Walther and Blatty are right that belief in traditional Catholic ideas about the devil, demons, good and evil, sin, hell, heaven, and Judgment Day have atrophied. But the idea that a horror movie might be some sort of remedy for that loss is dubious. More than thirty years ago, the anthropologist Mary Douglas tackled this problem in a short but pungent essay in the London Tablet (“The Devil Vanishes”). Douglas examined the broader context into which what Eire calls the “wild facts” of the past fit. “In the anthropological perspective it would seem that the devil has been gradually losing his grip on the mind of Western Christians. He has become a pantomime figure, like Dick Whittington’s cat, or a scary theme in horror films, like Dracula,” Douglas wrote. “More modern people believe in God than believe in the devil. In the anthropological long view, God has changed a lot too. He is made out to be more indulgent than before. He does not divide sheep from goats, or condemn his creatures to eternal torment…. It is not only the devil who has taken a back place, but the whole angelic host.”
As Douglas explains, ideas about sin and the devil can operate rationally in closed communities as ways in which neighbors who deal with each other face-to-face hold each other accountable. “But if there is no community, there is no such debate; and with no public debate the idea of sin has lost one of its public functions,” Douglas writes. In the open, mobile, highly atomized modern West, the idea of sin becomes politicized. “Not sin against God, but sin against humanity has taken the old rhetorical role,” she observes. In more tightly knit communities, practices such as exorcism are a way to reintegrate the sinner back into the community by blaming the demon rather than the possessed. “It allows the sinner to be distinguished from the sin. It was not the sinner’s fault that he succumbed; the devil was too strong for him: fortunately the community religion has resources which will expel the evil spirt and cleanse the sinner,” Douglas writes.
