TheoFantastique: Joe, as a younger scholar who likely did not see The Exorcist when it appeared in theaters in the 1970s, what is the personal interest in it for you personally and as a researcher in religion and theology?

Joseph Laycock: As I allude to in the paper, I first saw The Exorcist when it was re-released in 2000.  I saw the premiere at the SXSW music and film festival in Austin, Texas.  I remember there was a bat flying around the theater. (Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world).  I sat in the back row and the man sitting in front of me turned out to be William Peter Blatty himself.  Afterwards he went before the audience and took questions.  There were a lot of film buffs and he seemed slightly annoyed by their inquiries.  He must have repeated three times that nothing was meant to be symbolic and that everything in his story was based on actual experience.

I didn’t get around to reading the novel until the summer of 2008, but when I did I immediately wanted to write a paper on it.  I think what struck me most was not the supernatural elements but the little things, like a character chanting “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.”  I remember thinking that The Exorcist is a sort of time capsule of what America’s religious landscape looked like circa 1970.  Similarly, the description of Father Karras’ crisis of faith and his struggle to reconcile it with his scientific training has an amazing verisimilitude that I thought could only come from actual experience.  The final catalyst in starting this project was working with Dr. Jon Roberts of Boston University.  Roberts uses The Exorcist in a course on American religious history for the very reasons I’ve described.

TheoFantastique: How influential was The Exorcist both on the original audiences who watched it decades ago, and in the subsequent development of aspects of pop culture?

Joseph Laycock: In the 1970s, The Exorcist was on the New York Times best-seller list for fifty-five weeks.  Its commercial success paved the way for Stephen King and other best-selling horror novelists.  But it was the film adaptation in 1973 that is most remembered.

A Time article described a line 5,000 people long to buy tickets.  And in almost every screening of the film, people would become overwhelmed and have to leave, faint, and, of course, vomit.  There are numerous articles from 1973 describing theaters soaked in vomit after showing The Exorcist.  The film even appears in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, because it was linked to cases of psychosis.  It also created a demand for actual exorcisms.  Numerous charismatic “deliverance ministries” arose after the film.

Obviously, nothing like that happened when I saw The Exorcist in 2000.  Since the re-release you can find Regan’s demonic face covered with vomit grinning at you from T-shirts and even bobble-head toys.  The “hipster” culture has been accused of “fetishizing authenticity” as they plunder all of post-war culture searching for fresh artifacts of retro chic.  Sadly, I think this has become the fate of The Exorcist. On the other hand, only a handful of horror movies are remembered in this fashion.  I think Generation Y has fetishized The Exorcist precisely because they can sense its authenticity.

TheoFantastique: Can you sketch the ways in which the film has been interpreted critically and how this contrasts with your own interpretive approach?

Joseph Laycock: Relatively little has been written on the novel, but volumes have been written on the film.  One thing I noticed was resistance to the idea that this could actually be a story about religion.  Numerous theorists (including Stephen King) have read possession as code for something else that we fear either consciously or sub-consciously. According to most film theorists, The Exorcist is actually about fear of the counter-culture, fear of children, fear of women, etc.  Conversely, many critics who thought The Exorcist was actually about demonic possession found it distasteful.  S.T. Joshi, for instance, characterizes Blatty as a Catholic evangelist and The Exorcist as a sort of hellfire sermon.

While psychoanalytical readings are interesting, I don’t believe they can explain the behavior of audiences watching The Exorcist in 1973.  I think those reactions can be attributed to a very literal fear of demonic possession.  Furthermore, I think these readings of the film point to a disconnect between popular religion and the idea of secularization.  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.

TheoFantastique: How might The Exorcist reflect author William Peter Blatty’s life experiences?

Joseph Laycock: Blatty has described himself as a “relaxed Catholic” and his spiritual life is reflected in both the Catholic character Father Karras and the secular character Chris MacNeil.  Like Karras, Blatty was raised by his mother in extreme poverty and was extremely troubled by her death.  He attended Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, which serves as the setting for The Exorcist. Blatty suffered the same doubts as Father Karras and described a longing for a miracle that might shore up his faith.  This “miracle” came in 1949 when a story appeared in The Washington Post about a boy from Mount Ranier, Maryland who had become possessed and been successfully exorcised.  Blatty had already heard rumors of the exorcism through the Jesuits and successfully tracked down the exorcist.  However, he would not begin writing his novel for another twenty years.  After Georgetown, Blatty learned Arabic and worked for the US Information Agency in Beirut.  His time in the Middle East became the inspiration for the opening scene of The Exorcist in Iraq.

Chris MacNeil and her family are based directly on the actress Shirley MacLaine who was once Blatty’s neighbor.  MacLaine was an actress and single mother with a young daughter.  MacLaine’s French housekeepers were also turned into characters, as was the British director J. Lee Thompson.  Although MacNeil is not religious she experiments with a variety of spiritual practices, including using a Ouija board “to access her unconscious.”  In fact, Blatty used a Ouija board after the death of his mother and, according to MacLaine, once organized a séance at her house.

TheoFantastique: Can you describe secularization theory and how The Exorcist would seem to counter this in your thesis regarding folk piety?

Joseph Laycock: There are two versions of what has been called, “The cultural myth of universal secularization.”  In one version, belief in the supernatural is unable to compete with scientific rationalism: Accordingly, religion will be forced to renounce supernaturalism or else die out.  In another variant, religion will continue to exist but only as a very private phenomenon with no social or political significance.  While both these trends have occurred in Western culture, most sociologists of religion now agree that any sort of universal secularization is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

However, the secularization narrative carried a lot of weight when Blatty was writing his novel.  The Exorcist was written in 1969, three years after Time magazine ran its famous cover asking “Is God Dead?”  A Gallup poll taken in January 1970 indicated that 75 percent of survey respondents felt religion was losing influence.  This is the highest percentage ever recorded since Gallup began this poll in 1957.  I argue that by simply showing the religious elements from his own life-world in his novel, Blatty created a counter-narrative to the myth of universal secularization.  I also think that this critique is part of the appeal of The Exorcist.  For people who wanted to believe in demons, The Exorcist gave them permission to do so even if the intellectual elite didn’t.

The Achilles’ heel of the secularization narrative is folk piety.  Folk piety, or popular religion, is distinct from ecclesiastical religion, the official doctrines of the church.  Since the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church has been forced to take an increasingly guarded position about the supernatural.  Issues of exorcism and the demonic in particular, are often regarded as a source of embarrassment by the modern church.  This trend would seem to support the idea of universal secularization.  However, supernaturalism lives on in the form of folk piety.  The Exorcist portrays numerous examples of supernaturalism and the fantastic from American folk piety such the belief in demons, the use of Ouija boards, parapsychology, and rumors of Satanic cults.

Today, sociological data suggests that the America Blatty presents in The Exorcist is accurate.  While ecclesiastical religion may frown at talk of demons, we have numerous polls indicating that many Americans do believe that angels and demons are active in the world.  Furthermore, these beliefs are not always private but are continually leaking into the political sphere.  One example of this comes from a research report on a Christian picket of pornography.  98 percent of the picketers reported a belief in an active personal “transcendent” force of evil that was directly involved in pornography.  Another example is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has openly described his participation in an exorcism.  Clearly, supernaturalism is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon.

TheoFantastique: One aspect of disenchantment that I find intriguing, and which I wish more ecclesiastical authorities would become aware of, is Weber’s idea that you discuss in your paper wherein “church apologists had a hand in bringing about ‘the disenchantment of the world’ as they defended their doctrines through rationalization, banishing the supernatural to an increasingly transcendent role.” Doesn’t this mean that ecclesiastical authorities have to walk a fine line in late modernity in seeking both rationality and a level of enchantment?

Joseph Laycock: Weber argues that church apologists were forced to “rationalize” their doctrines or else be accused of superstition.  So in ecclesiastical religion, the supernatural became increasingly less immanent and more transcendent.  These changes made religious doctrine more resistant to the critiques of rationalists, but they also made religion less meaningful to practitioners.

The process of disenchantment can be seen quite starkly in the Christian tradition of exorcism.  There are virtually no demons at all in the Hebrew Bible.  By contrast, the world of the New Testament is full of demons.  Christians have the power to cast them out and, in their own way, demons affirm that Jesus is the messiah and that God is immanent in the world.  It seems that the early Christian church had a rich tradition of exorcism.  Early writings suggest that Pagans sometimes went to Christians for exorcisms, and this may have furthered the spread of Christianity.

This changed after the Protestant Reformation, which Weber cites as a seminal moment in the history of disenchantment.  Exorcists were accused of being in league with the demons (a similar accusation is made against Jesus in the Gospel of Luke).  Not wanting to lose face in front of their Protestant critics, Catholic authorities began to regulate who could perform an exorcism and to consolidate what had been essentially a folk tradition into the formal rite of exorcism that appears in the Ritual Romanum, written in 1614.  (A passage from this text appears in the novel).

With the rise of medical science, exorcism became even more regulated and increasingly deferential to scientific authority.  While the church has not denied the reality of possession entirely, the criteria for a case of genuine possession are now so demanding that an official exorcism is nearly impossible to obtain in developed countries.  Of course, rationalism is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has left many Catholics dissatisfied.  Those seeking an exorcism now frequently turn to groups that have splintered from the Catholic Church or to charismatic Protestant movements.

For Weber, there was no happy medium to be found: We can either stubbornly cling to supernaturalism, or we can stoically choose the path of rationalism and disenchantment.  Both reactions can be found among American Catholic clergy and The Exorcist actually exasperated these differences.  I think that the ad hoc solution lies in the division of labor between ecclesiastical religion and folk piety: The church can worry about reconciling religion and reason, while the lay people are free to pursue meaning through supernaturalism.  In some cases, Catholic clergy have arranged “under the table” exorcisms in order to maintain this division of labor.

TheoFantastique: How is folk piety expressed through the rite of exorcism and ouija boards in the film and its cultural context?

Joseph Laycock: Ouija boards were incredibly popular when Blatty was writing The Exorcist.  There was also a Ouija board connected to the Mount Ranier exorcism.  Structurally, using a Ouija board is very similar to conducting an exorcism.  Both activities involve calling out, engaging, and then dismissing a supernatural being and they are both regarded as perilous endeavors.  Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church has attempted to control both practices.  A campaign to warn American Catholics about the spiritual dangers of Ouija boards was launched as early as 1918.

Blatty seems to have experimented with Ouija boards for the same reason he was interested in exorcisms: He wanted a direct experience of the supernatural that ecclesiastical religion could no longer provide.  I think that most people who are interested in these activities have similar motives.

TheoFantastique: You conclude that The Exorcist “fueled a resurgence of folk piety” for audiences of the 1970s. How might contemporary films that touch on the demonic, particularly in the context of apocalyptic, serve the same function in our time?

Joseph Laycock: Millennial expectations are often not amenable to established religious institutions.  In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI commented that the Book of Revelation is not about imminent catastrophe but the struggle of Christian churches in Asia in the first century.  Benedict’s historical-critical reading still has a message that is relevant for modern Christians, but it makes poor fodder for charismatic religious movements or Hollywood movies.  Recent apocalyptic films like Knowing and the upcoming Legion draw on folk piety rather than ecclesiastical religion.  These films take a few elements from the Christian tradition and combine them with occultism, extra-terrestrials, and fears of planet-wide disasters.  The result is a supernatural story that seems somehow both strange and familiar.

Tonight I saw Paranormal Activity, which (spoiler alert!) I think is actually a re-telling of the Book of Tobit.  So far this film has grossed over $48 million and seems destined to be a cult classic.  It may be the closest thing the millennial generation will ever have to The Exorcist. As the title suggests, it derives its plausibility more from fringe science than from Catholic tradition but the same elements are there including demonology and the ubiquitous Ouija board.  Although no one vomited, as the credits rolled someone shouted, “That was the scariest movie I’ve seen in my life!”  What is interesting is that the events on the screen were not scary.  Most of the shrieks and gasps were in response to things as mundane as thumps or a door slamming.  These elements are frightening because of what Julia Kristeva calls “intertextuality.”  Regardless of their religious affiliation, the audience knew from folk piety what a door slamming at 3 AM signifies.  It this knowledge, and the belief that such things might actually happen, that makes the slamming door scary.

Obviously, a film like Paranormal Activity could not have been created, let alone frightening, if there was not already widespread interest in investigating the paranormal.  But it is also likely that in response to this film more people will discover their houses are haunted, conduct amateur experiments in parapsychology, and report belief in demons on Gallup polls.  As with The Exorcist and exorcism, art imitates life and life imitates art.

TheoFantastique: Joe, thanks again for discussing your article. I appreciate your research interests.

TheoFantastique: Thank you for an enjoyable read, and for your willingness to discuss the subject matter. How did you come to develop the personal interest in an exploration of the “occult” in general, and particularly its expression or influence in cinema, and how are you defining the term?

Carrol Fry: The term occult is pretty slippery, but in general it means hidden knowledge and the ability to alter what we think of as reality through esoteric practices.

How I got interested in the occult is a long story. I discovered the joys of public radio production when I first came to Northwest Missouri State, as the local radio station, KXCV, was anxious to get faculty participation. I discovered I had a knack for interviewing and scripting and did a number of pieces on folklore and oral history for local distribution. I had sort of run out of ideas for programs, and about that time an India Airlines plane was blown up by Sikh terrorists—must have been about 1985. I was talking to my sister, who lived in Kansas City, on the telephone and happened to mention the incident. “What’s a Sikh?” I asked. “Well you know, she responded, “they’re the people who operate the Golden Temple [a vegetarian restaurant in K. C.].” We had eaten there on a couple of occasions, and the kids who ran it were young Caucasians who dressed in vaguely looking Indian garb. I thought they were a bunch of zoned out hippies. The boys had long hair and beards (if they could grow one), and the girls were similar in appearance (without the beards). Now that’s interesting, I thought. Right here in the middle of the Bible Belt. I started checking around and found that Sikhism was just one of many religions practiced here that were well outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. So I decided to do a series on new religious movements and did five 30-minute documentaries that we distributed nationally by satellite. Somehow (and I don’t remember now how I stumbled onto it), I discovered Wicca and did one of the programs on New Paganism. I thought it was by far the most interesting of those religions I met, because it connected to some of my readings and to film. I went on to do documentaries on cults and intentional communities, but wrote journal articles on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s and Katherine Kurtz’s adaptation of the Old Religion in fiction. And I kept up my Neo-Pagan contacts. When I started seeing film adaptations of Neo-Paganism, I thought it was time to consider occult religions in general as they are adapted on screen. Hence, Cinema of the Occult.

By the way, for convenience and brevity, I mix the terms Wicca (or the Old Religion to its practitioners) and Neo-Paganism, and I should specify that Wicca is one of a larger group of return to occult Pagan religions.

 
TheoFantastique: You state in your introduction that as filmmakers draw upon the occult it is usually part of a general plausibility mechanism for storytelling, and that it is “usually an extrapolation of its potential to establish sensational plots rather than a totally correct representation.” Given certain aspects of the culture wars where fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, as well as some Neo-Pagans, have complained about such elements in film as either propaganda tool for the occult, or failing to properly represent esoteric belief, isn’t your observation important for viewers to remember? In other words, the esoteric is drawn upon for frame of reference and storytelling in order to create what might be viewed as new forms of fairytale and perhaps the culture wars are unwarranted on one level and might be telling us something else about the continued clashes between certain religious or spiritual subcultures. What would your thoughts be on this?
 
Carol Fry: Movies about the occult are, well, movies after all and are made for profit not education. The occult is by its nature sensational and sensationalism sells. Filmmakers have target audiences, but they want to reach a broad spectrum of customers. And you have to remember that a lot of films that adapt occult paths are part of the horror genre, and that audience demands sensationalism. So even those Wiccan films that give a favorable spin to the Old Religion might well offend not only Wiccans but conservative Christians, the former because they don’t accurately reflect their beliefs and practices and the latter because they are made at all. I think the one Neo-Pagan film that most Pagans I’ve met would, and do, enjoy is The Wicker Man. This is ironic because director­­­ Robin Hardy and script writer Anthony Shaffer intended it to be a warning against occult practices as leading to cults. As I say in my book, those Wiccan films that reflect negatively on the Old Religion, B movies such as Silent Night Deadly Night IV: the Initiation or Suspiria are unrelentingly sexist and even misogynist and reflect on the challenge to male authority that feminist Wicca presents for some people.
 
TheoFantastique: You also state in the book that the occult in cinema might be construed as a reflection of “the spiritual searching of those who seek alternatives to traditional religious teachings the quest for the numinous.” Can you illustrate or expand on this?
 
Carol Fry: TIME recently had a cover issue on the decline of Christianity. The feature article makes a good case that most Christian and Jewish paths, excluding the more, uh, “enthusiastic” denominations, have suffered losses and that political clout of conservative Christianity has declined. The Pentecostals and Southern Baptists have responded to the findings of science and the new Darwinism by simply denying anything that conflicts with biblical teachings, and those who search for the reassurance of certainty respond favorably to that line. But to many others, the sexism and authoritarianism of the Religious Right and the Catholic Church are simply unacceptable. Mainstream Christianity has failed to provide an alternative to those who actually think about spiritual matters. I don’t think there is much of a decrease in spirituality in the U. S., but many simply don’t find it in churches. Many of those who are seekers find that spirituality in new religious movements—African American Islam, the Baha’i Faith, various eastern religions, and yes, New Age and occult paths.

TheoFantastique: One of the recurring features of horror in general, but particularly in horror cinema that draws upon the occult, is a depiction of our fear of the Other. Can you describe this phenomenon and provide a few examples of how this takes place in occult cinema?
 
Carol Fry: Actually, I’m working on a book to be called Primal Screams, Primal Dreams that addresses this issue in depth. The term Other has become one of those undigested buzz words in post-modern criticism since the rediscovery of Hegel and the adaptation of the term by neo-Freudians like Lacan. The other as critical concept gets many different adaptations. To Marxists, for instance, it generally refers to minorities, Third World countries, gays, women, all those marginalized by Western society.

I mean something quite different based on the writings of sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson, Desmond Morris, and recently Richard Dawkins and many others, who speculate that adaptation through survival of the fittest and natural selection did more that create our physical form. These forces of adaptation also created the “whisper within” from thousands of years of evolutionary adaptive behavior. Successful adaptation, for instance, meant being suspicious of the other from the next valley who might kill you and take your women and children. Until recently, psychology and sociology had pretty much adapted the Lockean concept of the mind being a blank tablet at birth, on which experience (and association) writes, the tabula rasa. Sociobiologists would suggest that the tabula isn’t so rasa after all: that we are genetically prompted for many kinds of behavior, including fear of the other, who looks and behaves differently and who poses a perceived threat to our genetic kin group and territory. We see everywhere evidence of this fear of the other: at the mildest and probably most harmless level acted out in sports rivalries (the Yankees and Red Sox) but ranging to tragic violence between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, Shi’ite and Suni in Iraq, Nazi Germany’s holocaust against Jews, Poles, and homosexuals in the death camps, and the killing fields in Viet Nam. Killing in these instances is perceived as o.k. because those killed are other. There is a nature/nurture issue here, of course, as education leads us to civilized behavior despite the whisper within. Anyway, that’s a long answer to the question. I believe the horror genre, as in the Satanic film especially, plays on our fear of the other and the invasions of territory for its evoking vicarious fear. This fear of the other seems an obvious effect in the early vampire novels and films, werewolf, zombie, and slasher films which establish our fear and hatred of this invading other and prompts our satisfaction with the vampire’s stake in the heart (although that formula seems to be changing as we get romantic vampires), the werewolf’s silver bullet, and head shot for the zombie.
 

TheoFantastique: In my view, a neglected cinematic gem that incorporates “New Age” ideas in connection with near-death experiences (NDEs) is Flatliners. You discusses this in your chapter on New Age in film. Can you touch on this as an example of a thriller incorporating New Age ideas?
 
Carol Fry: Yes, I thought Flatliners was one of the better New Age films, not only in its adaptation of the near death experience phenomenon but in the creation of screen ambiance and visual symbolism. I don’t think those who believe in NDEs would have much objection to the film’s treatment of the concept. I thought the poster child for New Age movies was an even more neglected classic, Jacob’s Ladder. Few people saw it in theatres when it came out, but it has become a cult classic of sorts in DVD. The darned film is so deep and so demanding that few people are prepared to deal with and understand its message, which is, of course, detachment, as described in the works of Meister Eckhart, whose name comes up at a critical moment in the film. Meister Eckhart is a major inspiration in the New Age movement, even though he wrote 600 years ago.

TheoFantastique: How has the portrayal of Satan and the satanic changed over the course of horror films?
 
Carol Fry: I think the fear of the New World Order among conservatives and especial conservative Christians has given a different spin to the Satanic film. The cult mania starting in the sixties and all the folklore about Satanic groups has created a great potential other. The Omen was a dandy horror film, but as the franchise developed it because more and more an experience in vicarious paranoia about the enemy within. So the Satanic film has gone from being a religious allegory in Faust movies like The Devil and Daniel Webster and The Sorrows of Satan to the political subtext from all the Omen sequels and other films of that type.

TheoFantastique: Cinema has also changed in its depiction of the witch. Are fairytale depictions as in Harry Potter, as well as those which depict the empowerment of the feminine perhaps the most common modes of expression in contemporary film?
 
Carrol Fry: Yes, the empowerment of the feminine is the most popular adaptation, whether the film is supportive of critical. I’m sure this has to do with attracting an audience for the film. But Pagans might well feel that Hollywood slights their spiritual paths by concentrating nearly exclusively on feminist Wicca, and then just on the most sensational elements. By the way, there’s a strong subtext of feminist Wicca in The Da Vinci Code that no one much notices, most obviously in Sophie’s (named for Sophia from the Gnostic tradition) blunder’s into a Wiccan ceremony in which her grandfather is “drawing down the moon” as a coven ceremony. There are a few other witch films that are not part of the culture wars, romantic films such as I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle that are neither the silly version of witches (that have nothing to do with Neo-Paganism) such as the Harry Potter novels and films nor adaptations of Wicca.
 
TheoFantastique: Spiritualism is another aspect you touch on in your book. In your thinking, what films best illustrate this significant expression of the occult in cinema?
 
Carrol Fry: Spiritualism makes a wonderful frame for ghost movies. Not all ghost movies adapt Spiritualism, of course. A true Spiritualist film uses Spiritualist beliefs on communication with spirits, why spirits remain behind as part of the frame and/or descriptions of the afterlife. A Rumor of Angels comes to mind as an obvious Spiritualist film because it’s based directly on Ruth Boyland’s 1918 book Thy Son Liveth, a classic of Spiritualist literature and an early version of electronic voice phenomenon. Ghost and Sixth Sense are interesting adaptations on why spirits remain behind as ghosts. White Noise is pretty much high concept based on actual Spiritualist electronic voice phenomenon practices, and What Dreams May Come seems based on Spiritualist beliefs about the afterlife. Ghost stories have been with us forever, and Spiritualism give a distinct and interesting spin to these old stories.
 
TheoFantastique: Thank you again for your book and the exploration of an interesting cinematic expression of the fantastic.

Related articles of interest:

“Peg Aloi: Cinema and the Occult Revival”

“Jason Winslade Interview: Esotericism and Witchcraft in Entertainment and Commodification”

As readers of this site are aware, I attempt to move beyond a surface level analysis and appreciation of the fantastic in cinema and television to dig a little deeper in order to discover their social, cultural, and at times religious or spiritual aspects these venues provide. Last year I had the opportunity to teach a graduate level course on film and theology, and I used two films of the fantastic to illustrate a process of theologizing that takes place in film in ways that many people may not recognize as an exercise in metaphysics.

The first film was Minority Report (2002), a science fiction film starring Tom Cruise who plays a police officer with the Pre-Crime Unit that draws upon the psychic abilities of three “pre-cognitives” or “pre-cogs” who sense impending murders and provide a narrow window of time for authorities to decipher the visual clues provided by the pre-cogs so that would-be murderers can be arrested before they actually commit their crimes. The program is understandably controversial, and early on it comes under scrutiny through a character played by Colin Farrell. In a scene near the film’s beginning Cruise and Farrell discuss the idea of Pre-Crime against the backdrop of metaphysical questions of human will and responsibility in relation to time (at 3:07-3:53 in the clip found above). Theology hovers in the background of this discussion as the room where the pre-cogs stay is referred to as “the temple” (6:43-7:53 in the clip), the members of the Pre-Crime Unit think of their function as priests, the pre-cogs work together as three persons in unity reminiscent of Christian trinitarian theology of the divine, and the key figure among the pre-cogs is a female reminiscent of feminine aspects of the Holy Spirit. In addition, Farrell’s character, toward the conclusion of the metaphysical discourse with Cruise, makes reference to his studies in the past at Fuller Theological Seminary, a major Protestant theological institution in southern California. This dialogue then represents an aspect of science fiction which lends itself naturally to metaphysical and theological discussions of human nature, free will, and the divine relationship to time.

The second film I used in the course was The Devil’s Advocate (1997), which combines aspects of courtroom drama with demonological and apocalyptic fantasy. Al Pacino plays the owner of a major law firm and Keanu Reeves is his young, aggressive protege. Reeves’ character comes to realize at the climax of the film that his boss is in fact Satan who seeks his help in bringing the antichrist into the world. Reeves resists given his guilt and conservative Christian upbringing, which leads to a lengthy speech by Pacino (an excerpt of which can be found in the clip above) who questions whether God as conceived of in the Judeo-Christian tradition is worthy of worship. While it would be easy to dismiss this film on a superficial level, Pacino’s speech raises serious theological and metaphysical questions related to theodicy, the attempt to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil.

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror might be the last places many people would think of as sources for significant metaphysical reflection, but if are willing to look more closely the material is there to challenge us.

Related to the angelic destroyer and savior is the figure of the alien in horror films. One of the films the authors discuss in this connection is one of my favorite horror films, Ridley Scott’s Alien. The authors make a connection between this alien and the angelic when they state that:

“It is, in a sense, the Angel of Death, the Exterminating Angel, the avenging linchpin in Judeo-Christian mythology, from Genesis to Revelation. Which makes it all the more striking that the film’s thematic elements, such as they are, emphasize embryosis, gestation, and release. In short, creation rather than destruction.”

As the authors continue to develop their description of this film, and the connection between the alien and the angelic they comment:

“Alien, then, can be read as a hybrid of the angel and the alien genres, addressing all the issues taken up by either genre on its own. On the most basic level, there is the issue of bodily autonomy, of whether humans can withstand an invasion or resurrection of the body. For that matter, is there life after death or life beyond earth? Another issue is whether humans are in control of their personal and societal destiny. Is the Other a helper or a destroyer, and how can one be sure? The deepest issue might be whether humans are the chosen ones, the loved ones, either by God or by beings from outer space. Are they worth forgiving, or even saving?”

This connection between the angelic and the alien in horror films is even more interesting when we consider the influence of Christian demonology in shaping the thinking and symbolism in these areas. I have been engaged in an ongoing research project that explores how horror and fantasy in film and television shapes popular conceptions and interpretations of “the occult,” Neo-Paganism, and Witchcraft, and one of the research strands I am pursuing is contemporary Christian demonology. In his concluding comments in a chapter on this topic in The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2 (T & T Clark, 2005), Christopher Partridge states:

“Whether we consider Johann Heinrich Fusseli’s disturbing paining The Nightmare (1782), which depicts an incubus squatting on the stomach of a sleeping woman, or satanic panics, or explicit Satanist beliefs, or Satan films, or malevolent screen aliens such as Ridley Scott’s Alien, or the compositions and activities of black metal musicians and their fans or Icke’s conspiracy theories, modern Western artists, writers, and religionists have drunk deeply from the well of Christian demonology.”

I find it interesting that many Christians e would likely be repulsed by the depictions of the angelic and the alien in horror films, and yet it may be that the representations of these figures reflects prevalent views of the supernatural other and the very demonology espoused by a number of evangelicals and which also circulates as the background knowledge or ethos of a popular viewing audience.