Vampires, demons and the cross: Catholicism and horror

Carved gargoyles and other grotesques, often representing animal and/or human chimeras, sometimes overtly demonic, loom from the walls of Catholic churches, their cultural and symbolic significance uncertain and debated. The dans macabre or “dance of death” was a genre of literary, visual and dramatic arts depicting Death personified summoning human beings of every class and category — popes and emperors, merchants and robbers, men and women, old and young, rich and poor — to the world beyond in a procession of fleshy and skeletal figures. Here the moral was clear: memento mori, “remember that you must die,” though elaborated with a grisly élan.

For film buffs, the dans macabre is overwhelmingly associated with that quintessential art film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which begins with a famous, much-parodied encounter of Max von Sydow’s knight and Death on a beach, and ends with a haunting image of a parade of hand-holding figures silhouetted on the horizon, Death and a number of the film’s characters departing this life.

The Seventh Seal is one of the 45 outstanding films called out on the 1995 Vatican film list. Another is F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu, the first great vampire movie — though not a film that contributes to the iconography of Catholicism as the great enemy of uncanny evil.

Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula ascribes great power over vampires to the crucifix and the Eucharist: something that protagonist Jonathan Harker, being an Anglican, initially resists as idolatrous superstition, though Van Helsing, a Catholic, has no such qualms. Alas, Murnau’s film, an unauthorized, unofficial adaptation of Dracula, omits all this, along with virtually any all religious content beyond a few vestigial references (Belial, the seven deadly sins, etc.). Here the Van Helsing character (the characters’ names were all changed in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to dodge copyright) is a man of science, but not of faith — and, curiously, he is the least effective Van Helsing in the Dracula mythos, contributing nothing at all to the vampire’s defeat.

Nosferatu’s great contribution to vampiric lore is the vampire’s fatal weakness to sunlight. In Stoker’s novel Dracula’s power was at its full at the night, but sunlight was not harmful to him, and he could even exercise his powers at noon. Murnau’s film ends with the vampire, preoccupied with feeding on the protagonist’s wife and forgetful of the hour, succumbing to the first rays of the dawn and evaporating in a puff of smoke. It is a weakness vampires would generally retain ever after.

Nosferatu the Vampyre, Werner Herzog’s dreamlike 1979 remake of Murnau’s film, restores Stoker’s religious iconography (along with the characters’ names, Stoker’s book having passed into public domain). Herzog’s Dracula, like Stoker’s, is repelled by the crucifix, and crumbs of the Eucharist, scattered over the earth of Dracula’s coffin or in a line on the floor, are an insuperable barrier to the vampire.

On the other hand, Herzog’s Van Helsing is once again a relatively impotent, even ridiculous man of science rather than faith — one who manages to contribute to Dracula’s destruction, only to be defeated by Dracula’s successor, Jonathan Harker, who, in the film’s haunting final shot, rides away in dark triumph to continue spreading the curse.

While the most familiar and iconic of all movie vampires is probably Bela Lugosi’s elegantly seductive Count in the eponymous 1931 Universal film directed by Tod Browning, the most influential Dracula might be Christopher Lee, first seen in Terence Fisher’s 1958 Dracula (known in the US as Horror of Dracula), made for England’s Hammer Films.

Not only did Fisher’s film canonize the vampire’s deadly vulnerability to sunlight, with its dramatic climatic depiction of Dracula gruesomely withering into dust in the rays of the sun, it also gave us the first depiction of the cross not merely as a repellant, but as a weapon of offensive power. Lugosi’s Dracula is clearly crucifix-averse, but Fisher — a high-church Anglican whose films were infused with belief in the power of good over evil — gave the world vampires whose undead flesh burst into flames at a cross’s touch. So powerful is the cross in Fisher’s film that Dracula can be driven into the sun’s rays by a pair of candlesticks held at right angles.

Lee went on to reprise the role in a long string of mostly indifferent sequels, mostly with other directors, some of which subverted Fisher’s Christian vision in various ways. Roy Ward Baker’s Scars of Dracula (1970) opens with Dracula avenging himself on villagers who burned his castle by sending bats to kill all their women and children within the very walls of the village church. “The Devil has won,” stammers the priest as blood drips onto the church candles, extinguishing them.

Brian Clemens’s Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter explicitly developed an interesting theological wrinkle, suggested in earlier Hammer films, that has had some influence in later mythology: the idea that the cross and other sacred articles protect only those with true faith. More dubiously, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a co-production with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio, co-directed by Baker and Chang Cheh, takes Dracula to China, where it turns out that, in an appropriate religious milieu, an image of the Buddha can be as effective as a crucifix. At this point the notion of the power of an image of good triumphing over evil has been elided by the notion of the power of religious sentiment in any mode.

Fisher’s contributions to the cinematic vocabulary of Catholic iconography vs. uncanny evil were not limited to vampire movies. His best film, The Devil Rides Out (1968, known in the US as The Devil’s Bride), is a dark tale of black magic, devil worship, and satanic manifestations, based on the 1934 novel by Dennis Wheatley.

The film stars Lee in a rare heroic role as the Duc de Richleau, a masterful incarnation of the Van Helsing archetype — not as Stoker wrote him, but as subsequent adaptations have reimagined him, an experienced veteran in the sacred war against the powers of hell. The Duc’s arsenal against evil includes crosses, holy water, the Bible, Latin, sacred symbols and fictionalized ritual. As with Fisher’s Dracula, the power of the sacred over uncanny evil is absolute: holy water or crosses thrown at satanic apparitions banishes them instantly.

Five years later came a far more momentous Hollywood film about demons and exorcism, a film that changed everything: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), adapted by William Peter Blatty from his 1971 novel.

The Exorcist is a crucial film, a pivotal link from the Catholic-inflected piety of Golden Age Hollywood and the demonic world of latter-day horror. It is not the first cinematic depiction of demonic possession and exorcism, but it may be the first film to depict the power of religion over evil in a post-Christian cultural milieu. Young Regan’s mother, divorced actress Chris O’Neill (Ellen Burstyn), is an agnostic whose incredulous reaction when the topic of exorcism is broached is: “You’re telling me that I should take my daughter to a witch doctor? Is that it?”

The suggestion, which comes from the director of a clinic that has failed to treat Regan’s symptoms, is couched in an interesting way: The clinic director admits that exorcisms have been known to “work” — by the force of suggestion, he says, deeming possession itself a psychosomatic or hysterical condition. This rationalization opens the back door for Regan to be seen by a pair of Jesuit priests with secondary areas of expertise: Father Karras (Jason Miller), a psychiatrist as well as a priest who is struggling with his faith and sense of vocation, and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), also an archaeologist, who has experience with exorcisms.

The Exorcist wavers intriguingly between faith and doubt, with the priests finding as much reason to dismiss the possession as to accept it. Regan seems to know that Karras’ mother is dead (and implies that she is in hell), but falls silent when Karras challenges the demon to give her maiden name. Regan is restrained, and the demon apparently can’t overcome the bonds — but then a nightstand drawer inexplicably pops open, a trick the demon can’t or won’t repeat, at least immediately. Regan writhes in apparent pain when Karras sprinkles her with what he says is holy water — but it’s plain tap water.

What’s happening here? Does the demon not know the difference between tap water and holy water? Does the placebo effect work on possessed people? Or is the demon perhaps deliberately casting doubt on the reality of the possession, the effectiveness of the Church’s arsenal, or both?

Religious dramas have sometimes struggled with the dramatic problem of divine omnipotence: How can dramatic conflict exist if the heroes literally have God on their side? If a crucifix is a bulletproof defense against Dracula, how do you still make him frightening? The Exorcist discovers a counterintuitive flip side of this proposition: A satanic power that seems to have limitations, that can possibly be stumped or tricked, is in a way scarier than an unstoppable monster.

Perhaps it’s partly because it feels more real to the viewer: more like the world of our experience, in which the presence of God in the world and in our lives, and of angels and demons for that matter, is often more a matter of interpretation than of hard and fast criteria. The devil that might not be there is paradoxically more terrifying than the Devil with wings and horns, because the Devil with wings and horns we meet only in stories, whereas the devil that might not be there is also the devil that really might.

The Exorcist establishes a familiar pattern of inferring the presence of God and the power of religion from the evident power of evil. When Chris turns to Father Karras, it’s obvious that, despite her agnosticism, her hopes are in the less quantifiable side of his background: “Not a psychiatrist! She needs a priest!” Chris hasn’t interpreted her daughter’s condition as possession because of religious ideas; she became open to religious ideas because of her daughter’s condition.

Likewise, it is during the course of the exorcism process that Father Karras recovers his faith and sense of vocation — though ambiguities remain to the end, which can be seen, particularly in the original version, as a victory for God or for the devil. Scenes added to the 2000 edition (“The version you’ve never seen”) tip the interpretation of the film in a positive direction.

Despite its sometimes lurid Hollywood excess, The Exorcist is imbued with a genuinely religious spirit reflecting Blatty’s quest of faith and Friedkin’s humanistic curiosity. Subsequent exorcism-themed films, including sequels, have seldom matched the theological persuasiveness of the original. John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) floated a number of bizarre ideas: The Catholic hierarchy has distanced itself from its own teaching on demonic spirits. The Exorcist III (1990) finds the demon of the first two films taking further revenge against Merrin by reanimating his body with the soul of a murderer!

Only Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel To the Exorcist makes any effort to match the spirit of the original. Schrader’s pensive, theological approach didn’t match studio expectations, though, and the film was reworked by Renny Harlin as a more typical horror show called Exorcist: The Beginning. Both versions were eventually released, Harlin’s in 2005; Shrader’s in 2006.

In those same two years, two films were released based on a real-life case, that of a young Bavarian woman named Anneliese Michel: Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem (2006). Even more than The Exorcist, these films explore the power of ambiguity: Is it demonic possession or mental illness?

A few recent horror films have taken spiritual themes and a Catholic milieu as seriously as The Exorcist — The Rite, The Conjuring, Deliver Us From Evil — though none is in the same league as the 1973 film. Still, it’s a testament to the impact of The Exorcist, and perhaps a lingering awareness of spiritual hunger in our culture, that the genre remains vital over 40 years later.