(NPR) Think of some of the most iconic scenes in classics of the horror genre:
Priests gathered around a possessed child in The Exorcist.
The chanting of the neighborhood coven in Rosemary's Baby.
The priest warning Damien's father in The Omen.
Notice a theme?
Horror villains and monsters show up in all shapes and sizes, but when religion shows up, it is usually Catholicism.
In Hollywood, it's the faith often featured for its mysterious conclaves and Gothic churches, depicting the white clerical collar up against the ultimate prince of darkness.
"When a vampire is at your door or your child is possessed, you don't call for a Methodist," said Matthew J. Cressler, the co-author of the new book Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America, along with Jack Lee Downey, Kathleen Holscher and Michael Pasquier.
"God love the Unitarians, but you don't ask for your Unitarian minister. You grab your rosary beads, your St. Christopher medal, your holy water, your priest."
Cressler said Catholicism also has theological themes that work with the genre.
"Catholics have long had a sense that when one suffers, one is bearing the cross of Christ. And that in suffering, one is drawn closer to Christ," he said.
Aislinn Clarke said having an Irish Catholic childhood was the perfect preparation to become a horror film director. She wrote and directed the 2024 horror movie Fréwaka.
"I remember reading a book about the lives of the saints, which my parents probably thought was a very wholesome thing for a child to read," said Clarke.
"But there was a lot of stuff about, like, St. Lucia plucked out her eyeballs, and another saint cut off her breasts. And everybody's wearing hair shirts and thorns and flagellating."
Of course, horror movies take these ideas and ratchet them up to 11, Cressler said.
He argued that Catholic themes, like venerating the remains of the beloved dead, can show up in movies that are not even overtly Catholic. For example, keeping the mummified corpse of your mother in the basement of the house next to your roadside motel, as Norman Bates does in Psycho.
Beyond the fictionalized depictions, it is a faith that can take spiritual warfare fairly literally. The Rev. Aaron Williams, a pastor at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Natchez, Mississippi, consulted on the 2025 horror film The Ritual.
Williams said that while most people are far more likely to fall into sin through temptation rather than possession, "we do come in contact with the occult and the enemy and his minions, the demons."
Though the average Catholic may not hold these views, the church still performs the rite of exorcism. And the Catholic Church positions its clergy to deal with ultimate evil by imbuing them with ultimate good.
"A priest … through ordination, he's sacramentally received a character that allows him to act with the authority of Christ," Williams said.
Some films use that heightened authority to save characters from the demonic. And some use horror to point out broken elements in the church itself. Clarke discussed a scene from her 2018 film, The Devil's Doorway, in which nuns sing hymns to Christ and perform a brutal symphysiotomy procedure while ignoring the suffering of the young woman giving birth in front of them.
It was a nod to the confinement of women in Magdalene laundries, asylums run by Protestants and Catholics between the 18th and 20th centuries.
"There are things flying around, and crosses going upside down, and we have some stuff like that," Clarke said. "But the most horrific scene in the movie from the script stage for me was always going to be this birth sequence."
Catholic symbols and songs show up in horror so much so that Cressler said it can influence how we see the church itself.
"If you walk into a room that's got too many candles and too many crosses and too many statues, you know you're in trouble," he said.
But Cressler said that also goes for the tropes of Catholic grace and redemption. Horror films bring our fears out into the open. And in seeing them, we can, in some ways, defeat our monsters — at least until they're resurrected for the sequel.
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