spiritual horror

A twelve-year-old girl is possessed by the Devil in The Exorcist; her only chance is two priests and a rite the Church still keeps on file. In Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary and Guy move into an infamous New York apartment building, wanting nothing more than to start a family. In The Witch, a Puritan family loses a baby to the woods and turns on each other, certain the fault is sin. In each film the Church's own account of good and evil turns out to be exactly the account the plot is running on, and the people who take it seriously are the only ones who see what is coming.

The same shape holds outside the Church. In The Wailing, a mysterious sickness spreads through a Korean village, and a policeman is pulled into investigating it to save his own daughter. A Scottish police sergeant lands on an island where pagan belief in a good harvest has replaced the church entirely in The Wicker Man, finding his own Christianity has no purchase there. A devoutly religious mother keeps her two children out of daylight in a house she becomes sure is haunted in The Others, certain enough to fight for them against whatever it is.

The mainstream wave runs on identical rules with a bigger budget. A newborn is swapped for a dead couple's own child on a priest's suggestion in The Omen, and years later a priest's own warnings are the first sign something is wrong with the boy. Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren are called in to examine a satanic haunting spreading through a Rhode Island farmhouse in The Conjuring. In The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a courtroom retries an exorcism after the fact, with a defense lawyer arguing for what a priest swears under oath that he saw.

Faith is an institution here too, with its own training and its own doubts. A funeral director's son enrolls in a Jesuit exorcism course while still unconvinced in The Rite. His skepticism is the thing his mentors are trying to cure. In Deliver Us from Evil, a New York police officer partners with a priest schooled in the rituals of exorcism, working cases the film says are drawn from a real detective's own casework. In Svaha: The Sixth Finger, a pastor makes a living investigating suspicious religious groups, and the cult he's hired to look into turns out to be the same one behind a police captain's murder case.

The same institutional shape holds wherever the local belief system is the local authority on evil. A Thai family becomes convinced their goddess is behind a relative's turmoil in The Medium. Three generations of one family guard, and live off, a god they were warned never to worship in Tumbbad. A dying mother's cure for infertility turns out to have been a bargain with a cult that worships Satan in Satan's Slaves, and it is the youngest of her children, about to turn seven, that the cult is coming to collect.

Devotion turns dangerous on this shelf as often as it saves anyone. A hospice nurse convinced she has been chosen by God sets out to save her dying patient's soul in Saint Maud, whatever it costs. In The Devil's Advocate, a young attorney's wife starts seeing devilish apparitions the moment they move to New York, while her husband is too deep in his new boss's cases to notice. A New York detective investigates a run of murderers who each give the same calm reason in God Told Me To, and starts to suspect the reason is not a delusion. You spend these films waiting to find out whether being right about what you believe is any better than being wrong.