The Pope’s Exorcist isn’t scary enough
All worthwhile horror films are products of their culture. They distill its neuroses and fears, forcing protagonists to make value judgments with life-or-death stakes. And that’s why the genre continues to compel: beyond the adrenaline rush of jump scares, watching old chillers is like opening a metaphysical time capsule. They show how past generations understood their world. The exorcism subgenre tracks that pattern — only its questions tend to be explicitly religious. William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, arriving at the height of modernist theology, directly foregrounded the question of faith within a liberal world order.
