Commentary: The Surprising Optimism of the Exorcism Sub-Genre

By Nathan Rabin

When an indignant believer tweeted of the Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate, “Libs saw how the anti-woke crowd embraced Sydney Sweeney as their new darling and right away had to shove her in this blasphemous, satanic, feminist, pro-abortion, anti-life movie degrading Christians. This movie also debases Mary, mother of Christ!” Neon, the indie studio behind the nun-based horror film, did not run away from the criticism.

Instead, they leaned into the controversy by printing the above tweet on a tee-shirt, featuring it in advertising where a more conventionally positive blurb would otherwise go, and offering discounted tickets for six dollars and sixty-six cents as a cheekily Satanic publicity stunt.

As is almost invariably the case, the hype was overblown, but it did contain an element of truth. Satanic Christian horror movies come in two varieties. There is the birth of the evil version found in Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen. Immaculate belongs to this subgenre. Its ending is anything but happy, particularly from a Catholic perspective. That’s also true of 1976’s The Omen. That ornery little brat Damien lived through the end of The Omen and its 1978 sequel before meeting an unfortunate end in 1981’s The Final Conflict. 

Birthing Evil

Birth-of-evil horror movies often end on ambiguous notes that lean toward the malevolent. Think of the ending of 1967’s Rosemary’s Baby; nothing good would ever happen for that poor woman.

The other primary kind of Satan-themed horror movie is the exorcism variation, most famously found in The Exorcist, its lesser sequels, and a slew of movies with exorcist or exorcism in the title, including the recent surprise hit The Pope’s Exorcist. 

The Pope’s Exorcist is based on a “nonfiction” book by Father Gabriele Amorth. He claims to have performed one hundred sixty thousand exorcisms over the course of his career, battling evil and single-handedly delivering a death blow to ol’ Scratch.

There is a word for people who make such claims: liars. The Pope’s Exorcist chronicles just one of the fibbing Father’s many exorcisms, so it guarantees a happy ending.

William Friedkin, the secular Jewish auteur who launched the exorcism-derived horror boom with his iconic 1973 smash The Exorcist, also used Amorth as the basis for a 2017 documentary about the priest’s career.

Satanic Irony

For all of their darkness, violence, graphic imagery, and crucifix-aided masturbation, exorcism-based movies also offer a glimmer of hope.

The reason: movies about exorcisms revolve around a Catholic conception of God and the Devil, where the faithful are forever being challenged by evil and emerging victorious.

The Devil plays a major role in Catholic theology as a central supporting character and antagonist for God, Jesus, and humanity. The forces of good are forever on the ropes. They are perpetually on the verge of losing before a last-second reversal worth of the World Wrestling Federation puts good over evil.

In that respect, the Devil resembles the Washington Generals squaring off against The Harlem Globetrotters. Beelzebub’s sacred destiny is always to fail. The Generals’ job is to be as unimpressive as possible but an antithetical dynamic comes into play with exorcism movies.

An entity as all-powerful as God demands an enemy who is almost as powerful. Satan has long played that role in Christian mythology and in exorcism-based films. So the most reverent thing Friedkin could do when directing The Exorcist was to make the Devil seem as terrifying as possible.

The purpose of The Exorcist and all of the films that have followed is to make audiences terrified of Satan but also of God since the big guy upstairs is the Devil’s boss, as well as the deity that made Lucifer.

The Haunting

The Exorcist made such an indelible impact on audiences and studios that even though every sequel and prequel, with the exception of 1990’s The Exorcist III, was a pronounced critical and commercial failure, Blumhouse and Universal recently paid between 400 and 600 million dollars for the worldwide rights to an Exorcist trilogy.

So even though the David Gordon Green-directed 2023 legacy sequel The Exorcist: Believer was a critical flop that underperformed at the box office, Blumhouse has promised more entries in a franchise simultaneously deathless and cursed.

Blumhouse and Universal will undoubtedly try to make back some of the fortune they sunk into the rights to The Exorcist. That means that the Devil will surely return to the big screen in more wildly unnecessary sequels and prequels to get his behind climactically kicked by God and all that is righteous and holy all over again.

The Exorcist and its progeny make a point of giving the devil his due as an adversary and God’s misguided frenemy. Yet no matter how bleak and Satan-y things get, they are almost invariably on the side of God, the universe’s ultimate winner.

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This post was previously published on Wealth of Geeks.

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