The Catholic Roots of Modern Horror

Long before we had creepy Halloween stalwarts like Freddy Krueger, hockey-masked Jason, and Pennywise the killer clown, there was Father Patrick Phelan of the Hotel-Dieu convent in Montreal.The cruel priest and the “Black Nuns,” who work with him, are among the villains of a gruesome literary classic, “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.” Published nearly 200 years ago, this fake memoir purportedly exposed the “secrets of the convent. The dungeons. The punishment. The torture. The murder. The rape,” as the authors of a fascinating new book “Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America” put it.“Awful Disclosures” was one of many “wildly popular and explicitly anti-Catholic publications” that appeared “during years marked by Protestant anxiety about Catholic immigrants and the threat they posed to Anglo norms.” Written by “four Catholic historians who love horror stories” — Matthew J. Cressler, Kathleen Holscher, Jack Lee Downey and Michael Pasquier — “Body and Blood” traces these 19th century social fears all the way to the post-1960s rise of bloody slasher flicks, arguing that “there is a profoundly Catholic current coursing through modern American horror.”For any 21st century American genuinely wrestling with questions about faith, pluralism, and social paranoia, “Body and Blood” is one of the more timely and enlightening books you’ll read any time soon.The authors are forthright about the American prejudices that fueled genre books and movies, while never ignoring the many horrific sins of church leaders themselves, from the Inquisition and colonialism right up to the global sex abuse scandals of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Just this week, the New York Archdiocese announced a potential settlement with victims totaling nearly a billion dollars.If you’re wondering why and how schlocky genre movies became the stuff of prestige TV and Oscar-winning cinema, and how history lingers in popular culture, and why it seems half-a-dozen movies about scary nuns are made every year, then “Body and Blood” is a must-read.Not that you will, or should, agree with all of the authors’ claims or interpretations. With fewer than 200 pages of narrative text, the authors are not (and don’t claim to be) authoritative, especially when it comes to the 19th century culture wars between Catholics and Protestants that — to this day — profoundly shaped American culture. (We don’t hear anything about Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who was fascinatingly ambiguous about Catholicism.)Comparisons to other artistic-religious controversies — over “satanic” heavy metal music, say, or works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” — might also have been enlightening. But the very fact that this book makes a genuine, substantive case for the continuing relevance of 19th century conflicts undermines prevailing assumptions that the only history that really matters began in the 1960s.“Body and Blood” is made up of two distinct narratives. The first is a chronicle of 19th century anti-Catholicism, which reinforced beliefs that America was meant to be neither a Christian nor pluralistic nation but simply a Protestant one.Poster for ‘Psycho,’ directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. Wikimedia CommonsThen there is a more authoritative chronicle of horror films (broadly defined, and later including TV series) since the 1960 release of “Psycho.”“The period during which (Alfred Hitchcock) made Psycho and established himself in the United States ‘was a time of the most profound ambivalence in the relationship between Catholics and American culture,’” the authors write, also quoting historian Robert Orsi, who added: “As much as they were assimilating to American ways—and indeed because of this—Catholics were intensely concerned to mark and maintain the difference between themselves and other Americans. They accomplished this … by establishing, emphasizing, and intensifying the distinctive boundaries of the Catholic body.”Toss in the fact that the devoutly Catholic Hitchcock “brought intimacy with corpses to his art,” and you have a provocative (if not entirely persuasive) argument for “Psycho” as a distinctly Catholic American classic.At the heart of “Body and Blood,” inevitably, is the most important, and controversial, horror film in cinematic history. So much has already been said about William Friedkin’s 1973 picture “The Exorcist” — “the urtext of Catholic supernatural horror,” the authors write. They efficiently summarize this decades-long debate, including (as unlikely as it may seem) an analysis of why conservatives have embraced director William Friedkin’s blood-soaked flick.“Filmmakers, showrunners, and storytellers have spent the past half century imitating, riffing on, and subverting,” ‘The Exorcist,'” the authors write. The 1980s and 1990s, in “Body and Blood,” bring with them a diverse, endless stream of horror sequels and sub-genres, but also appalling abuse revelations. Overall, the authors do as capable a job as possible of conveying the pain and suffering of recent decades, while also analyzing how popular culture has continued to respond to recent as well as ancient history. (Some readers, for various reasons, might not love the authors’ focus on “the fetus” after Roe v. Wade.) The final big cinematic controversy with which “Body and Blood” contends is Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which in its own provocative way was a mash-up of a half-a-dozen genres, and thus raised an inordinate number of artistic as well as theological questions.An inevitable weakness of “Body and Blood” is that it must conclude at a time when the very ideas it chronicles have never been more popular, with the expansion, in recent years, of streaming services and TV horror shows. Which perhaps means the authors will need to consider a temptation that has seduced so many of the artists under discussion in this eye-opening book: A sequel.

The Catholic Roots of Modern Horror

The Catholic Roots of Modern Horror

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