But until now the studios have been largely unsuccessful with Christian films because, as Mr. Kirkpatrick sees it, most executives do not know very much about Christianity. He said one studio head asked him how he came up with the name Good News Holdings. Bemused, Mr. Kirkpatrick told him, “Gospel means ‘good news.’ ”

Walden Media and Bristol Bay Productions, both owned by Philip F. Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire and a Christian, have made several Christian-themed films, including “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the forthcoming “Amazing Grace.” But the company does not have a specifically religious mandate. Last year, Fox created a division called FoxFaith, but its plans to produce a handful of low-budget films each year are notably modest.

By contrast, Good News Holdings describes itself as “advancing the kingdom of God” with an ambitious range of media endeavors, financed and supported by some of the most prominent and politically connected conservative Christian groups in the United States.

In addition to films -- including a planned series of Christian horror movies -- Mr. Kirkpatrick says the company will introduce a channel on DirecTV next year, with investments from John Ashcroft and News Corporation, among others. Test runs began this fall on an Internet Protocol Television Platform (a digital television delivery system) called the Cloud, with partners including the Christian men’s group Promise Keepers and Mothers of Preschoolers, a group of three million Christian women.

FaithMobile, the company’s subscription mobile content provider, delivers Bible verses via text message, as well as inspirational cellphone ringtones, screen savers and other content. An Internet community for churches called Lights Together offers tools for organizing prayer groups, Christian dating and much more.

Good News Holdings plans to build a $150 million television and film studio near Boston. And in partnership with Tyndale House, the Christian publisher of the “Left Behind” series, the company will publish novels that it intends to turn into movies. Mr. Kirkpatrick said he hoped that Harper Lee would give her blessing to calling this venture the Atticus Project, after the protagonist of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” because he wanted “to get authors to write more moral characters like that one, so we can make movies about them.”

When Mr. Kirkpatrick describes the company’s mission, he often quotes its chairman, George Barna. A slender 50-year-old with riveting blue eyes, Mr. Barna is a pollster and author who contends that American Christians have lost touch with the Bible.

“Only 9 percent of all born-again adults have a biblical worldview, and only about 2 percent of all born-again teenagers do,” he explained in the conference room of the Good News Holdings office in Sherman Oaks. (Mr. Barna has written that a biblical worldview requires belief in “six specific religious views,” including “Jesus Christ lived a sinless life” and “Satan is real.”)

Mr. Barna, whose studies indicate that the mass media have more influence on Christians’ values than local churches do and that spiritual character is substantially formed by early adolescence, contends that deploying the power of the mass media to help save children’s and teenagers’ souls is a critical cultural battle that Christians must fight.

Among these like-minded allies, some differences remain about the dimensions of that fight. Mr. Barna, for instance, said in an interview: “We’re not planning to promote homosexuality. Anything that is sinful, we can’t promote.” Meanwhile, Ms. Rice, whose son, Christopher, is openly gay, has maintained there is nothing sinful about homosexuality — a view that led Tyndale House to rescind an offer to publish books related to “Christ the Lord,” the movie. Janis Long Harris, the company’s associate publisher, said that Ms. Rice’s beliefs about homosexuality were “certainly a component” of its decision.

As Mr. Kirkpatrick sees it, leading movie audiences to salvation involves one obvious tactic: Christian horror movies. The inevitable journey toward that conclusion began long ago, when he had a knack for developing teen movies at Paramount and Disney. He helped produce hits like “Grease,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Dead Poets Society,” “Top Gun” and the “Friday the 13th” franchise. His mentors included some of the industry’s most powerful executives: Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Eisner remembered Mr. Kirkpatrick as “creative, thoughtful, hard-working, committed — and eager, for sure.”

Along the way, Mr. Kirkpatrick enjoyed the spoils of success, like a white Cadillac that he says Harrison Ford “called my ‘Reverend Ike’ car.” For 10 years, he said, he did not see the inside of a grocery store. Like many of his colleagues, he threw tantrums at the office. He was so reviled that, he claims, “Bob Altman based ‘The Player’ on me,” because he refused to make two of Mr. Altman’s films. (He later admitted that Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel on which the 1992 film was based, did not have him in mind; the week before his death, Mr. Altman declined to comment on the matter.) When Mr. Kirkpatrick left Paramount, he says, the studio head, Stanley Jaffe, had his furniture thrown out on the lawn. (Mr. Jaffe did not respond to an interview request.)

Then he started his own production company, Original Voices, and made some acclaimed films, like “Big Night” (1996), with backing from German investors. But the investors fell into default, and Mr. Kirkpatrick poured his own money into the company to stay in the game, with films like “Bruno” (2000), starring and directed by Shirley MacLaine.

At his lowest, Mr. Kirkpatrick said, he still had $50,000 a year in income from various sources. His conversion did not happen in a flash, like Saul’s on the road to Damascus; instead, he said, it was “a process.” He went to the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky made famous in the 1960s by Thomas Merton, for a couple of silent retreats, and became fascinated by contemplative prayer. With Judge and Amy Reinhold, he made a documentary on the subject for FoxFaith called “Be Still,” released on home video this year. His prayer life became increasingly concerned with “spiritual warfare.”

The phrase describes a worldview that interprets human thoughts and actions as the product of unseen battles between angels and demons. Frank Peretti’s 1986 novel “This Present Darkness,” a best-selling Christian thriller, made spiritual warfare a popular notion among evangelicals, who cite as evidence for their belief verses from Chapter 6 of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, particularly Verse 12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

During several days of interviews, Mr. Kirkpatrick quoted from Ephesians 6 more often than any other passage in the Bible. Some of the verses also appear on a large poster covering the wall next to the main door of the Good News Holdings office. And they inspired the company’s “Dudleytown” series of Christian horror novels (to be published by Thomas Nelson) and films, named for a now-abandoned town in Connecticut that was said to be cursed. Mr. Kirkpatrick said that “the Weinstein Company’s faith-based initiative” is eager to become involved with the first “Dudleytown” film. (A spokeswoman for the Weinstein Company declined to comment on discussions with Good News Holdings but said the company would soon announce further details about “entering the faith-based market.”)

Greg Michael, who will write and direct the first film, called “Dudleytown,” said one of the characters, a sexually active teenage girl who mutilates herself with knives, begins hearing demonic voices as a child while playing with Barbie dolls and is ultimately taunted by the demons into driving a pair of scissors through her heart. “Just as God has a plan for our good, to prosper us and not harm us, so Satan or the forces of evil also have a plan to destroy us,” he explained. “The premise of the film is that these plans are real.”

Citing Mr. Barna’s research again, Mr. Kirkpatrick said that teenagers make up 95 percent of the audience for horror movies: “We thought, what a great way to evangelize a message of goodness, by using darkness as the antithesis to it. And actually showing a man triumphing over evil through the course of a story, which still needs to deliver all the whistles and bells of scares.”

The families who own property in Cornwall Bridge, Conn., where Dudleytown once stood, want Good News Holdings to find another way to evangelize. Legal representatives of the residential association Dark Entry Forest Inc. sent the company a cease-and-desist letter, forbidding Good News Holdings from proceeding with its project and explaining that publicity would bring more ghost hunters to the neighborhood.

Mr. Kirkpatrick said he believed the letter was a salvo in the spiritual war that seeks to thwart his company’s ministry. He said that one of his business partners at Good News Holdings, Christopher Chisholm, a founder of E! Entertainment Networks, read the letter and then “crawled under his desk and went to sleep for five hours.”

Repeatedly, Mr. Kirkpatrick also said that Mr. Chisholm remarked, “If somebody isn’t puking around here, we’re not doing our job.” It has become an office motto.