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Stephen King on The Passion
...About 10 minutes before the movie started, a well dressed woman of about 30 entered the rapidly filling theater with a girl and two boys in tow. The boys looked about 6 years ago. I didn’t get a chance to observe them; I was on the wrong side of Mom for that. The little girl I’ve chosen to call Alicia, however, sat on my side. Cute little thing, you bet. Blue dress; spandy clean kneesocks; matching white ribbons in her dark hair. I’d say she was no more than 10, and probably only 8.

Mom, meanwhile, had whipped out her cell phone and was calling a friend. Mom wasn’t happy. The theater manager, she told her friend, had had the nerve to suggest to her that the level of violence in The Passion wouldn’t be good for children as young hers. “I told him,” Mom said, “that if it gets too bloody, they can just close their eyes.”

I kept sneaking glances at Alicia as the movie played. She did okay until the scourging of Christ. Then she did indeed close her eyes, and buried her face against her mother’s side. The little body inside the blue dress was all angles, an exclamation mark of horror. Gibson’s version of the scourging seems to go on forever as the Roman punishment detail uses first a whip and then a spiked lash to literally peel the flesh from Jesus’ body, spattering the cobbles around him with gore.

Alicia hid her face for 15 minutes . . . but that left another 50 minutes of punishment, torture, cruelty, and death still to go. And was I ashamed to be in that theater, even though the film Gibson has made is, if taken on its own artistic and religious terms, good – perhaps even great? I was. I feel that shame heating my skin even now, days later. Because 50 minutes is a long time to hide your eyes when you’re only 8. So after a while, you see, our sweet little girl stopped doing it.
The child I’ve chosen to call Alicia looked. And looked. And looked. I think she’ll be looking for a long time to come in her dreams.

In those dreams there will likely be no redemption, no victory over sin, no scripture, no eternal life. I think in Alicia’s dreams there will only be a skinless nightmare Christ with one eye swollen shut.