The Possession Film and the Return of the Religious

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Here is the strange fact that sits under the whole subgenre. Church attendance across the West has fallen for fifty years, catechism has emptied out of ordinary life, and yet audiences who could not recite the Nicene Creed at gunpoint will pay to sit in the dark and watch a Roman Catholic priest sprinkle holy water at a snarling child and root for the water to work. The possession film is the last place in mainstream cinema where the rite still functions, where Latin still binds and faith still has teeth. It is horror’s back door into theology, and it keeps swinging open because the genre solved a problem the culture never did.

Exorcism - vo.rs

The Possession Film and the Return of the Religious