Catholic Horror on Television: Haunting Faith

Catholic Horror on Television WLWOH3DJHL 6WDJH'UDIW LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES Series Editors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as an important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical approaches to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of culture, why it resonates with audiences so much, and what its popularity reveals about human cultures generally. To that end, the series will cover a wide range of periods, movements, and cultures that are pertinent to horror studies. We will gladly consider work on individual key figures (e.g., directors, authors, show runners, etc.), but the larger aim is to publish work that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given this broad scope, we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media, including film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music. We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror, including the history of horror-related scholarship. Titles in the Series Catholic Horror on Television: Haunting Faith, by Ralph Beliveau, Laura Bolf-Beliveau, Ruth DeFoster, and Erika Engstrom Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust, by Nathan Wardinski Disney Gothic: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock The Ethics of Horror: Spectral Alterity in Twenty-First Century Horror Film, by Michael J. Burke Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020: Readings in a Mutating Tradition, by John R. Ziegler Star Trek Discovery and the Female Gothic: Tell Fear No, by Carey Millsap-Spears Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures, edited by Simon Bacon The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simon Bacon Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica Joan Dymond Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by Rui Oliveira The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon WLWOH3DJHLL 6WDJH'UDIW Catholic Horror on Television Haunting Faith Ralph Beliveau, Laura Bolf-Beliveau, Ruth DeFoster, and Erika Engstrom LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London WLWOH3DJHLLL 6WDJH'UDIW Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by Ralph Beliveau, Laura Bolf-Beliveau, Ruth DeFoster, and Erika Engstrom All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP> The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. WLWOH3DJHLY 6WDJH'UDIW Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Monstrous-Feminine Revolt in The Exorcist Television Series Laura Bolf-Beliveau 19 Chapter Two: Insidious Evil: Midnight Mass as Horror Vérité Ruth DeFoster 47 Chapter Three: The Duality of Evil Erika Engstrom 71 Chapter Four: The Weird, the Eerie, and Folk Horror in 30 Coins (30 monedas) Ralph Beliveau 101 Conclusion 129 About the Authors 145 v 72&3DJHY 6WDJH'UDIW 72&3DJHYL 6WDJH'UDIW Acknowledgments The idea for this book began, as many of those written by academics do, as an informal conversation over drinks at a conference of our shared professional organization, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, during the summer of 2022. Our efforts have resulted in this book on Catholic horror and television streaming programs, all of which are available, as of this writing, on major platforms for viewing, reviewing, and contemplating. Ralph thanks Laura Bolf-Beliveau for her brilliant insights into the role of women in the Catholic Church, as well as his mom, who has served the Catholic Church in many capacities, and sees the best that the Church can be. He thanks Erika Engstrom, a frequent fellow traveler, and Ruth DeFoster, who made brilliant contributions in this book. He thanks Bailey Strahorn for editorial assistance. And he dedicates his chapter to his father, Donald J. Beliveau, RIP, who was saved as a young orphan by Catholic Charities. He would have loved all this stuff we’ve written about in this book since he was a true horror fan, and his legacy has been passed down to Abby and Martha! Laura thanks her brilliant coauthors who inspired her to dig deeper into Catholic horror. She also thanks Father Jerome Riordan, the pastor of her childhood Catholic Church. Not only did he fight the Cardinal to allow her to be an altar server in the 1970s, he also tirelessly answered her questions about the evil in the world. Confession was less about sin and more about justice and injustice. He made an indelible mark on her. In addition to her coauthors, Ruth would like to thank Tasha Swalve, who read an early manuscript of the chapter on Midnight Mass, and whose insights greatly strengthened this book. Ruth would also like to thank Sara Cannon, whose encyclopedic knowledge of obscure cat-related Catholic history helped to explain the symbolism in Midnight Mass. Erika thanks her coauthors for their intellectual prowess and willingness to take on this project, which was both really hard work and actually kind of enjoyable. vii DFNQRZ3DJHYLL 6WDJH'UDIW viii Acknowledgments We thank our editor at Lexington, Judith Lakamper, for her patience as we navigated the final stretch to get the manuscript ready. We give a shout out to our indexer, Scott Smiley, for getting us to the finish line. Financial support was provided from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the Office of the Provost, University of Oklahoma. DFNQRZ3DJHYLLL 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction Religious themes enjoy a long history in film and television, with narratives featuring the supernatural, “The Weird,” science fiction, and horror making use of Roman Catholicism in particular. Similarly, the horror genre frequently tells fantastical stories about the mysteries that we seek to understand and serves as a way for us to come to terms with the destructive and the monstrous. These stories in turn serve as a virtual gauge of how a society at a particular moment shares a common understanding of the role of religion and, in this case, a particular religion, in everyday life, even as the narratives and surrounding aesthetics of their audiovisual form depict aberrations of the normal. This book explores the genre of Catholic horror—which combines the religious with the fantastical—in the context of the current streaming media environment, a composite canvas for exploring how our culture comes to terms with the reminder of our physical mortality, the metaphysics of meaning, and morality. In this introduction, we review the history of Catholicism’s depiction in movies and on television in the guise of characters who serve as representatives of the Church, as well as an overall treatment of Catholics in these popular culture texts. We then explain how Catholic horror developed from early Gothic art and literature and reflected a suspicion of Catholicism as a mysterious, ritual-based practice to the “rebirth” of Catholic horror in the form of popular Hollywood films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This rebirth was established by the release of the groundbreaking 1973 film The Exorcist, which depicted Catholic rituals and sacred objects in terms of their power to combat tangible evil. We then explore how evil itself serves as a central character, in a profound and significant sense, in the narratives of Catholic horror that pit the “good” forces of Catholicism against overwhelming evil. We discuss how television streaming services provide a new platform for delivering Catholic-centered texts that we analyze in subsequent chapters to uncover and reveal the ways in which popular culture entertainment serves as a vehicle by which to 1 LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 2 Introduction critique, through storytelling that relies on the fantastical and supernatural, the real-world problems associated with the Catholic Church. As one of the most influential forces in Western civilization that today, by the Church’s own count, this religion is practiced by 1.3 billion people—almost 18 percent of the world’s population (Wooden, 2023). We consider the texts examined in this book as not only forms of literature, but as conduits for critically thinking about Catholicism in particular and religion more generally. CATHOLICISM IN FICTIONAL FILM AND TELEVISION “The portrayal of religious figures—saints, priests, clergy, nuns, ministers, rabbis, preachers, missionaries, monks, and other spiritual leaders—dates back to the very beginnings of motion pictures and television,” wrote Paietta (2005, p. 1) in her compilation of film and TV portrayals of religious characters. Lawson (2016) observed that “the politics and psychology of the Vatican have long proved a fascination, and TV fiction has often genuflected towards Rome” (para. 2). McDannell (2007) noted that Catholics have historically served as central characters in movies, with priests serving as representations of the immigrant Other through depictions of the stereotypical Irish or Italian priest; onscreen portrayals were checked by filmmakers for accuracy, at least prior to the 1960s. Catholic priests have often been depicted in a “positive, sometimes even heroic light” throughout cinematic history, noted O’Brien (2011, p. 256), although alongside this sympathetic portrayal filmic depictions also include casting priests as villains. On television, according to Wolff (2010), portrayals of the church, priests, and clergy have most often been “sappy or slapstick, [avoiding] the sensational” (p. 3), with cancellation the result when depictions proved controversial. Recent informal observations by media critics of religious depictions in fictional fare have pointed to how faith is shown as “syrupy,” used as a vehicle for narratives of the supernatural, or just ignored (Lyons & Poniewozik, 2016). Notably, until the mid-twentieth century, a production code named for one of its creators, William H. Hays, then the president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, strictly governed and censored depictions of Catholicism in film. According to Devanny (2018), the Hays Code, which passed in 1930, “was not a mere list of dos and don’ts but a rigid document outlining a Catholic view and theory of entertainment media and a list of positive recommendations, warnings, and prohibitions” (p. 108). One of the most tightly enforced rules of the Hays Code, noted Devanny, was that religion could never be depicted in a mocking manner, which resulted in the LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 3 near-total absence of any mainstream film critique of Catholicism until the mid-1960s. In the wake of scandals involving priest sexual abuse in the early 2000s, Fuchs (2010) observed how Catholic priests in particular were targeted in a “rude way,” with negative portrayals in network TV drama and comedy shows. Since fictional media texts can serve as sites of commentary and criticism of governmental and religious institutions, both dramatic and comedic films and television shows have targeted the Catholic Church, such as the 2004 play and 2008 film Doubt, which addressed the topic of abusive priests. The 2015 film Spotlight dramatized the Boston Globe’s series of investigative news stories that uncovered the child sex abuse scandals in the Church in the Boston area during the early 2000s, while The Devil’s Doorway (2018) shed light on the real historical abuse of women and children in Catholic reformatory institutions for women in crisis. Despite their increased frequency, late-twentieth-century film portrayals of Catholicism often received pushback. This came mainly from the Catholic Church and religious cultural commentators more broadly, who argued that Hollywood depictions of Catholicism in the 1990s were grotesque for the sake of sensationalism, proving that Hollywood elites were “out of step” with what religious audiences wanted to see (Torrens, 1995). However, the critical success of films that addressed the real and tragic results of abuse by priests and other representatives of the Catholic Church point to their value as exceptional filmmaking that allowed for social commentary and critique that spoke truth to power. Regarding criticism of the Church on television, because of network considerations of avoiding controversy that might endanger ratings and alienate advertisers, any criticism of Catholicism and the Church, and religion in general, required writers and producers to tread such textual territory carefully. Even so, storylines occasionally did address problematic issues surrounding the Church. For example, the ABC legal drama The Practice (1997–2004) featured an episode in which a Catholic character quit the Church due to the priest sex abuse scandals. Series executive producer and writer David E. Kelley, himself raised as a Catholic, said the issue could not be presented as balanced, citing the scandals as “just an atrocity” (Carter, 2002, p. E1). Cable television, however, allowed producers a bit more freedom in terms of content. For example, Feltmate (2017) analyzed how the satirical animated TV series South Park—on the cable channel Comedy Central—overtly criticized the Church, by portraying it as a “cesspool,” depicting sexually deviant priests and a hierarchy that was “inherently conservative, defensive, and dishonest” (p. 174). Taken together, these media treatments from film and television paint a picture of a corrupt organization that contradicted previous versions of the priest on film and LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 4 Introduction television that were more favorable and sympathetic. Today, media consumers and producers enjoy a wider range of choices for viewing and distributing content that speaks to religious themes. Changes in how audiences access visual storytelling came as the result of increasingly advanced technology for home distribution, along with different business models for production and increased competition. Getting past the network television era and the expansion of cable television, the rapid advances in streaming quality and quantity are accompanied by different sets of audience expectations. Throughout these changes, the media industries in the United States have remained almost exclusively profit-driven. This diversification of outlets and increasing numbers of channels and streaming services also allows for storytelling directed at smaller niche audiences. The variety and diversity of storytellers means there are more possibilities for more diverse stories, ones that now can include controversial topics that had been avoided in the past. As reviewed here, research into the portrayal of Catholics in films and on television has addressed depictions in the drama and comedy genres of narrative storytelling. For example, Colleen McDannell’s Catholics in the Movies (2007) covers the portrayal of Catholicism in Hollywood films generally. It also includes a chapter on the 1973 film The Exorcist but does not delve into the horror aspects of the film. Although cinematic Catholic horror serves as a topic of numerous scholarly articles and book-length treatments, as cited here in and subsequent chapters, Catholic horror on television receives a proportionally miniscule amount of scholarship. This paucity offers opportunities for rich scholarly examination that explores the relevance of faith in contemporary times. We aim in this book to contribute to the research literature that investigates portrayals of Catholicism in the horror genre in particular by offering a fresh take on how TV/streaming horror is used to critique, expand, and interrogate Catholicism and its place in the modern world. By doing so, we see our work as spanning media, cultural, television, and religious studies. CATHOLIC HORROR Horror enjoys a long history in the art of storytelling, reaching back to the origins of narrative that featured epic battles between humans and monsters, continuing over the centuries in literary works such as Dante’s Inferno and Gothic novels of the 1700s (Dixon, 2010). In particular, the trappings of Catholic religious practice enhanced such a view. Hansen (2021) listed “ruined abbeys, lecherous priests, nuns walled up in convents” as particularly vivid tropes employed in Gothic novels to create an atmosphere of dread and fear. “The enclosed and protected sacred spaces of the Catholic tradition— convents, monasteries, cathedrals, shrines—were construed by Protestants to LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 5 be spaces of entrapment, bondage, and superstition,” explained Smith (2008, p. 111). In the context of U.S. history, bestselling fictional works such as books about corrupt priests during the antebellum period reflected a public opinion that signified Catholicism as “an alien and threatening religion,” with a powerful Roman Catholic Church serving as an obstacle to the enlightenment brought about by reason and the pursuit of individual freedom (p. 111). In early Gothic literature, treatments of Catholicism and Protestantism served as extensions of the wars and skirmishes between France and England (Wright, 2013). The dread and fear was political as much as it was spiritual. Wright argued that the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, and the fear of French—read: Catholic—incursions into British culture were the inspiration for the Gothic romance of the 1760s. Expressions of a similar tension can even be found in the etchings of William Hogarth, whose two engravings titled The Invasion luridly depicted the possible consequences of such a threat. The Invasion imagines the infiltration of French culture into England as a consequence of the war. The first engraving (titled “France”) “shows a rapacious French monk sharpening the edge of an axe as he and some soldiers embark for England on a boat loaded with Catholic paraphernalia” (p. 4). As Gothic art and literature went through massive transformations and new contexts, some of the European politics were shed. But the subtle notion of Catholicism as a cultural threat remains in the background. Given the interconnections between written horror in the form of books, and especially of the Gothic use of Catholic-centered depictions, mysterious spaces, nefarious characters, and practices, the rather easy transition of the genre from words to images became the basis for what would become a subgenre of film—which we here consider as a genre of its own. Horror and Catholicism on film have a long and intertwined history, tracing back to the earliest days of the medium (Hansen, 2021), with the Catholic Church dominating depictions of religious horror (Tushnet, 2019). Indeed, “Catholic faith and practices offer a striking visual and auditory language” to the horror genre (Tushnet, 2019, p. 34). Familiar narratives in the horror genre that relate to religious belief and religion-oriented horror in particular include the larger themes of good versus evil and the “cosmic battle for the souls of humankind” (Miller & Van Riper, 2017, p. 2). What Miller and Van Riper (2017) term “divine horror” began during the culturally turbulent times of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1973 film The Exorcist continues to enjoy an elevated status as perhaps the best-known example of Catholic filmic horror. Miller and Van Riper include it and other films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) as examples of divine horror; all three invoke Catholic elements (Ripatrazone, 2017). With their “unprecedented scenes of visual horror” (Miller & Van Riper, 2017, p. 4), these films established tropes of religious horror still used some LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 6 Introduction five decades later; their middle-class settings feature everyday people who encounter forces that disrupt their everyday lives and suggest that humans may be finished with ancient history, but that history is not finished with us. Other examples of Catholic horror films since then include 1976’s God Told Me To, 1987’s Prince of Darkness, The Exorcist III in 1990, 2011’s The Rite, 2013’s The Conjuring, and 2021’s The Seventh Day. In God Told Me To, a devout Catholic cop in New York City seeks the force behind a series of inexplicable incidents of mass murder. When the cop confronts a killer with a rifle on top of a Manhattan water tower (echoing the 1966 Texas tower shootings in Austin), the perpetrator says, “God told me to,” and then throws himself to the ground. Pursuing the case becomes a test of the cop’s faith. Prince of Darkness cleverly combines Catholicism, advanced scientific expertise, and supernatural horror around the birth of a murderous Satanic entity. The storyline has a secret sect of priests responsible for keeping watch over a large vial of evil liquid; this depiction shows the Catholic Church as standing as a sentinel against evil. Larger questions surrounding belief in a higher force serve as the theme of The Rite, which focuses on the relationship between faith and identity: what does it mean to be an “exorcist” when that individual is experiencing a crisis of faith? The more recent The Conjuring and its sequels feature the Warrens, a couple who are Catholics and demonologists. In these examples, religious faith (along with Lorraine Warren’s apparent paranormal sensitivity featured in The Conjuring) is at the center of horror. In fact, Carey Hayes, one of the coauthors of the screenplay for The Conjuring, offers the term “The Religious Supernatural” to describe this and similar films: Today there is a lot of focus in popular culture on the supernatural or the paranormal. It is almost all secular. In the past, the supernatural and paranormal occurred within a worldview that allowed for the supernatural but within a religious framework. People had tools like prayers to deal with the supernatural, which, you have to admit, is scary. We wanted, in our movies, to return to that. We thought that, in many ways, religion deals with the big questions, and the supernatural is usually a scary thing that interrupts daily life and causes people to think about the big questions. So, we wanted to pair the two, religion and the supernatural, and remind audiences that this is, ultimately, what scary movies are about: ultimate questions about life. (Hayes, Hayes, & Pasulka, 2014) The social anxieties addressed in these films, the source of their greatest genre effects, work because of their juxtaposition of Catholic belief and threats to human identity (Beliveau, 2011). Filmic horror enjoys an inherent, almost natural, integration with religion— Catholicism in particular—but horror’s transition to the medium of television LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 7 has been difficult. Hills (2005), in The Pleasure of Horror, described television as a “para-site” for horror, “a cultural site that is assumed to be alien to the genre and a space where horror supposedly does not belong” (p. 111). Due to network censorship and considerations of ratings, especially the network model that avoided content that would turn viewers away, horror on television was constructed as “unscary” and “inauthentic,” noted Hills (p. 112). Graphic visuals generally could not be shown, thus relegating the potential of television horror to a weakened medium that could not truly induce fright, unlike films viewed in theaters (Jowett & Abbott, 2013). Further, as Hills (2005) explained, the horror genre was marginalized in the academic realm of television studies. “Glance theory,” which posits that viewers only glance at the television screen within a domestic setting rather maintaining the gaze required by the large, cinema screen, was invoked by some scholars as a reason for television’s “less-than” status as an artistic medium, coupled with the legacy view that TV is culturally inferior to film (p. 112). Even as horror on television had evolved, Hills noted, “it remains caught in transition between different discourses of television as a ‘mass’ and ‘niche’ medium” (p. 128). Offering a counter argument, Jowett and Abbott (2013) pointed to the mainstreaming of horror on television throughout the medium’s existence, particularly when one considers how horror “mingles on our screens with the staple of genres of television programming,” such as comedy, investigative and serial drama, anthology series, and soap operas (p. 17). Indeed, one can easily cite numerous examples of horror content on traditional over-the-air networks going back to the medium’s early decades. These include the classic 1960s and rebooted 1980s versions of The Twilight Zone, the 1950s original and 1990s reboot of The Outer Limits, and the daytime soap Dark Shadows from the late 1960s (rebooted in 1991). Crime drama was integrated with horror in the 1973 and 1974 made-for-TV films The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, followed up by the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, also rebooted in 2005. Other popular examples of horror-infused network TV series include Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Charmed (1998–2006), The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016), and American Gothic (1995–1998), to name only a few. The long-running horror-fantasy series Supernatural (2005–2020) integrated overt religious characters and themes, illustrating that popular culture treatments of religious horror can and does find success—in that case for some 15 seasons over 327 episodes—on the small screen. LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 8 Introduction CATHOLIC HORROR IN THE TV STREAMING ERA The emergence of Internet streaming services has revolutionized television in monumental ways, allowing for an unprecedented plethora of horror offerings. With the development of advanced computer-generated special effects, on-demand video, and the shedding of ratings concerns that once shackled the major broadcast networks, television horror in the 2020s has significantly changed the game when it comes to television horror. Indeed, algorithms taken from viewers’ clicks and views provide consumers an array of horror movies and television, both continuing and limited, from which to choose. Netflix viewers, for instance, can find an entire category of horror-themed content called “This Place Is Evil,” on their homepage, further catering to this once-“niche” audience. Furthermore, globalization has enabled an international infusion of high-quality media entertainment in the horror genre; Abbott and Jowett (2021) point to digital technology as enhancing the accessibility of international offerings of TV horror on Netflix in particular. There are also streaming services that particularly focus on horror. Shudder, for example, provides a large variety of horror films, TV and streaming series, documentaries, podcast series, and nonfiction programs about the genre that particularly capitalize on the kinds of storytelling that use graphic depictions of violence and sex. Other services that offer horror content include ScreamBox, Shout Factory TV, and The Criterion Channel, and even online services available through local public libraries such as Kanopy and Hoopla. In addition to the increased amount of content now available, today’s streaming landscape allows for storytelling that focuses on more controversial and complex representations of politics and identity. This has led to transgressive media-making in the cable environment which in turn has become available to stream. Television in this new age thus can produce content in the horror genre that depicts and explores more extreme violence and body horror, as portrayed in AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–2022); representations of and problematics associated with race like in HBO’s Lovecraft Country (2020); and more complex notions of sexuality, such as in HBO’s vampire series True Blood (2008–2014) and the FX cable series American Horror Story (2011–). Examples of television series with graphic novel origins that feature religious-based notions such as demons and angels include Cinemax’s Outcast (2016–2017) and AMC’s Preacher (2016–2019). LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 9 Catholicism vs. Evil: A Philosophical Problem The idea of an ongoing epic struggle between the Catholic Church and unrelenting evil goes back centuries, and closely reflects Pope Paul VI’s 1972 speech warning against the very real threat of the Devil in the world (Miller & Van Riper, 2017). While belief in a literal devil and the practice of demonology were common in the Catholic Church especially prior to Vatican II (1962–1965) and, to some degree, after it, Miller and Van Riper noted a lack of reference to the Devil, Lucifer, or Satan in early Christian scriptures; allusions to an “evil one” by various names “are considered by many biblical scholars to be allegorical references to earthly, human evil” (p. 2). Writing for the website The Conversation, Hansen (2021) commented on the duality of Catholicism in the Catholic horror film genre in particular: “For every horror film that sees the rituals of Catholicism as instruments in the fight against evil, another portrays the Church itself as evil.” Contemporary examples of the casting of the Church as a nefarious organization working in opposition to any notion of benevolence reflect the historical treatment of Catholicism in Gothic novels that paint it as a threat to a Protestant worldview. One of these includes the 1999 film Stigmata, which portrays the Church as the real source of evil on earth and suppressor of new knowledge—in the case of the film’s narrative, the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas—or anything that opposes its intractable dogma (Miller, 2017). However, Doherty (2020) described Catholic horror films as portraying the Church as “the sole arbiter of religious truth in a cosmic struggle between good and evil” (p. 67). In television programming invoking the fantasy and horror genres, Catholicism appears as a major force against malevolent forces. For example, the long-running series Supernatural (2005–2020) depicted Catholicism as the hegemonic, dominant “weapon” against demons, and presented a sympathetic, noncritical portrayal of Catholic priests (Engstrom & Valenzano, 2014). Catholic horror films, interestingly, rely heavily on pre-Vatican II teachings about the existence of a devil and demons, and hearken back to an almost-medieval image of the Catholic Church as being engaged in a great ongoing spiritual battle against the forces of evil. Doherty (2020) also noted that the depictions of demonic attack in many Catholic horror texts are drawn from Catholic writings on saints who purported to be victims of demonic attack: “Since the making of The Exorcist . . . filmmakers have steeped themselves in classic writings of Catholic demonology, most importantly drawing on the twenty-one introductory chapters to the Rituale Romanum which outline the criteria for establishing the diagnosis and treatment of diabolical possession” (p. 80). These characterizations of Catholic-themed texts sometimes offer a version of Catholicism that presents the faith in binary terms, as either good or bad LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 10 Introduction but not both. This is the case with the 1973 pro-Catholic film The Exorcist. Director William Friedkin’s film presents Catholicism as the major force that can fight evil. Walther (2023), writing in The New York Times, agreed, saying that the film’s plot and characters cannot be understood from a nonreligious point of view. This is particularly true in Father Merrin’s treatment of Regan, the possessed young girl; she is not a person, but simply the devil. Heller-Nicholas (2011) observed that exorcism films serve as “strong ethical signs in the broader non-Catholic cultural imagination that symbolize a less theological and more melodramatic Catholic notion of ‘good’ (one defined by its direct opposition of ‘evil’)” (p. 67). The Exorcist television series (2016– 2017), which ran on the Fox network for two seasons, complicates this binary. Both seasons show how the Church’s role can be strengthened by Catholic women who work with the exorcists and challenge them. These women’s faith is far more complicated, and the two focal priests-exorcists, Fathers Keane and Ortega, through their crises of faith, show that blindly following the Church is suspect; breaking the binary produces more humane work with the possessed than the strict adherence to ancient dogma and practice. Positionality: Catholicism and the Authors’ Lived Experiences Writing and researching about religion can pose a tricky task, especially when one’s life experience involves religious practice or upbringing that becomes part of one’s identity. Each of the authors of this book has a connection to Catholicism in some way, which informs our own research on religion’s presence and depiction within media narratives, both fictional and nonfictional. We acknowledge our own positionality here as we approach the current inquiry; our intent to understand the extent to which Catholicism has shaped our perspectives using the general tenet of standpoint theory: that one’s knowledge stems from one’s social position within a culture (Bowell, n.d.). Standpoint theory originated in examinations of power-based relationships, and was further developed in feminist studies. Feminist standpoint theory focuses, in part, on the ontological and epistemological consequences of being in and knowing the world. These are steeped in the social formations that constrain subjects. Acknowledging these power dynamics is of great importance and provides a sense of totality, “an attempt to locate some of the specific connections between our everyday lives and practices and the larger framework of social structures within which they are organized” (Weeks, 1998, pp. 4–5). In their work from the Pews in the Back: Young Women and Catholicism, Dugan and Owen (2009) mention “Catholic glue,” a way in which followers LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 11 of the Church see their identities deeply rooted in Catholic rituals: “the Catholic way of thinking and expressing faith seeps into our bones and grabs hold of our religious senses” (p. 227). As we share our own personal Catholic histories, we acknowledge how that “Catholic glue” may affect the ways in which we explore Catholic horror and grapple with our changing standpoints on the Church. We are reminded of our younger selves when Catholicism was a family tradition, inherited generationally and without question. That is, until at some point in our adult lives its relevance waned, much in the way “lapsed” or “recovering” Catholics relate such an evolution when talking about their experience with the faith. Now, as researchers, our positions on Catholicism are more complex, no doubt influenced by academic discourse and training. Ralph Beliveau grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. The era of “White flight” combined with the cross-cultural appeal of suburban life brought many groups out of the city, but the change still sustained the dominance of Catholicism in the Chicago area. Over time, groups of Central and South American Catholics moved into the southwest side because of cheap housing, in addition to large numbers of immigrants from Poland. Throughout this time, a rotating series of priests brought a variety of approaches to discussing the Catholic faith, from more traditional, almost pre-Vatican II approaches, to modern masses that included guitar groups, nuns in casual clothes, extraordinary ministers (including his mother), attention to issues of intersectionality, and religious education that included both young people and neurodiverse members of the Church. It was only later that the broad history of the Catholic Church included addressing its more corrosive practices. Since moving to Oklahoma, the role of the Church in Native American communities, including the politics of erasing Native cultures through the boarding school system, became important as a consideration of the negative side of Catholic history. At the same time, awareness of the liberation theology (an approach dedicated to the liberation of the oppressed) movement has offered a demonstration of the Church’s commitment to social justice. Laura Bolf-Beliveau was raised in the Archdiocese of Chicago where today Catholics are 35 percent of the total population. She can attest to the omnipresence of the Church since she did not know other religions existed until she was in third grade. Her extended family was likewise Catholic, and she attended Mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days. She took all the sacraments allowed to a woman: baptism, first communion, confession, confirmation, and marriage. Having been a member of a suburban church whose pastor was Jesuit-trained and liberal minded, she was allowed to become one of the first female altar servers in the Archdiocese of Chicago in the 1970s. Although several parishioners challenged the pastor’s decision, he did not relent. Although no longer a practicing Catholic, she finds herself still drawn LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 12 Introduction to the spiritual aspects of Mass but repelled by the atrocities committed by the Church. Ruth DeFoster was raised in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, where she was confirmed as a teenager, and where all three of her children were baptized. While the Reformed theology differs in some key theological ways from Catholicism, there is a great deal of common ground in terms of liturgy and tradition—weekly Holy Communion, the Lord’s Prayer, the prohibition of female leadership, the insularity of the Church and the broader sense of belongingness to one “true” belief system to the exclusion of all others. Ruth’s extended family on both sides is Catholic, and while she remains deeply imbedded in many of the communal and celebratory practices and traditions of the Catholic Church—baptisms, weddings, and the regular celebration of Catholic holidays—she has become disillusioned with the role the Church has played in the systematic and widespread abuse and mistreatment of women, children, and the LGBTQ+ community. After her church of over a decade egregiously mishandled a case of marital abuse, Ruth chose to remove her family from corporate worship and has found a great deal of peace since. Erika Engstrom was raised in the Catholic tradition throughout childhood, was administered the sacrament of Confirmation when a teenager, and still identifies as Catholic even though she has not attended Mass in some 30 years. Although still tied to the directive of the Christ to “love ye one another,” her thoughts on the Church range from reverence for nuns, steeped in her own mother’s admiration for nuns of all religions, to disillusionment about the Church due to abuse committed by those entrusted with the care of children and the corruption of the Church as an organization. Our personal histories of deep engagement with and belief in the tenets of Catholicism and Christianity inform our interest in the subject of how Catholicism is framed and presented in entertainment media. We have all lived Catholicism and have intimate knowledge of the Church’s role in our shared culture. Our work here, thus informed by personal experience, nevertheless relies on systematic research as we approach the texts we analyze and unpack regarding the ways in which popular culture—in the form of streaming television series—can be read as critique of the Church while simultaneously affirming religion’s potential as a positive aspect of the human experience. CHAPTER PREVIEWS In this book, we explore the genre of Catholic horror on television—which combines the religious with the fantastical—in the context of the current streaming media environment to understand the myriad ways that mass LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 13 media entertainment critiques, expands, and interrogates Catholicism and its place in the modern world. The analyses of the Catholic horror TV/streaming series examined in subsequent chapters are put into the context of the state of the Catholic Church in recent decades. The television series analyzed in this book, all available through major streaming services—The Exorcist on Hulu, Midnight Mass on Netflix, Evil on Paramount+, and 30 Coins (30 monedas) on HBO and Hulu—serve as ideal texts to examine the themes and commentary provided by Catholic horror in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In Chapter 1, “The Monstrous-Feminine Revolt in The Exorcist Television Series,” Laura Bolf-Beliveau analyzes The Exorcist (2016–2017), which originated on the Fox television broadcast network, with both seasons now available on Hulu. Each season consists of 10 episodes and focuses on a pair of Catholic priests, Fathers Marcus Keane and Tomas Ortega. The former is a seasoned exorcist, and the latter has visions of Keane conducting an exorcism and finds him when he needs help with one of his parishioners. Each season features different exorcisms, but a larger story arc about the Catholic Church emerges: those in high positions want to stop exorcisms and allow demons entrance into the Church and the world. As Keane and Ortega thwart the Church and continue their work, they find support from Father Bennett, an emissary from the Vatican tasked with reining them in. In their work repelling demons and confronting the growing evil within the Church, these three priests are assisted by Catholic laywomen, who are read in this analysis as embodying what Barbara Creed (1993) called the “monstrous-feminine.” The interactions between these priests and the Catholic women are telling and disrupt Catholic patriarchal knowledge and practices. The three priests— Keane, Ortega, and Bennett—are challenged, bettered, and changed by the monstrous-feminine characters in the series. In Chapter 2, “Insidious Evil: Midnight Mass as Horror Vérité,” Ruth DeFoster unpacks a critique of Catholicism and religion in general in Midnight Mass, a seven-episode miniseries that was released on Netflix in September 2021 to critical acclaim. The supernatural horror series centers around isolated Crockett Island, where the arrival of a charismatic young priest, Father Paul Hill, coincides with escalating, inexplicable mysterious events that call into question his true identity, the role of the institutional church, and the intersection of guilt, faith, and truth. Centering on the perspective of a young ex-convict struggling to reconnect with his devout parents in his deeply Catholic hometown, the series charts the meteoric reinvigoration of the faithful in this small religious community, followed by the troubling realities of a growing, insidious evil that threaten to subsume the entire island. DeFoster analyzes Midnight Mass through the lens of what Landsberg (2018) called horror vérité, a style of filmmaking that LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW 14 Introduction deploys the traditional tropes of the horror genre—in this case, vampirism, powerful visual shock cues, the human struggle for survival, and an insidious demonic evil—but in the context of very pressing and real historical circumstances. In this way, argues DeFoster, Midnight Mass represents the present, engaging the mechanics of horror to tell a story about a nightmare that has some basis in truth. In Midnight Mass, the growing rot at the core of Crockett Island’s devout Catholic community—a community already generationally divided on the role of organized religion—speaks to the crisis of confidence and trust facing the real Catholic Church, as evidence mounts of unspeakable corruption, evil, and abuse in the Church’s recent past and present. First aired on CBS for one season and then subsequently streamed on Paramount+, the critically well-received series Evil features a three-person team of “assessors” who work for the Catholic Church in New York City to determine if supernatural phenomena are of natural or divine origin. In Chapter 3, “The Duality of Evil,” Erika Engstrom details how the Catholic Church figures prominently as both an organization and as a faith identity in the series, which features elements of horror and humor. Evil stands apart from other networks and even streaming offerings through its overt criticisms and allusions to scandals within the Church and the depiction of the Church as obsessed with liability issues. In the series, evil becomes tangible through the actions of malevolent forces that seek the end of the Church and the portrayal of demons that harass the show’s protagonists. The series depicts the epic struggle between the Catholic Church and unrelenting evil. Evil builds on filmic versions of Catholic horror, with the duality of Evil’s portrayal of the Catholic Church as both a problematic institution and as a major force for combating nefarious forces providing one way to ascertain how television can convey prevailing attitudes and understandings of the Church through the use of entertainment television. In Chapter 4, “The Weird, The Eerie, and Folk Horror in 30 Coins (30 monedas),” Ralph Beliveau explores the properties of folk horror, atmospherics, effects, and narrative patterns that define the notion of The Weird, and studies the slightly different notions of The Eerie in this Spanish series produced for HBO Europe. The eight-episode first season ran from November 2020 through January 2021. Álex de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría, the creators and writers of the show, take viewers through a series of interwoven stories set in a small Spanish town, and focus on a priest, Father Vergara, who possesses one of the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas for betraying Christ. A subversive sect within the Church is collecting all 30 coins in order to overthrow the existing Catholic hierarchy. Father Vergara works with the town veterinarian and the mayor to untangle a mystery that has led to an outbreak of supernatural happenings. 30 Coins contends with the Catholic Church by drawing on an intersection between notions of folk horror and a LQWUR3DJH 6WDJH'UDIW Introduction 15 perspective grounded in The Weird. Beliveau demonstrates how characters in this rural location, deeply tied to Catholic traditions, contend with Weird threats that endanger the very foundations of modern life. We review the findings of our analyses of these Catholic horror television series in the conclusion to explain the relevance of Catholic horror as a conduit for religious and social commentary about lived religion in the early twenty-first century. Summarizing our analyses, we situate our overall findings in the context of the continuum of research on religion in entertainment television, and the importance of horror studies as a route to critique our contemporary notions of meaning. Because we see these as useful and relevant examples for classroom instruction of religion and media theory, we list several episodes for pedagogical use. Finally, we address the implications of religion-based entertainment content that forward questions about religion, specific faith traditions, and the role of faith in society today. REFERENCES Abbott, S., & Jowett, L. (2021). Global TV horror. University of Wales Press. Beliveau, R. (2011). Something in the dark: Race, faith, horror, and the other. 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