On the one hand, the film clearly had folk religious effects on the audience upon its initial release. Vatican II and the reforms in the Catholic Church in the years prior to the film’s release had begun a widespread “disenchantment” within Catholicism – removing saints from the Church’s calendar and discouraging/abandoning a wide range of sacramentals, prayer, and ritual practices – and Blatty was most probably confronting this process with his story. The Catholic apologetic element in the film was obvious to many, and I have talked to several Evangelical Protestants in recent years (who otherwise believe in demons) who discourage people from seeing the film, as they consider it a piece of Catholic propaganda.

On the other hand, if the film were only touching upon Catholic folk elements (or even generic Christian ones) it would not have had the large audience that it did, so there was obviously something else going on. I first saw the film a few years after its original release as part of a drive-in double feature. I was about 12 years old at the time (circa 1977) and had grown up in a mostly non-religious home. I only attended church a few times a year for special occasions (Xmas, Easter), and the church my family attended was a very liberal, mainline Protestant group that focused exclusively on world peace and brotherly love, while the most supernatural hymn we ever sang was Kumbaya. I don’t believe I had ever even considered whether the Devil existed or not at the time, and I had certainly never heard a sermon on the topic. And yet, the film scared me in a way that no other film has (and I have seen a lot of horror films). To this day, when I debate in my mind as to the best horror film I have ever seen, I place the Exorcist “off of the table” as it were, for it somehow “feels” to me like it was “more” than a movie; that it was somehow scarier than other films on some kind of “other” level.

I think that Blaylock is on to something when he refers to the visceral reactions that audiences were having to the film. I have always been impressed by the intensity of the emotional reactions to the film – including my own. Perhaps the “repressed subconscious reaction” to the film was actually folk Christian elements that have somehow been ingrained into our worldviews and ways of thinking? Either way, the subject clearly deserves more attention.

But I think that this touches on a problem with evaluating horror movies, which is the (I think mistaken) assumption that something in a horror movie is frightening because the audience is literally afraid of the object of the fear. If that were the case, then there ought to be a clear connection between film-induced fear and fear that’s the product of a literal referent. Like, if I were literally afraid of plane crashes (which I am), I ought to also be afraid of movies about plane crashes (which I am not)–this despite the fact that I know that plane crashes are a real thing that can occur.

Simultaneously, I don’t believe in ghosts, but can still be scared by movies about ghosts. Why is the argument that the Devil, by virtue of its continued historical presence, in a privileged position regarding such fears? That unlike all other literary bogeymen, the fear of the Devil is not a product of the context in which the Devil is presented, but rather the product of an actual specific fear of the Devil that grips people who do and do not believe in it?

Obviously, we could say that even the intellectual elite, who conform to the ecclesiastical tradition of disbelief in demons, may remain subconsciously afraid of it; certainly, it’s true that the Devil has been a part of our cultural history for a long time–but, as I said, possession has been a part of our cultural history for even longer. How do we distinguish between an internalized, socially-inculcated fear in a fictional entity, and a wide-spread subconscious fear that comes from a cognitive structural source?

I think that what you are getting is a Jungian reading in which Blatty’s film taps into a dark archetype that is part of the universal human experience. So far as I know, such a film reading has never been done before. It might be an interesting project.

The psychoanalytical readings that I am dissenting from are Freudian, not Jungian. In these readings, our repressed fears are not universal, they are neuroses specific to our culture, i.e. “Americans who raised their children in the 1960s are secretly afraid of their own offspring and so seeing a possessed child frightens them.” Furthermore, I think it would be hard to publish a Jungian reading in film studies precisely because Jung’s ideas defy the secularization narrative.

I’m curious about this comment:

The secularization narrative is so powerful, that even when audiences are fainting from terror while watching The Exorcist, it is assumed that this is the catharsis of some repressed and previously unknown fear, rampant in our collective subconscious, because the idea that modern Westerners could actually be afraid of the devil seems an impossibility.

Are these necessarily incompatible conditions? It seems to me that it’s at least plausible to suggest that “Fear of the Devil” is itself a manifestation of a collective subconscious function. If the idea of a kind of separation between an increasingly rationalized ecclesiastical religion and an increasingly (or, at least, stubbornly) superstitious folk religion is accurate, then I think we’re left with an interesting conundrum: did The Exorcist reinvigorate a Western “Fear of the Devil” that can be identified as being fundamentally separate from some broader subconscious fear, or was the consequence of The Exorcist that this broader subconscious fear was given a form and name (“The Devil”) by people who otherwise would have never named it?