When the Cardinal Comes: Horror, Resurrection, and a New Ending

How a Slasher Script, a Solar Lamp, and the Death of a Pope Led Me to Rewrite the Ending

A bird built her nest on my porch again this year.
Same corner, same quiet stare, same little patch of twigs.
She is a little brown bird that has returned for three years. She usually has babies by now, but this time… nothing. No fluttering. No noise. Just her, resting. Watching.

I didn’t think much of it—until the signs started showing up everywhere.

I didn’t plan on writing a resurrection story. But sometimes stories change you before you finish them. This past week, something strange started happening—life and fiction began to echo one another. Cardinals kept showing up. My horror script shifted in a direction I didn’t expect. And I was reminded that the line between horror and holiness isn’t always a line at all—sometimes, it’s a doorway.

When Life Starts Echoing the Script

I rewrote the ending to my film The One-Eyed Monster. It wasn’t planned. I was going over the screenplay, and that familiar flow began to come, and I knew I had to change the ending. Something never felt right. It never felt complete, and now it does. A few days later, I gave my mom a cardinal lamp for Easter. Nothing fancy. You set it outside during the day; at night it glows—soft, steady, quiet. But here’s the strange part: when it lights up, the shadow of a cardinal appears in the glow. Like it’s hiding there, waiting for the dark.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
But then more cardinals started showing up.

Saturday, I had a long conversation with my friend Chad Taylor. We talked about life, ministry, and the way callings sometimes shift when you’ve carried them long enough. There was no announcement, no conclusions—just a conversation. But while we were talking, a cardinal landed on his car. Quiet. Still. Almost like it was listening.

Then came the news that Pope Francis had passed away.
And soon after, the College of Cardinals began the sacred task of choosing his successor.

That’s when I started paying attention.
Cardinals in the script. Cardinals in the lamp. Cardinals in a conversation. Cardinals in the Church.

Birds. Shadows. Conversations. Death. Resurrection.
It was like the story I was writing had grown wings—and was flying circles around my real life.

Resurrection Isn’t Always What You Expect in Horror

Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

In horror, death is usually the point. The release. The punctuation mark at the end of a long, bloody sentence.

But when I rewrote the ending to The One-Eyed Monster, I didn’t make it lighter.
I made it quieter.
More still.
More human.

It shifted from a final kill to something else. Something that felt like rebirth, not in the religious or triumphant sense—but in the way a room feels when the party’s over and someone’s sweeping the floor.

The brothel isn’t burning.
The survivors aren’t screaming.
They’re simply walking away. Not broken. Not hunted. Just… changed.

It’s the kind of ending that feels earned—like pain had its say, and now silence gets the final word.

Photo by Justin Campbell on Unsplash

Think about Jason Voorhees.

He drowned in Crystal Lake, but he didn’t stay dead. He came back. Not as a child. Not as a man. As something in-between. Something transformed. And now he’s afraid of the very thing that brought him back—water. The place of death becomes the place of fear.

It’s mystical, in a way.

Because in Revelation, there’s another body of water. The Crystal Sea.
Not cursed, but sacred.
Not haunted, but holy.
Before the throne of God.

Maybe horror has always been wrestling with that tension—between Crystal Lake and the Crystal Sea. Between what drags us down and what calls us home.

When Horror Becomes Holy

This isn’t the first time something I’ve written started bleeding into real life.

When I was nineteen, I wrote a full-length script about a vampire and a werewolf falling in love. It was strange, sensual, spiritual—part myth, part monster movie. I was attending the Hollywood Scriptwriting Institute back then, and that script got me a lot of attention. It was the first time I shared something full-length with people in the industry. I had written a few things before that as a kid, but this one felt different.

And that’s when it started.

Little things.
Themes from the script showing up in my life.
Symbols I thought I invented suddenly appearing in places I hadn’t been looking.
At first, it scared me.

I thought maybe I was crossing a line—that somehow, the veil between storytelling and the spiritual was thinner than I’d realized. But over the years, I’ve learned not to fear it.

Now, I just flow with it.

I don’t try to explain it anymore. I don’t need to. Whether it’s cardinals, shadows, lamps that glow at night, or stories that rewrite themselves before Easter—some things are too sacred to untangle.

So when I changed the ending to The One-Eyed Monster—when I let resurrection slip in where there was only supposed to be death—I didn’t question it.

I just followed the story where it wanted to go.

The Sign of the Cardinal

by Kevin Frasure

They say cardinals appear when angels are near.
But sometimes they come when a story is ending—
or just beginning.

A woman dies in a brothel and is reborn beneath a blood moon.
A filmmaker rewrites the final page, and resurrection blooms from rot.
A lamp soaks in the sun all day
only to glow in the dark with the outline of a cardinal—
charged by stillness, glowing in silence.

On a porch in Readyville,
a little brown bird returns without expectation.
Not to build. Not to birth.
Just to rest.

And somewhere in Rome, the College of Cardinals gathers,
while in Tennessee, a horror writer listens to the Spirit
and changes the ending.

The signs don’t always shout.
Sometimes they perch quietly,
red against the gray,
reminding us that
something eternal is always watching,
always whispering,
“You’re on the right path.”

👁️‍🗨️ If you’ve ever felt a story cross over into your life—leave a comment.

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