Let me fill in some personal background as quickly as possible:
When it comes to faith, you could define me pretty close to agnostic. My wife of 25+ years is a lapsed Catholic. There's no real conflict here, but our respective cultural backgrounds give us a different attitude towards religion in general.
Christmas is a secular affair for us; when the kids lived with us, it was all Santa and presents.
Since we joined the empty nest club, Christmas is an excuse to goof off and relax for me, actually I smirkingly pretend to celebrate Christmas while inwardly considering it "Yule," since Western society has seen fit to rip off the Pagan holiday and rebrand it as Jesus's birthday with the serial numbers filed off.
For Mrs. Penguin, it's pretty much the same, but she adds in the ritual of staying up til midnight to watch the Vatican's Midnight Mass. I watch along with her, but for me, it's something to marvel and gawk at.
Occasionally I'll look up from my eggnog and laptop gaming session to solemnly utter it a very merry Feast of Winter Veil. I'm a smart-ass, she's used to me, and we're great fun at parties.
But I do, on some levels, respect the Catholic religion. By contrast with the default religion in America - Protestant leaning into Evangelical leaning into Theocracy leaning into Nazism - the Catholics seem downright laid back by comparison.
I'm fascinated by the history of the Catholic Church, and its role in world politics through the centuries. Part of that fascination is fed through the late Robert Anton Wilson, of course, but that's another blog post.
While countering that the Catholic religion has been responsible for some evil stuff in history, I'll have to admit that it does some good in the world, even if only incidentally. There are some poor people out there getting fed and clothed. Every now and then we get a pope like Pope Francis, who's practically a granola-chomping liberal hippie by pope standards.
That's just to clear up my attitude going forward. I'm not here to make statements for or against Catholicism. What I'm really here to talk about is…
The Exorcist (1973)
Director William Friedkin is in the news this week, denouncing the sequel to his Earth-shaking landmark work as "the worst piece of sh** I've ever seen." And well he should; Exorcist II: The Heretic has a standing today as not just a bad horror movie, not just the worst horror sequel, but one of the worst movies ever made.
What can you expect when it was directed by moonbat John Boorman, the guy who did THIS to Sean Connery?
But you think that's bad?
In my movie-blogging' career, (1) (2) (3), I've made a guilty pleasure out of tracking down every cheap Exorcist rip-off that followed the 1973 landmark. Oh, these are their own blog post as well, in fact, maybe even their own book. Check out that IMDB list and laugh yourself silly.
But I keep calling The Exorcist a landmark - how groundbreaking was it?
Yes, it didn't merely release. In 1973, it landed like a comet strike, left an impact crater you could lose a Death Star in, and changed film culture forever. For. Ever. The Exorcist movie just had its 45th anniversary this last Christmas, and we're talking about it.
We are still living in the post-Exorcist world right now when it comes to horror films:
- The Nun was one of the highest-grossing movies released last year.
- The Exorcist starts off with the little girl Regan accidentally summoning a demon via an Ouija board. Guess which tired-ass wooden plot device still has its own film subgenre?
- Are movies about demonic possession still kicking? You bet your red pointy horns they are! There's six more slated for release or in production this year.
- Nuns themselves, being Catholic, get their own horror subgenre.
- Name any trope famous from The Exorcist, and a bunch of movies copied it. Spinning head. Demonic speaking voice. Holy water. It all became a million times more popular after the Exorcist.
- Not to mention that directly following The Exorcist, a whole "demon decade" gave us iconic {Catholic devil demon}-based horror titles like The Omen (1976), The Sentinel (1977), The Legacy (1978), and The Amityville Horror (1979) - plus all their sequels, of course.
Troma Movies just this last year put out a series of hilarious spoof shorts titled Exorsisters:
Yeah, we can parody The Exorcist phenomenon all day, but we just keep feeding the beast that is the Catholic Horror Legacy.
But Why Catholics?
That's a good question for the ages.
Let's get one obvious effect out of the way: Catholics have uniforms.
If you're making a movie and your character is from some other Christian religion, they dress like everybody else, so you'll have to explain that this guy's a Baptist preacher, a Mormon deacon, or whatever. But Catholics have popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, monks, and even sexy schoolgirls in miniskirts, all so distinguishable that you can dress as any one of them for Halloween and have everybody recognize you right away.
So if you need a religious hero to fight the demon in your horror movie, it doesn't take much convincing to just have central casting send over a priest and a couple of nuns and be done with it.
But beyond that, if you really drill into some theological study, you'll find that Christianity, in general, does one distinguishing thing different: The belief in an actual Satan, Hell, and minions of bat-winged demons.
Yes, plenty of other religions have "demons," but they're more like lesser mischievous spirits at worst, not necessarily evil at best.
The concept of Hades was originally just a neutral place of the afterlife, not particularly evil or good; it took Christians to color it with red markers and make it a lake of fire. Satan himself is a cultural stew of Greek cloven-hoofed trickster and vague suggestions from other religions. Even Islam, closest cousin of Christianity (whether either of them wants to admit it or not), doesn't consider Satan to be the originator of evil, just a tempter towards same.
Christianity is the only religion to personify evil, give it a name, a house, and a backstory, and insist it exists in a physical sense.
Pew research in 2015 found 70% of American Christian adults believe in a fire-and-brimstone hell, the highest of any polled religion. America being mostly Christian, Gallop 2007 found 70% believe in Satan.
We don't mean "as a metaphor for evil" or "in a symbolic sense" or "complementary to believe in God," we mean that SEVENTY PERCENT OF THESE PEOPLE THINK THERE'S LITERALLY A GUY DRESSED LIKE THIS RUNNING AROUND:
And in case you were hoping those Millennials you hear about so much are out to renounce religion, in 2013 63% of them believed "in the notion that invisible, non-corporeal entities called 'demons' can take partial or total control of human beings." Like a hermit crab moving into a shell. Extending our condolences to the late Carl Sagan; he tried his best.
Obviously, if you're going to make a horror movie and you're picking out a monster, Ol' Scratch looks like a great choice.
Can you imagine how much scarier vampire movies would be if you really, truly believed in vampires?
Why bother inventing some new horror and have to sell it to the audience?
Why bother with the old Universal horror canon?
Frankenstein, Wolfman, the Mummy, the Phantom of the Opera, nobody has taken these guys seriously in years. Just say "demon" and you have a guaranteed delivered audience.
None of which comes from the Bible, BTW!
If you study the actual Bible itself, you won't find many bases for these modern Western conceptions of Satan, Hell, demons, possession, or exorcisms. The book of Genesis only mentions a talking snake. Other references only describe "a satan" or an "angel of Yahweh" or some-such. It isn't until the book of Job, a work of prose, that a solidified character of Satan emerges.
There is mention of "Lucifer," in the book of Isiah, but that's even vaguer with phrases like "bringer of dawn" and "shining star" being referenced more than anybody with goat features. Only in Revelation do we get at last "that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan."
Later verses in Revelation rave about a "great red dragon," a beast with "ten horns and seven heads," and all kinds of crazy visions, but seriously, you tell me what the crackers are going on by that point?
"And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear's, and its mouth was like a lion's mouth."
That one is the beast which the dragon controls, but again, neither of those are named Satan in the same sentence. Religious scholars trip all over themselves telling us what these phrases are supposed to mean, but when the Bible gets into its freakiest visions, this is all the explanation I really need.
Ditto "hell" there are references to good old "Hades," "Gehenna," and other metaphors, and the last book of Revelation finally describes "a lake of fire burning with brimstone." But nothing like this movie hell.
As for demon possession itself, we're really out of luck here. The Old Testament makes one vague reference to King Saul falling sick with "evil spirit." The New Testament gets meaty with Jesus himself casting out demons all the time, in the Synoptic Gospels Mathew, Mark, and Luke, but even this amounts to a few vague accounts here and there.
For the record, here's a (partial) list of things the Bible doesn't mention in regards to Satan, hell, or demons:
- that demons can possess a house, building, or other structure
- Ouija boards
- being possessed by demons causes head-spinning, barfing pea soup, etc.
- the physical appearance of Satan as having horns, goat's legs, hooves, and a pitchfork
- that Satan is in charge of Hell
- the idea of a sinner going directly to Hell upon death
- demons living in hell
- pentagrams
- the physical appearance of demons
- that Satan buys souls in exchange for favors or conducts other transactions
- demons living in service of Satan or doing his bidding
- that Satan collects human souls like Pokemon
So in conclusion to this point, Western civilization is pretty far along fictionalizing entire mythology out of a combination of skimmed scripture, late-night Robert Tilton ravings, and half-borrowed / half-denied elements from history's mythology closet. This amalgam of folk superstition has emerged as one of the scariest dogmas ever cooked up. Of course, it's going to dominate horror.
And Why The Exorcist?
That's actually a much easier question to answer! We even have some help from horror author Stephen King in his landmark non-fiction book of horror genre analysis Danse Macabre, where he writes about the cultural influences on horror:
> "If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal - to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide. In many cases - particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies - the fearsexpressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel'sInvasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats - the B-picture as tabloid editorial - they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society."
...snip…
> "The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demonout of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair […] Substantatively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. […] Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan MacNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock."
So the idea that Stephen King picks at here and there is that The Exorcist, and much of the demon-kid stories of that same time period, were the reaction to the Baby Boomers' Generation Gap. This rings very true; horror movies play with the fears already present in the audience, which is why the post-atomic era of the 1950s had so many giant monsters who were exposed to radioactive fallout.
But the 1960s weren't the only generation where there was a gap. Likewise, especially in Western culture, there is a continuous struggle between the religious conservative and the atheist progressive. For religious parents who just can't understand why Junior is getting his nose pierced and can't see what a great guy Trump is, the answer is clearly: He's possessed by demons!
Of course!
We ran out of space before we got to discuss the Satanic Panic proper, but honestly, to be Christian means to be in a Satanic panic 24/7, at least for 70% of Christians.
WHEN Will We Move On?
Who knows?
It's high time; I, for one, am so sick of demons, devils, nuns, priests, crucifixes in horror that I'm just screaming in my theater seat: "GET YOUR RELIGION OUT OF MY MOVIE!" It's driven me to Indonesian flicks like Mystics of Bali, where at least the religion isn't Catholic for a change.
