Kevin Smith Invites Westboro Baptist Church to ‘Red State’ Screenings

In some ways, Kevin Smith is extending an olive branch to Fred Phelps and the rest of the conservative Westboro Baptist Church (the ones who protest at soldiers’ funerals): He’s offered invites for them to attend the Kansas City preview screenings of his new film Red State. The thing is, the horror movie is based on Phelps and his swollen sense of morality. Awkward.

Back in 2007, Smith got his hands on extra footage from an interview that Malcolm Ingram did with Phelps for his documentary Small Town Gay Bar. Phelps’ fervency fascinated Smith: “That guy believed every word he’s saying.” But it also planted a seed in his mind:

“I’m watching the footage, and I’m going this guy could easily be like a horror-movie villain. Imagine if you just had this extremely religious fundamentalist family so passionate and frustrated about their inability to save people … that they’re like, ‘Forget it. Let’s just start killing people ourselves. Basically, anybody who’s a sinner we can find a biblical passage to justify it.’”

However, Smith is quick to clarify that the Parks family in Red State are not the Phelpses, primarily because the Phelpses never killed anyone. In Smith’s film, some teenagers fooling around on the Internet make a date to meet an online buddy in the flesh, thinking they’ll get to have sex. But instead they find themselves trapped by a fundamentalist family with quite a score to settle, ready to use these boys as the perennial sacrificial lambs.

Though he was initially spooked by the WBC folks protesting a screening of his the year prior, Smith has grown to call them his “marketing partners” and said that their antics have livened up more than one screening: “…You go into the theater, the lights go down, the movie comes up, and there’s a mass protest going on, people yelling and holding signs. It was weird. It was like 4-D. It was suddenly like we were a 3-D movie with a pre-show that began in the parking lot, Rocky Horror-style.”

And still he invites them along to join the audience. His offer to Meghan Phelps-Roper, Phelps’ daughter, at Sundance earned him a rejection, but Smith is still optimistic.