by Darryl Jones
William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of the novel is rightly understood as one of the most powerful horror films ever made. Its indelible images of radical Satanic evil literally inscribing itself on the flesh of the adolescent Regan MacNeil in scars and mutilation, disfigurements, and even words understandably proved too much for many audiences, some of whom believed that watching the film was itself an encounter with Satanic forces. The evangelist Billy Graham believed that the very film itself was possessed by the Devil. And yet The Exorcist was made with the support and participation of the Catholic Church, and features among its cast a number of Jesuit priests playing versions of themselves. The success of the film contributed directly to a spike in applications for the Catholic priesthood in the 1970s, and for obvious reasons. In both book and film, the priest-psychiatrist Father Karras and his medical colleagues exhaust every somatic and psychological explanation for Regan’s condition before confronting the obvious fact that the Devil is real, and it is only through the traditional rites and sacraments of Catholicism that he can be defeated.
The Exorcist was an important part of a post-war cultural phenomenon. The artistic and commercial success of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, based on Ira Levin’s bestselling novel of the previous year, is often credited as marking the beginning of the 1970s’ ‘satanic screen’—and, along with Romero’s genuinely radical Night of the Living Dead (also 1968), is seen by many as the foundational work of modern horror cinema. Rosemary’s Baby has nothing like the degree of religious horror to be found in The Exorcist. Levin’s novel in particular does gesture towards the travails of Catholicism in 1960s America, but in not very much detail. Rosemary Woodhouse is ‘Catholic but no longer observing’; her family had ‘not forgiven her for (a) marrying a Protestant, (b) marrying in a civil ceremony, and (c) having a mother-in-law who had had two divorces and was now married to a Jew up in Canada.’ She has nightmares about her convent education, and one startling dream sequence in which the Pope, the Devil, and JFK seem all to be conflated.
In 1977, Jeffrey Burton Russell, one of the Devil’s greatest historians, wrote scornfully about The Exorcist for presenting ‘a Devil who is stupid enough to choose to possess a little girl rather than a national government, which would enable him to do much greater harm to the world’. This seems like a reasonable observation—albeit that it rather misses the point of The Exorcist—and is certainly representative of the position of much modern popular cultural theodicy, which is, as we have seen, keen to explore the possibility of large-scale political Satanic conspiracies. Rosemary’s Baby is an important cinematic example of the major preoccupation in modern horror with the birth and upbringing of the Antichrist. In this specific concern, Rosemary’s Baby anticipates works coming out of a Protestant or even an Evangelical tradition, such as The Omen (1976), and in our own century Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s monster-selling series of Evangelical eschatological thrillers, Left Behind (1995–2007), in which the Antichrist is a Romanian politician who gets elected Secretary General of the United Nations.
The Omen, in particular, is a film which propounds, through the influence of the Evangelical pastors Robert Munger and Don Williams, who are both listed in the credits as ‘religious adviser [sic] to the producers’, a covert ideological agenda that is very much in tune with the apocalypticism of the religious right. The Omen is also markedly anti-Catholic. When Cathy Thorn (Lee Remick), wife of the American ambassador to Rome, loses her baby in childbirth, a Catholic priest suggests to her husband Robert (Gregory Peck) that they secretly switch the dead child with another born at the same time, whose mother has died. What Thorn has not been told, however, is that the baby who is to become young Damien Thorn was born of a jackal. Father Brennan (played by Patrick Troughton), the crazed Catholic priest who was present at the birth, has a birthmark on his thigh which reads 666. The implication of the film is obvious: that the Vatican, which not only nurtures and protects the Antichrist, but places him where he is in a position to do the greatest harm, as the son of ‘the future President of the United States’, is in league with the Devil. The film closes at Robert Thorn’s funeral, with little Damien holding the hands of the President and First Lady.
Ghosts and Spirits
Satanism is of necessity a limit case, an extreme far shore of belief. Being a believer in—or even a practitioner of—the supernatural or the occult does not necessarily, of course, make you a Satanist. Nor, for that matter, does enjoying books about magic, although there have been calls in the UK to ban the Harry Potter books from classrooms because, according to Tom Bennett, an advisor to the British government on matters of educational behaviour, the series ‘normalises acts of magic’ and even ‘glorifies witchcraft’ for some of its readers: ‘There are many parents who are uncomfortable with their children discussing or looking at or reading anything at all to do with the occult.’ In the US, fringe members of the religious right have conducted several public burnings of the Harry Potter books. And yet, as I suggested at the beginning of the chapter, most religions—and in fact even the very concept of religion—have their deep origins in magical belief and ritual. For many, perhaps most, people of faith, a belief in the reality of the supernatural is by no means incompatible with, say, deeply held Christianity. As any reader of the Gospels—and most particularly of St Mark, generally held to be the oldest of the Gospels and thus the closest in time to the events it describes—will testify, exorcism, the casting out of demons, was a major component of Christ’s earthly mission. While there are certainly those who remain willing to ascribe a variety of physical and psychological illnesses to demonic possession, for most of us an actual encounter with the supernatural is likely to mean ghosts and spirits, not devils and demons.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’ As someone with a research interest in the supernatural, I get asked these questions all the time (my simplistic answers are ‘no’ and ‘no’, but I have, and prefer, more nuanced ones). According to a 2016 YouGov survey, more British people believe in ghosts than in ‘a Creator’ (interestingly, only 40 per cent of self-identified British Christians claim to believe in a Creator, according to the same survey). According to a 2013 Harris Poll, 42 per cent of Americans believe in ghosts, while the figure for Britons is 52 per cent.
If anything, I am surprised that these figures are so low, as a belief in ghosts is a consistent component of human culture. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian text which is perhaps the oldest surviving work of literature, dating from 1500–2000 bc, closes with the warrior-king Gilgamesh meeting the spirit of his dead companion Enkidu, who gives him an account of the underworld. In the Old Testament Book of I Samuel, composed around 800 bc but describing events from the eleventh century bc, King Saul seeks advice on the eve of a battle with the Philistines from the Witch of Endor. The Witch summons up the ghost of Samuel, who asks Saul, ‘Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?’ In Homer’s Odyssey (eighth century bc), Odysseus, journeying through the underworld, encounters the shade of his mother Anticlea, who tells him:
You are only witnessing here the law of our mortal nature, when we come to die. We no longer have sinews keeping the bones and flesh together, but once the life-force is departed from our white bone