This trend appears to have been largely reversed. Vampire-laden narratives, for instance, rarely take seriously their roots in Christian ritual and theology anymore. The first entry in the recently completed Blade trilogy makes a point of overtly ridiculing the notion that the cross and holy water could hold any power over vampires, and offerings like Underworld (a sequel was released Friday) avoid references to Christianity altogether. Hordes of vampires and demons populate Joss Whedon’s popular Buffy and Angel television series, but they are conflicted, morally ambiguous creatures as often as not, their soul-searching quests for redemption aligning them more closely with humanity than with Satan. On the flip side, we’ve a growing number of “good” guys who also (quite literally) straddle the chasm between heaven and hell. The titular heroes of comic-born movies Spawn (1997), Hellboy (2004), and the upcoming Ghost Rider (2007) fight evil with powers born—not of Heaven—but of Hell itself.

So it’s a pleasant surprise to catch a successfully scary movie whose most frightening feature is its assumption that there is a deep divide separating the shadow and the light, and that the two forces are quite unequivocally at odds. When the two tangle in Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), the result is not some pleasant shade of grey—no reconciliation or uneasy partnership resolves this conflict—but a knock-down, drag-out fight that leaves only one victor.

This story about a priest put on trial for attempting to perform an exorcism on his now-deceased parishioner, Emily Rose, is framed by two central questions. Is there actually some invisible world filled with angels and demons and, if so, can we avoid dealing with this uncomfortably intangible, unmeasurable plane of existence by simply ignoring it?

Towards the beginning of the movie, public defender Erin Bruner wonders whether third-world countries report more instances of possession, not because they are more “primitive” or “superstitious,” but because they see possession for what it really is: “Maybe we’ve taught ourselves not to see it.” Derrickson’s film articulates the alternative position, but only to explode it. We hear medically reasoned explanations for the strange behavior and wild visions that precede Emily’s death, and we see alternate explanatory flashbacks that imply she was having grand-mal seizures (instead of being attacked by invisible demons, as suggested by earlier flashbacks). The movie does not, however, allow us to accept the scientific approach pushed by the prosecution, as it regularly intercuts scenes that show Erin and Father Moore encountering demonic and angelic forces themselves (usually around the witching hour of 3 a.m.).

The movie, then, suggests that an unambiguously malevolent Satan does exist, and that Emily Rose’s choice to remain in a body taken over by demons was indeed a heroic—not a psychotic—decision. As she explains during a brief lucid period following the failed exorcism, a divine voice told her in a dream that refusing to escape early to the afterlife meant she would “suffer greatly,” but that through her “many [would] come to see that the realm of the spirit is real.”

The irony here is that a self-proclaimed Christian, the counsel for the prosecution, is the film’s strongest proponent of a non-spiritual, “facts-only” approach. Like a utilitarian educator pulled straight out of Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), Ethan Thomas denounces all the defense’s “imaginative” talk of spirits, claiming that though he is a “man of facts” as well as a “man of faith,” “in this court room, facts are what must matter.” Ethan’s platform admits only to cordon off and remove the supernatural, implying that we can choose at will when God and Satan will play their parts in human events.

I'm going to suggest that this film has been classed as a “horror” flick by the American film industry not only because of the conventional scare tactics it employs to surprise and shock its audience, but because--like Ethan Thomas--much of our culture is horrified by the very idea that that events like those depicted in this film might actually occu. What if even a quarter of the supernatural goings-on portrayed in this film were authentic? What if Satan really does exist? Such a conclusion would obviously require a significant reevaluation of what we consider "reality."