How watching The Exorcist with my kids assured me as a deconstructing parent

I was seventeen when The Exorcist was re-released in theaters as a director's cut with never-before-seen footage. My family did not celebrate Halloween, so this would be my first real step into the world of horror. The world I grew up in, demons were not a joke or entertainment, but a real fear that we faced as a society. Instead of reading books by Stephen King as a child, I grew up on his Christian counterpart, Frank E. Peretti, who wrote horror books about angels, demons, and the impending judgment that awaited us all. Unlike the predecessors of horror like Mary Shelley, who used the genre for allegorical reasons, Peretti used his books like This Present Darkness to convey a spiritual “reality” of what the world of angels and demons, constantly fighting over the souls of man, must look like if we could see past the veil of the spiritual warfare happening all around us.

As a kid, I didn’t have to watch horror films; I lived in one.

Conversations of demons were commonplace in the churches that I attended. Kids were frequently warned not to mess with the demonic forces that existed in what they called “the world” as if they were somehow separate from this tangible reality that we lived in and only wished for the release from the mortal coil to their celestial home somewhere in the great beyond. Two realities existed on the other side of all this: an eternal paradise where we would have a lavish life in the arms of Jesus or eternal torment to suffer the wages of sin.

I had been warned of the dangers that lurked under the Ouija board, tarot cards, and the occult bible known as Harry Potter. One of the strangest plot twists of my adult life was watching She Who Shall Not Be Named running directly to the bosom of the very folks who once encouraged the burning of her books. Stranger still was watching those who once burned her books override their hatred for witches for their joint fear-mongering of the trans community.

Friends at church had warned me of the dangers I faced if I chose to watch The Exorcist. However, I was deep in the throes of my film buff era, and I just had to watch the movie in theaters “the way it was meant to be seen!” My pleading did not fall on deaf ears, and I was granted the right to absorb the terrors that awaited me.

I slept at the end of my parent's bed that night, quaking in fear of the demons that long for my immortal soul and the Hell that yearned for me if I didn’t get my act straight. I admired the priests who valiantly fought against this evil, and a seed was planted. Having grown up entirely protestant my whole life, I walked into a small Catholic chapel shortly after viewing the film and said, “I am not Catholic, but I don’t know who else to talk to…” That day, the priest sat with me in my struggles. He listened to me, counseled me, and, most importantly, didn’t say, “I can’t talk to you because you aren’t part of the club.” These events began a long journey to my ultimate conversion to a faith that felt ancient and, eventually, my ordination as a priest.

The very first time I donned the black and white, I felt like a warrior finally prepared to take on the spiritual battles that lay ahead of me. This wasn’t just a uniform but the armor of god. That little white tab around my neck was a dog collar, letting the spiritual forces know I was ready to take on the enemy.

During my time in the priesthood, I far more often fought physical forces than spiritual ones. Instead of chasing demons like Father Karras, I took on city councils, hunger, poverty, homelessness, and the specter of impending fascism. Eventually, I grew to realize that the religion I loved was just as complicit in the harm I was attempting to fight. That book that brought Hitler to power was the same one that led Bonhoeffer to defy the Third Reich, and I struggled to reconcile this reality. How did the words I read with love written in red make others wish to wear red instead?

I left the church.

My oldest daughter, now nineteen, still remembers her dad standing behind the altar, but my other two children, thirteen and ten, have no memory of the man in black. Instead, like their mother, they call those old rags that hang in my closet like a retired military uniform “The Batsuit.” They know it hangs there as a reminder, only to be removed from its place to bury the dead the Church has rejected as unworthy of a proper burial or has refused to wed because The Institution has chosen hatred over recognizing love.

My children grew up without Hell or demons. They read banned books instead of burning them. Like my mother before me, I sat with them as they watched The Sound of Music to show them what sometimes we have to leave the abbey to chase after love, and when they splatter red on the walls, we tear it down, no matter the cost. I read them the works of Bonhoeffer, inspired by the words of Jesus, to give them context for the real battles that lay ahead of them.

When my middle child turned thirteen, we began putting together a list of horror films we would marathon during October in preparation for Halloween. This, I suppose, is now a tradition, as I had done something similar many Octobers before when her oldest sister turned thirteen.

Like most parents deconstructing the faith of their youth, I struggle deeply if I am making the right choices. I would do anything for my children, and the deep struggle of anyone raising a child is hoping that your own trauma does not create new problems for them. You don’t know if your choices, good or bad, will become a burden they must carry later in life. What if I am wrong and Hell does wait for us on the other side? What if I am doing as the Christian trolls accuse me of and leading an entire generation directly into the pit? Wouldn’t a good father prevent this destruction from happening to their children?

Yes, I suppose they would.

Which means if Hell is real, we served a truly cruel Father.

We started our home entertainment horror fest where I began: The Exorcist.

As the credits rolled in unison with the classic sound of Tubular Bells, I felt a shudder up my spine. My best friend in the priesthood and I both had this sound as our ringtones. Whenever we would go to dinner together, as Hector approached the hostess stand, he would joke, “We have the young priest and the old priest, and after this meal, we will need some exercising!” This film shocked the nation when it was released. People fainted, puked, and protested. It remained a terror for generations to come, traumatizing everyone from the Silent Generation to the Millennials, and now it was my turn to pass on the horror to Gen Z.

I waited in antici… SAY IT …pation.

When Regan’s mom turns around holding the Ouija board to ask her about it, I look over to my kid, just shaking her head and mumbling, “This dumb b+tch.” She proceeded to heckle Regan through the ENTIRE film, saying things like, “That’s what you get for messing with sh+t you don’t understand!” When the movie was over, she calmly walked upstairs, completely resolute that she would never, and went to sleep peacefully.

Around the seventeenth, “the power of Christ compels you,” I apparently fell asleep. My daughters had walked up the stairs, laughed in their room about how corny the film was, and then put themselves to bed. They did not wake me up with terror in the middle of the night asking to sleep in my room. Conversely, I woke up in a panic on the couch in my living room, terrified and confused. I rushed up the stairs in the middle of the witching hour to check on my babies, only to find them peacefully asleep. I made the horror walk of shame back down the stairs, into the darkness of my kitchen, and the only ghoul that followed me was bewilderment.

The next evening, we continued our marathon with a double feature, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. As I prepared a snack between the two films, I listened as Freddy Krueger was described as “a total creep for sure” but “not really that scary.” What in the actual f+ck is wrong with these kids, I thought as I brought my apples and almond butter back into the living room with me, faking a smile.

As the ending credits of Halloween began to play, my thirteen-year-old said, “Well, that was pretty scary.” She opened her phone to see where the nearest insane asylum was, and I gave her a lesson on a far scarier Reagan, why the mental health institutions were closed, and how it resulted in a mental health crisis and homeless epidemic. Spooky stuff, indeed. I even looped it back around to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, by way of that, The Shining. I asked what was particularly scary about this film, Halloween, over the quantifiably terrifying movie The Exorcist.

“Because this could really happen,” she said calmly.

If horror films have taught us anything, it's that a sequel is only scary if we buy into the original premise of the preceding film. We need to understand the context of the origins for the fiction to work. My wife often says, “All art is derivative,” but good art is still beautiful even if you don’t understand the work that inspired it. For example, Da Vinci’s Last Supper is still a masterpiece, even if you just think it's a painting of some friends having a light snack before going to the coliseum. However, if you grew up not fearing demonic possession because you listened to metal music and Hell is not looming out there as some impending future for the sins you committed in this temporal plain. It seems that William Friedkin's “masterpiece” is viewed as nothing more than a somewhat slow-paced, clunky attempt at a jump scare. Without the underlying context to fear that this could happen to you or someone you love, there was nothing to fear.

As parents, their mother and I chose not to hand down the generational trauma of Hell or some present darkness looming over the world that could only be fought with an invisible sword known as The Word. We taught them about reality: science, history, and mathematics. We explained to them what allegory is and the value of the scriptures of all faiths as ways to understand culture and context. We opened the Bible to explain phrases in the works of William Shakespeare and the speeches of Dr. King. We also read them the Koran to better understand Malcolm X and the works of Yusuf / Cat Stevens.

Yet, my greatest fear as a parent remained: Am I setting my kids up for failure, not giving them the faith I grew up with? The nagging question of depriving them of something was profound until I watched The Exorcist with them. I taught my daughters that playing board games or reading books about witches wouldn’t harm them. I taught them that the real fear in this world is extremism and that it can take hold of anyone, even people who write books about witches.

It wasn’t demons that scared them, but a man with a knife and obsession did because that’s real.

The Exorcist will still exist as the scariest film I have ever seen, but it appears that is my cross to bear and not a burden that I placed on the backs of my own children. As I have gotten older, I still think my mom was a good parent for not shaming a seventeen-year-old boy for wanting to sleep in her room after watching The Exorcist. I am also realizing that I am a good parent because my kids didn’t need to.