Russell Doughten (Redirected from Russell S. Doughten)

Russell Doughten
Born(1927-02-16)February 16, 1927
Carlisle, Iowa, United States
DiedAugust 19, 2013(2013-08-19) (aged 86)
Carlisle, Iowa, United States
OccupationFilmmaker
Years active1958–1988

Russell S. Doughten Jr. (February 16, 1927 – August 19, 2013) was an American filmmaker and producer of numerous short and feature-length Christian films.[1] His film work is credited under numerous variations of his name: with or without the "Jr." suffix or middle initial, and sometimes using the informal "Russ" instead of "Russell". Nearly all of his Christian films were shot in various locales in his home state of Iowa.

While he worked on films, most notably as producer and director (uncredited) of the 1958 sci-fi/horror classic The Blob, he was best known for the Thief In The Night series, which dramatizes the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ and the struggles of a small band of believers against an increasingly hostile worldwide Antichrist dictatorship.

The films of that series are:

Doughten appears in all four films as Reverend Matthew Turner, a survivalist who has an elaborate chart of the End Times events, but did not fully believe in the Bible until after the Rapture, even if not accepting Christ as his savior. With his long, graying hair usually worn in a ponytail and shaggy beard, he didn't look the part of the stereotypical Christian fundamentalist, a fact that is credited with earning him secular fans,[citation needed]as is his use of unusual camera angles and layered audio.

While there had been feature-length Christian films before, including the End Times film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? directed by Ron Ormond in 1971, a sweeping, ambitious project like Thief—with three sequels telling one continuous story over the course of a decade—had never been undertaken even in Hollywood.[citation needed] Doughten's identification of the Antichrist not with Communism as Ormond had done, nor with Jack Chick's sinister view of the Vatican, but rather with a worldwide government that initially acts as a global peacemaker, i.e. the United Nations, is consistent with many other Biblicist interpretations of the Tribulation.[citation needed] His finding that the rapture is referred to in Matthew 24 is controversial.

While the films were clearly made on a low budget, and the dated 1970s fashions shown in the early films provide unintentional amusement today, there is no denying the series' influence among Christian fundamentalists. A Thief in the Night is said to be the most widely seen Gospel film in the world and has been influential in many conversions to Christianity.[citation needed] Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins cite Doughten's films as being the primary influence for their million selling Left Behind series of books and films. Doughten's films have been frequently shown in churches and on Christian television stations.

In the mid-1960s, Doughten taught English and drama and supervised and directed student productions at South Pasadena High School in California. His former students report that he was exacting in demanding their best efforts, but they were proud of the results and the quality of the productions he directed and they regretted his departure in 1964 to return to filmmaking in Ohio.[citation needed]

Doughten died from a cardiac-related illness on August 19, 2013.[2]

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