Evil in Pullman's books is represented by the church, called the Magisterium, whose acolytes kidnap orphans across England to subject them to horrible experiments in the frozen northern wastelands. The Northern Lights won Pullman the 1995 Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in Britain, and the final volume in his trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, was the first children's novel to be awarded the prestigious British Whitbread Book of the Year award, which it won in 2002.

With its $205 million big budget movie, New Line studios is hoping to repeat the box-office success of its Lord of the Rings series. And it aims to tap into the young audiences of cinemagoers who flocked to the five Harry Potter films making them big earners for Warner Bros. But already The Golden Compass is whipping up similar controversy to that which led to the Harry Potter series, based on the novels by British author J.K. Rowling, being accused by some on the religious right of promoting witchcraft.

The author's attack on organised religion has been toned down for the film, in a bid to attract as wide as audience as possible, something director Chris Weitz has acknowledged. "In the books the Magisterium is a version of the Catholic Church gone wildly astray from its roots," Weitz wrote in the British Daily Telegraph.

But "if that's what you want in the film, you'll be disappointed", he warned. However, the sanitised version of Pullman's book has failed to appease the Catholic League, which has 350,000 members, and which has already been sending out leaflets denouncing the film. "The Catholic League wants Christians to stay away from this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books," said president William Donohue.

"Unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books," he added. The League took on the movie world in 2006 to denounce the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code and its central tenant that Jesus Christ had a child by Mary Magdalene, whose descendants survive today.

However, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been more nuanced in its approach, warning in a review of The Golden Compass of its anti-clerical subtext, standard genre occult elements, a character born out of wedlock, a whisky-guzzling bear. But it adds that "taken purely on its own cinematic terms, [it] can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalised rejection of authoritarianism". The Golden Compass will be released in about 3000 cinemas and only 60 have so far refused to screen it, industry daily Variety said.

"It's this undisguised anti-religious theme that has numerous groups in a lather, but perhaps more of an issue for some ... will be the film's lack of exciting uplift and the almost unrelievedly nasty treatment of the young characters by a host of aggressively unpleasant elders," Variety added. AFP