “, and is done with demons that assume other forms than a wolf. In the Harry Potter books, professors regularly shape shift into cats, dogs, and other exotic creatures.
Cutting Edge concludes by theorising that Spider-Man is intended to condition children to accept the coming of a shapeshifting antichrist:
Satan does have the capability to temporarily alter the physical reality. Is Spider-Man a very clever way in which our young children are being pre-conditioned to accept shape-shifting at the right moment in world history. The House of Theosophy seminar into which I was sneaked tells of the time in which Antichrist will shape-shift, but with a slight twist of Satanic power.
[…]
If Antichrist is going to shape-shift, and if the demonic aliens accompanying him are going to shape-shift, a lot of pre-conditioning must have already taken place that will prepare people to accept this demonic phenomenon. Is Spider-Man part of that preconditioning? Berit Kjos certainly thinks so.
Goodness.
Doris V. Sutherland 