Profs & Pints Alameda: Faith and Frights

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Faith and Frights,” a Jesuit priest’s take on religious themes in notoriously terrifying movies, with the Rev. Dennis Recio, S.J., lecturer in English and teacher of a seminar on horror films at the University of San Francisco.

[Tickets available only online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-faith-and-frights .]

Many have been left praying for salvation from darkness based not on what they had heard in church, but what they had watched in a movie theater. Forget depictions of fictional vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Nothing unsettles quite like a religiously themed horror movie featuring evil forces and evil beings that we might truly believe exist.

Spend an evening confronting the power of religiously themed horror with Father Dennis Recio, a scholar of horror films on the same team as those priests you’ve seen warning of the antichrist, performing exorcisms, or getting hurled by demons out windows and down stairs. He’ll talk about what Hollywood gets right in its depictions of religion in horror films, as well as where it stumbles. He’ll explore why religiously themed horror often generates so much buzz and why it has so much appeal.

He’ll start by describing how horror films are rooted in Gothic literature of the eighteenth century and derived from such literature a focus on the depiction of anxiety during periods of social and religious unrest. From there we’ll examine horror films with religious themes that attracted huge audiences and sometimes caused big stirs in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as the Catholic Church endured upheaval and change as a result of Vatican II.

We’ll look at movies that drew attention with religious themes that suggest the possibility of the Devil entering the world through hapless or unsuspecting victims, including Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and Richard Donner’s The Omen. We’ll consider films like Alice Sweet Alice, Carrie, and The Amityville Horror that ascribed to insular religious communities a peculiar violence related to their maintenance of religious practices. We’ll chart the rise of films like The Conjuring with narratives focused on lay persons as demonologists out to vanquish demonic forces.

Father Recio will make clear that religious horror is not relegated to a focus on institutional religion. We’ll look at how it lurks in folk horror films such as The Wicker Man, The Blair Witch Project, and The Witch and their stories of fear and dread. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From a stained glass window from about 1170 depicting the Devil tempting Jesus. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London / Creative Commons.)