Catholic themed horror is dull. There are a small handful of exceptions of course, (this is a response to one such exception) but even amongst those who enjoy this surprisingly expansive subgenre, I don’t think that’s a very inflammatory statement. There are only so many times that you can have a ‘meditation on the nature of evil’ without it becoming stale; especially when the majority of works that take this tack have nothing more to say than ‘there’s a darkness inside of man.’ And this roteness isn’t limited to only thematics.
There’s a certain formal rigidity to Catholic themed horror; an aesthetic and structural rut which it’s been stuck in since the 70s. In large part this is due to its cultural reliance upon its progenitor, The Exorcist. A film which, despite what your Boomer relatives might tell you, is far more of a supernatural drama than an outright horror movie. A good (but not great) film, with some novel (but not revelatory) ideas, which unexpectedly went on to earn the studio a fuck ton of money, as well as critical accolades and even a few academy awards. And, sadly, the subgenre has never recovered from this original sin of market viability.
At their best, its popular expressions are Exorcist knockoffs that manage to stick the landing on the drama elements. At their worst, they’re James Wan throwing a Spirit Halloween nun costume at you from just off camera. A few of the truly ambitious additions will go for some baby’s first postmodernism, and end on the twist that ‘exorcisms aren’t actually real, maybe.’ All while reproducing the drab, grounded visual style of their predecessor, without any understanding of why that style was used, let alone how to use it anywhere near as effectively.
I suspect that studios (publishers, curators, et al) being too afraid to offend christian viewers is a significant part of the genre's stagnation. At the same time, there’s also a clear fear of going too far in the other direction. Of making the work too religious, and pushing away more agnostic viewers; or making horror which actually speaks to something within Catholicism / Christianity, whether it be from the perspective of an insider or an outsider. In essence, the very presence of religion has made the entire endeavor too risky to truly commit to, while still being far too lucrative to set aside.
The Exorcist, and its better imitators like The Omen, managed to thread the needle of too much or too little religiosity, and have thus been parroted again and again by risk-averse creators. The outcome is a bunch of forgettable, safe rehashes, rolled out at regular intervals, checking each box without deviation. Like a parishioner steadily making their way through the stations of the cross, again and again, only to arrive at the same, carefully curated ‘revelation’ as the time before.
Hence, it’s dull. But it certainly doesn’t need to be.
Full disclosure: I’m not and have never been even remotely religious, but outside of the predictable edgelord atheist phase of my teens, I’m also not specifically anti-church. Or at least my anti-church sentiments hold no special significance for me over my opposition to any other hierarchical power structure. I’ve got no skin in the game, is what I’m saying. Catholic and other religious themed horror holds no value to me, either positive or negative, beyond its success or failure AS a work of horror. And I find the successes too few and too far between.
Consequently, billie raphael’s work, agnus dei qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere mei, immediately hit me sideways. It unselfconsciously throws away all of the expected tropes and norms of religious horror, (and, I suspect, religious erotica, though I haven’t confirmed that) while simultaneously having far more to say about religion than anything within the far safer canon of similar works. It, like so many gothic cathedrals before it, has not merely reproduced what came before, but heightened it to the point of simultaneous ecstasy and absurdity.
Of course it has several things working in its favour, over other works in the same milieu. Firstly, as a work that straddles the line of both film and visual art, it’s freed from many of the expectations within those mediums. Likewise, by resting between horror and erotica, as well as comedy and tragedy, agnus dei uses the inherent queerness of its form(s) to great effect. In true queer fashion, it blends seemingly disparate elements and contradictory truths in ways which feel true and lived in, regardless of whether or not they make any sense on paper. Which is, at least to my own outsider’s understanding, precisely the type of truth that one is supposed to find in religion.
raphael’s work does what horror excels at: It shocks you. It makes you uncomfortable, not through cheap jump scares or children using spooky voices, but by showing you something you always knew was there, but couldn’t put an image to. It embraces contradiction, and poor taste, and good old fashioned blood-soaked sex and gore, and refuses to flinch, or apologize, or pull its punches while doing so. It makes unsafe choices, while wading hip deep in already unsafe waters. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, not fucking dull. And we could use far more religious art like it, blood and horniness and discomfort and all.
Amen. Now say ten Hail Judas’ and leave your number in the collection plate on the way out.