E. Elias Merhige

Director of Begotten (1990) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000), and off screen a serious collector — roughly 2,400 volumes on mysticism and Freemasonry in his own library, weighted toward Böhme (multiple editions of the Aurora, the Threefold Life of Man, the Forty Questions on the Soul, one set once owned by the Earl of Cromer) and, by his own account, original Golden Dawn documents.

⭐⭐ THE LIBRARY IS NOT SET DRESSING FOR THE FILMS — HE SAYS IT RUNS THE OTHER WAY. Asked why Böhme in particular, he gives the wing's own question back: "If everything emanated from this one deity, how do you reconcile evil with good?" Böhme's answer — that good and evil are not two competing substances but one Ungrund working itself out — is the rule he directs by: "nothing is one thing. No character is good, entirely, and no character is entirely bad." ⚠ That is a working theory of drama borrowed from a seventeenth-century shoemaker's theodicy, stated as such, by a man with the receipts on his own shelf.