The Lives and Afterlives of The Exorcist (1973)

This roundtable gathers eight scholars to analyze and commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist – the book, the film, and its many inspirations, imitations, and inheritances. Panelists will reflect on the film’s popular reception and spectacle; the significance of the St. Louis Jesuits who inspired the book; the vernacular religious understanding of Catholicism operating within the film; the film's impact on demand for and practice of American exorcism; the ways the franchise showcases the social subjugation of women in horror; a queer reading of the film as exemplar of “gothic Catholicism”; the film’s distinctly gendered aesthetic template for Catholic horror; and the interplay between the film’s spectacle and the banal horrors of the Catholic Seventies.