For an atheist, I’m surprisingly religious.

Actually not that surprising really. I was brought up as a catholic (as I have no doubt mentioned elsewhere) and educated by Jesuits (well, not solely by Jesuits - in fact only by about three but it was a Jesuit institution. With the emphasis on institution.) My maternal grandfather would have been a priest if it wasn’t for the fact that he wanted a family but even so, he did a lot of work for the church and the Vatican and all sorts of other people.

Me - I’m the black sheep of the family. Well, I would be except my fathers family were not religious at all so I can say I took after them.

But I learnt about religion and I learnt about Christianity and I spent time studying it and reading the bible (and not in a “had to” way either - I read 90% of the bible entirely voluntarily. The 10% I missed was mainly the long winded parts of Deuteronomy and Numbers which dull beyond belief. I might have also skipped several epistles in the later part of the NT so that I could skip to the good stuff in Revelations.)

But these days, I’m most definitely an atheist - just one a well educated one.

The reason I mention this is because I’ve just finished the horror short screenplay (working title “In the dark of the night” - it’s not staying). I made some notes regarding the scene structure and the overall plot and realised that the story I’d written was a direct parallel to a very famous biblical story. Hell, THE famous biblical story. I might as well just change the title to “Nativity” and have done with it. (Hmm… actually…) The main female character in it is even called Mary Davidson (Mary is obvious - Davidson is an indirect reference to Jesus being a descendant of David hence being born in Bethlehem yadda yadda yadda).

The thing is that at no point while writing it did I consciously think to myself “I’ll retell the story of the birth of Jesus and make it a horror”. Obviously the imagery is so ingrained subconsciously that I couldn’t avoid it. Still, I’m not going to change it just yet - it might add some subtext and make it seem clevererererer than it actually is.

It’s not just this screenplay though. I mentioned that I’d written a sci-fi short for a competition before now. The thing about that script is that it’s not actually sci-fi at all. It should probably be called reli-fi instead as it’s about God and angels and heaven and hell. There’s a very big “what if” premise but it’s not a scientific “what if” at all.

Perhaps that’ll end up being my “thing” - religious subtexts and overtones. (Texts and ringtones?) A way of working out the indoctrination I suffered as a child, of dealing with the cross I have to bear.

Ack! Someone stop me please!