Heaven Come Down (2006)

• 85%
• 2006
• Documentary
• Gabriel Wrye
• Michael Mees

Heaven Come Down is a many-faceted document of ordinary people who go to work, raise families, and every week walk into a church with a box of poisonous snakes under one arm, a jar of strychnine on the altar, and an electric guitar on the dais. They testify and pray and sing and dance and speak in tongues. They light up a glass bottle filled with kerosene, stick their face in the fire, take the snakes out of the boxes, drink strychnine, and dance and sing and pray some more. Filmmakers Gabriel Wrye and Michael Mees present portraits of four contemporary Appalachian worshipers who find nothing unusual in these practices, including a brother and sister whose father, a preacher, was fatally bitten during Sunday service. Another heart-rending series of events finds two best friends caught between the law and a breed of religion that is nothing if not uniquely American.