The Seventh Sign (1988) The Seventh Sign (1988)DIRECTED BY Carl Schultz
WRITTEN BY Clifford Green and Ellen Green
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN USA
In this scary but also kind of hokey movie set in 1988, bizarre things are happening all over the world. All the fish in the sea off Haiti have washed up dead; a village in Israel's Negev desert has frozen and shrunken to miniature proportions; and the water in a Nicaragua river has turned to blood. Two men, a Roman Catholic priest and an eerie wanderer, are both following these events and believe they signal the end-times as described in the New Testament. (The end-times are supposed to be a period of suffering that precedes the Second Coming of the Christian savior, Jesus Christ.)
The priest eventually determines that it's not actually the apocalypse. Meanwhile, the creepy wanderer makes his way to a couple's house in Los Angeles, where a very pregnant woman named Abby (Demi Moore) and her busy lawyer husband, Russell (Michael Biehn), are preparing for the birth of their first child. They'd lost one baby to miscarriage in the past, so they're extra careful about following their doctor's every order. The couple is renting out the room above the garage, and the wanderer, who introduces himself as David Bannon (Jürgen Prochnow), takes it. Bannon also informs Abby that he originally came to Earth as a lamb, but that now he is a lion.
More Movies Directed by Carl Schultz
Careful, He Might Hear You (1983)
To Walk with Lions (1999)
UNFORGETTABLE MOMENT
Beginning to grow suspicious about just who exactly her renter, David Bannon, might be, Abby goes into Bannon's room to do a little snooping. She pokes around in his desk, admires his antique chest of drawers, and discovers some ancient-looking Hebrew texts sealed up with an old-school wax seal. As she leaves, she accidentally steps on the texts, and breaks the seal. As she walks down the stairs heading back to her house, the Earth begins to shake violently and the sky grows dark.
Soon Abby begins having nightmares and developing some very strange fears about her pregnancy. As she gleans more information from the man living above her garage, she begins to uncover what's going on: Bannon, she thinks, is Jesus, come to Earth to nudge things along according to God's plan—in which a baby will be born both dead and soulless, and act as the Earth's last human. While Abby is giving birth, the doctor says they've lost the baby's heartbeat. Just after this happens, Abby sees a vision of a man asking, “Will you die for him?,” and she answers, “Yes, I will.” Abby dies soon after this conversation, but the baby is granted life—presumably by Jesus. Abby has thus averted the end of days by sacrificing her life for her baby's, who is born with a soul like a normal human being.
EALITY FACTOR
The apocalypse in the movie is pretty directly concerned with the apocalypse as it's portrayed in the Book of Revelation. So whether or not you believe the movie is possible is entirely based on whether or not you believe in the Bible's New Testament.
The InspirationThe inspiration for The Seventh Sign is the New Testament's final chapter, the Book of Revelation. Written by John the Apostle in 95 AD, Revelation describes the impending apocalypse or end-times. The protagonist in this chapter is known as the “lamb” (like Bannon) and represents Jesus Christ. In the Book of Revelation, there is a holy scroll with seven seals, which no one is able to open except Jesus. Revelation also says that Jesus will break the seven seals when he returns to Earth, thus unleashing the seven disastrous signs of the apocalypse (all of which are represented in the film) and triggering the end-times.
The Impact
QUOTABLES 
“Oh, God, l could feel it coming—death.”
What Abby says to her husband after waking up from a nightmare about her baby
“lt's called The Guf…They say whenever a baby is born, this is where its soul comes from. As the soul descends from heaven, only the sparrows can see it. So they sing.”
David Bannon, explaining to Abby and Russell, over the dinner table, the spiritual concept of The Guf, a part of heaven where souls are supposedly held as they await the birth of the child they are intended to go into