it's giving catholic vibes in a horror movie

how religious horror uses catholic aesthetics and deep-rooted fears of evil to deliver truly horrifying tales

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un.

I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC. I went to Catholic school; I wore a long white dress with white gloves to my First Communion. There were too many crosses and Virgin Marys around the house growing up. I'm also obsessed with horror. My first taste of it was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my older sister, at an age when that show was definitely scary to me. Battling vampires with wooden stakes and crosses and holy water felt natural to me; those were imagery every Catholic child could easily understand.

Over time my fascination with horror only grew. I started watching scary movies in secret (I wasn't allowed, obviously) and most of them involved the supernatural. Ghosts and demons were what scared me most, not serial killers. To this day I rarely enjoy slasher stories. There is something more troubling with stories of spirits and demonic entities; how do we fight something that is not of this world? How do we fight something we cannot even see, something that might not even be there?