Bradford Scobie and Larry Fessenden in 'Satan Hates You.' Glass Eye Pix/Monsterpants

As an amateur historian of off-beat genre cinema, filmmaker James Felix McKenney has long taken inspiration from the more peculiar reaches of American popular culture. His 2006 feature "Automatons," for instance, was about a robot war in a future dystopia, shot in an obsolete format: black-and-white Super 8 film. "It's like when you're watching TV as a kid, before cable," said Mr. McKenney, 42, explaining one of his formative influences, "and you come across something weird on a channel that barely comes in."

The title of the New York-based director's latest effort, "Satan Hates You," suggests it's a horror movie. It has all the elements, played to a tragic-comic hilt: demonic spirits, serial killings, drug overdoses, lesbian Wiccans, back-alley abortions and sex crimes. But it's really more of a cautionary tale. The film, which opens Friday at the recently opened reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, is Mr. McKenney's homage to the neglected form of religious psychodrama sometimes known as "Christ-ploitation."

The films of this genre, often financed by church congregations and screened on the revival circuit, were like drive-in movies meant to steer audiences to Jesus. They served as modern-day parables, showing hopeless sinners in the grip of sex, drugs, rock music, devil worship, homosexuality and communism, lost in a spiral to eternal damnation and urged to choose God's mercy.

"There's a whole aesthetic that I really like," Mr. McKenney said. He cited North Carolina producer Ron Ormond's "The Burning Hell" (1974) as a classic of the form. "20,000 Degrees Fahrenheit and Not a Drop of Water," warned the movie's forbidding tagline, but the "Burning Hell" production faced the same challenges as any low-budget genre film. "It's like they're saying, 'We don't have the money but we're going to do this period drama, and show Hell with church members wearing bed sheets, and use papier-mâché props.'"

The filmmaker, who produced "Satan Hates You" with indie maven Larry Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix company, wanted to acknowledge a bygone era. "They aren't really making movies like that anymore," he said, lamenting that the Christian independent film industry long ago turned to "fake action movies" like "The Omega Code," leaving its collection-plate budget, wing-and-a-prayer roots behind.

Shot on the cheap in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, "Satan Hates You" walks a fine line between campy laughs and sincere appreciation. Its lost souls— Marc (Don Wood, of the PBS series "Colonial House"), a closeted gay man drowning in alcohol, and Wendy (Christine Spencer), a promiscuous party girl—play it straight. But the deliberately cheesy special effects and comic elements, including Mr. Fessenden as a chortling imp in a smoking jacket, keep the tone lively.

"Jim actually makes a case for religion in the course of pooh-poohing it," said Angus Scrimm, the 84-year-old horror film regular best-known for his roles in the "Phantasm" franchise. Mr. Scrimm, who has worked with Mr. McKenney twice before, is cast against type as the inspirational Dr. Michael Gabriel. "I leapt at the part, because with my background in the horror ghetto, no one in my lifetime was ever going to ask me to be an angel."

Mr. McKenney, a New England native whose background in comic books and theater primed his late-blooming ambitions in the movies, has two more films in the works. He's in post-production on what he called a "Creature From the Black Lagoon on ice" thriller starring Michael Rooker, and next year will shoot "The Girl From Mars," an alien romance starring Pauley Perrette (known to TV audiences as the Goth forensic scientist on the CBS series "NCIS").

Meanwhile, Mr. McKenney still hopes to win some fans from the fundamentalist Christian community. "People don't know what to make of it," he said, disappointed that efforts to reach out to church groups came to naught. "We actually got it into a Christian film festival in Wales. They showed it at 11:30 in the morning. But I never heard anything."