Carole Snow knew she had the subject for her first film when her friend, Kurt Morris, told her about his UMass Boston master’s thesis, “I See Some Strange People Coming to Church: Christian Scare Films of the 1970’s.”
“I became fascinated by it because my evangelical upbringing included a ban on TV and movies, popular music?even Flannery O’Connor books,” says Snow, a Northwestern video specialist.
“Still, I was always allowed to watch these apocalyptic films made in the 70s,” says Show, formerly an associate producer for nonprofit science movie makers 137 Films (“The Atom Smashers,” “The Experiment”), and also a print journalist and photographer.
Snow and Morris joined forces with DP Sean Clark, an occasional collaborator of Snow’s at Northwestern, to form RealLab Productions. Then they headed south to begin production on their documentary about the Christian film movement, “Soul Winners.”
“On our second day of production, our GPS sent us up a horse trail and over a creek in the Appalachian foothills, through winding church-lined roads,” Snow writes on the RealLab blog. “It was magnificent.
“We spent time filming a winter-vacated drive-in theater complete with black crows circling above and a foggy drizzle. It was beautifully mysterious and the way I like to reflect on my upbringing in the mountains.”
Three of the main figures in “Soul Winners” are Ron Ormond, Russell Doughton and Donald Thompson, who got their start in mainstream film before becoming born again Christians.
Ormond directed the ?60s exploitation films, “The Exotic Ones” and “Please Don’t Touch Me.” Doughton was associate producer of “The Blob” and director of the exploitation picture “Fever Heat.”
