The Exorcist Effect

Happy (almost) Halloween! We're keeping the horror movie picks coming with this week's review, which looks at the intersections between the horror movie genre and religious culture in connection to the iconic 1973 film, The Exorcist.

Posted on October 27, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion and Demonic Belief

Laycock, Joseph. by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson Oxford, 2023
312p bibl index, 9780197635391 $29.95, 9780197635421

The Exorcist Effect book cover

When William Friedkin’s film adaptation of The Exorcist (based on the novel by William Peter Blatty) opened on screens across North America in 1973, horror cinema was forever altered. And so, perhaps, was American culture. Laycock and Harrelson’s The Exorcist Effect transforms understanding of the interplay between pop culture, religion, and the nature of evil. Residing at the intersections of film studies, history, sociology, and religious studies, this remarkable book demonstrates the importance of such transdisciplinary approaches and probes how horror cinema influences attitudes toward spirituality and the supernatural. Notable chapters consider the “possession” film subgenre, mountebank mediums Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranoid writings of priest Malachi Martin, the rise of the religious Right, and the “Satanic panic” connected to heavy metal and horror cinema. A extremely powerful and relevant section centers on how conspiratorial thinking (as demonstrated by groups such as QAnon) related to the “Exorcist effect” continue to haunt US culture. This brilliant project opens up new avenues of study concerning cinema, culture, and systems of belief.

Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
Reviewer: S. B. Skelton, Kansas State University
Subject: Humanities – Performing Arts – Film
Choice Issue: Jun 2024

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