The only book I ever stole was a volume of Left Behind: The Kids. Swiped it straight from an Episcopalian church’s library in Florida. I was eleven (or so) and obsessed with the drama. Four kids (like me) were standing up to the biggest baddie of them all—the Antichrist.
I was also in love with Vicki Byrne, a “Young Trib Force” member who had red hair and was extremely heroic. But we don’t have to talk about that.
Left Behind: The Movie—the 2000 adaptation of the first novel by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—is one of the few films I saw in theater as a child. A couple of years later, I saw Left Behind II: Tribulation Force on VHS and was so terrified of being left behind that as soon as I was alone I prayed the sinner’s prayer all over again.
My end-of-days fervor cooled until I found a copy of Nicolae at a yard sale and decided to try the grown-up Left Behind series. After all, these books had been a cultural phenomenon. That third book of the series thrilled me. It has one of the most chilling endings of any novel I’ve read. So I continued reading them, only souring once I got past The Indwelling and finally giving up on the second-to-last one because I grew frustrated over repeated missed narrative opportunities. For me, it was time to leave behind Left Behind.
Except the story caught up to me again—as a Nicholas Cage–led movie reboot in 2014, and then with Vanished, a 2016 adaptation of Left Behind: The Kids. Now after another Left Behind film, Rise of the Antichrist (supposedly a sequel to the 2014 outing), made its glorious appearance in theaters this year, we can say the franchise still has cultural staying power. (It’s been around longer than Harry Potter.)
While now-grown church kids suffer from Rapture anxiety and dispensational pre-millennialism loses theological adherents, the survival-dystopian-apocalypse aesthetic still has legs. We live in a world of bad news—pandemic, war and potential war, government gridlock, conspiracy theories, global financial collapse—and escapist-survival stories are the comfort food of the people. The drama of Earth’s (potential) last days, as imagined in Left Behind, would make a perfect streaming series adaptation in the vein of dystopocalypses such as The Leftovers, 12 Monkeys, The 100, and The Last of Us.
Here are four big ideas for anyone aiming to adapt Left Behind for the small screen.
Read full article at Lorehaven.