Same year, same knock on the door
In the great tradition of Mockbusters.tv, every so often two movies arrive wearing near-identical name tags and we get to play detective. This time it's Heretics, the found-footage haunted-house-cult thriller, versus Heretic, the A24 chamber-piece where two missionaries accept a stranger's invitation for tea and regret it slowly, theologically, and at length. Both landed in 2024. Both involve a house that seems to actively resent people leaving it. Only one of them, as far as the public record goes, stars Hugh Grant delivering an unnervingly polite lecture on comparative religion.
Here at Mockbusters.tv we run a running gag — and we want to be very upfront that it is a gag — in which we treat the lower-budget title as the plucky original and its glossier namesake as the "million-dollar copy" that came along later with better lighting and a marketing budget. It's editorial mischief, not film history. Nobody at any studio owes anybody royalties for the word "heretic." But it's a fun lens for looking at how two productions can chew on the same premise — a stranger's house, a test of belief, a door that's suddenly very far away — and end up in completely different corners of the horror aisle.
The pitch, side by side
Heretic is a two-hander (well, three, with Mr. Reed presiding) built entirely on conversation. Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton knock on a door to escape the rain, get invited in for tea, and find themselves in an increasingly airtight theological debate that curdles into something closer to an exam with no passing grade. The horror here is architectural and rhetorical: hallways that don't lead where they should, a host whose courtesy never once cracks, and a front door that keeps getting harder to reach. It's horror as a locked-room argument.
