The Exorcist Effect

The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief, the latest book from Joseph Laycock, with co-author Eric Harrelson, expertly encapsulates the stakes and implications of researching possession/exorcism phenomena in the United States. It investigates the influence of exorcism film and television media on “real world” beliefs and practices as contextualized within America’s fractured sociability: a country suffering the effects of information illiteracy, wherein cultural truths are fostered by media bombardment and the perceived value/authenticity assigned to media reproduction. The book effectively connects the historical dots between popular horror films and political religious movements, leaving space for future studies to expand their findings within the new media ecology of today.

Laycock and Harrelson approach religion like Clifford Geertz, analyzing the 1973 film The Exorcist through its “models of” representation and “models for” production of social reality. “The Exorcist effect” (see chapters 1 and 2) refers to a culturally available idiom or framework with traceable genealogies, the meanings of which individuals can manipulate to express personal needs and emotions. Horror films, the authors argue, denote manipulations of symbolic structures as meaningful parallels to pre-established, non-symbolic systems—in this case, “true story” dramatizations revealing the threat of human/supernatural predators. “As an analogue to reality,” Laycock and Harrelson write, “horror films . . . shape our ideas of what is possible” (21) while also providing a truth apparatus that make them congruous with “being repurposed into religious beliefs” (17). Horror films simultaneously provide viewers with cultural models for ostension, a process by which “stories [come] to life” and “provide a ‘script’ that informs people’s . . . interpretations of [real world] events” (21). Political religious differences, an example the authors provide, are explained and amplified through folk theories aligning neighbors with evil conspirators. “Imagining one’s political opponents killing children like a villain in a horror movie,” the authors contend, “functions both to project one’s own antisocial impulses onto someone else and to justify using violent, undemocratic means to achieve one’s political goals” (236). Within “The Exorcist effect,” “events provoke stories and vice versa” (11).

Laycock and Harrelson tie this “feedback loop” to recent QAnon controversies—in ways that are sensationalist. Former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin, a supposed insider with secret knowledge of the Vatican and world governments, “was ‘Q’ before there was QAnon,” the authors write in chapter 5 (132). They identify Martin’s career as significant to the cultural coherence that later fuses demonology, exorcism, and conspiracy into segments of popular political imagination. The authors also reveal how traces of the adrenochrome conspiracy surface in an interview (date unknown) with demonologist Ed Warren. The Exorcist and related cinema (see chapters 3 and 4) must be analyzed as “plausibility structures that support dangerous conspiracy theories” (15). Problematically, the authors seem to interpret QAnon as a means of legitimating the scholarly study of exorcism and Satanism, as the two make conjectures about connections between film and political conspiracies in the absence of empirical data which shows that these connections actually exist. “Satanic Panic is . . . more of a threat to democracy and public safety today than in the 1980s” (199), they conclude, with exorcism films somehow implicated in internet accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. The authors overstate just how generative cinema may be in the creation and dissemination of America’s conspiracy thinking.

While relevant survey data is provided, the basis of the book stems from theories of spectatorship. Such speculation poses the largest obstacle for the book’s narrative. If supernatural horror films, especially those marketed as “true stories,” effectively create popular models from which consumers seek and create ostension, how may we trace QAnon conspiracy theories, with their demonization of liberal elites and others, to consistent possession/exorcism media in the public sphere? It is true that “reports of demonic activity and Satanic conspiracies can spread . . . faster” on social media (229), but contrary to the authors’ concluding remarks, the degree to which social media posts accelerate “The Exorcist effect” remains undetermined. Social media analysis and data science are not prioritized as methodologies within this book. Are possession/exorcism films then directly implicated in the social media posts of QAnon supporters or right-wing religious media consumers? These inquiries require more research.

Though exorcism, by consequence of adding other sensationalist narrative threads, seems epiphenomenal and extraneous in this equation, I see value in incorporating exorcism and Satanism together into this analysis of the “feedback loop.” Exorcism discourse enters the public sphere at times of social crisis. Satanism and exorcism appreciate in social capital as public preoccupations with imagined rival communities increase (chapter 6). Occult practice/Satanism and possession/exorcism phenomena stem from mutually recognizant feelings of political sectarianism and moral panic—that is, false accusations, social competition between newer and more traditional agencies/authorities of social control, and oversimplified and/or ambiguous systems of diagnosis. American discourse routinely emphasizes topics of reiterative religious combat, apocalypticism, cosmic upheavals, and, indeed, conspiracy theories. The popular media consumption and reproduction of exorcism and Satanism remain significant by consequence.

I submit that Laycock and Harrelson’s tracing of such “fringe” mediatized characters (e.g., Ed and Lorraine Warren, Malachi Martin, Bob Larson, Ralph Sarchie) would improve through a discussion of the Christian persecution complex and self-designations of political outsiderhood. American discourse remains shaped by those who best appropriate rhetoric of persecution in efforts of political mobilization.

William Chavez is an assistant professor in religious studies at Stetson University.

William Chavez

Date Of Review:

August 15, 2024