Halloween seems like the right day for a confession: I’m a little obsessed with The Exorcist. The obsession began in fear. The very idea of demonic possession terrified me when I first became aware of it; joking references by a classmate at my (Catholic) grade school to the 1973 movie only redoubled my terror. I spent many years thereafter trying to avoid the movie’s long, infernal shadow in popular culture.

Then, in 2016, just before Halloween, I decided to face my fear and watch the movie. I discovered that, even though I had absorbed much of it by cultural osmosis (despite my best efforts), it still had an incredible power to shock (though the possessed Regan’s vernacular sounds increasingly modern) and scare (I didn’t sleep the night after I watched it). But also to uplift. As I wrote at the time, “My Catholic upbringing renders me not only uniquely susceptible to the film’s terror but to its main theme, one that commends it not only as a horror film but as a film generally: faith. Demonic evil reveals the higher, victorious reality of transcendent good.”

I don’t necessarily seek out horror as a genre, but I will watch horror films that stand out as great films. And The Exorcist definitely qualifies and is probably my favorite of the bunch . . . even though I haven’t watched it since. It seems pretty pointless to watch any other demonic-possession movie now; like Enter the Dragon (also released 50 years ago), The Exorcist invented so many of the tropes of its genre that the whole thing exists in its shadow. It’s hard even to find much new to say about the movie itself. Which is why in 2017, I read the source-material novel, by William Peter Blatty. (For added effect, I finished the book on Halloween . . . while sitting on the steps in Georgetown on which its climax takes place.)

If this seems a little pathological, blame my Catholic upbringing and its attendant Catholic guilt. But I take some solace in the fact that I am not the only one who has written about either the book or the film. In fact, in just the last week, City Journal published two articles about them. One, by Chris R. Morgan, is a review of The Devil Inside: The Dark Legacy of The Exorcist by Carlos Acevedo. The Devil Inside is a book about the making of the film. In Morgan’s telling, it “leaves almost nothing out when it comes to the film’s conception, its production, its critical legacy, and its ongoing controversies.” Even so, Morgan believes that “what Acevedo’s objective, debunking account perhaps overshadows is an appreciation for that innate, indispensable impulse of horror fans to bask in credulity—and to risk losing their lunch in a movie theater.”

And then there is an excellent character study of Father Damien Karras by John Hirschauer, formerly of National Review. Played in the film by Jason Miller (who had experienced his own crisis of faith), Karras is a priest consumed by doubts. Though as Hirschauer details, the nature of his doubts is slightly different between the book and the film. In both, however, he is a convincing and stirring portrait of uncertain faith, one “vindicated, ironically, by the incontrovertible existence of evil.” In 2019, I similarly observed, focusing on the book, that the experience brings “the restoration of Karras’s faith.”

Hirschauer also rightly sees in Karras’s character “the uneasy rapprochement between psychology and Catholicism, which persists half a century later.” The journey of the resolution of the problem of possession from the material to the spiritual is even more present in the book. The demon possessing Regan at first delights in visits by the “rational” Karras, because “nothing would prove anything at all to you. . . . That is why I love all reasonable men.”

Both essays help explain why the film endures (as well as the book), and why some of us remain obsessed. Moderns are sometimes uncomfortable with admitting true evil, but its presence in our world has hardly diminished, even as the traditional means of confronting it may have. Adrift in modernity’s anomie, we may find those older, surer conceptions of the good more comforting than we are comfortable admitting. But they will always be there for us.