(Image: Scene from Killers of the Flower Moon)

“The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.” — James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

*** 

James Baldwin was deeply troubled by The Exorcist (1973), a film he insisted on seeing twice despite how much he despised it. His reflections on the film make up the last few pages of his 1975 book, The Devil Finds Work. He was “most concerned with the audience,” and “wondered what they were seeing, and what it meant to them.” Baldwin watching the audience watch The Exorcist led him to declare that the most terrifying thing about it was “the mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented” therein.

Two recent films—Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), about a Nazi family’s life right outside Auschwitz—brought Baldwin’s striking turn of phrase back to my mind. At first glance it might sound more than a bit idiosyncratic to speak of two critically-acclaimed historical dramas in the same sentence as “the scariest movie of all time.” And yet, each is a meditation on evil; each was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards; and, surprising as it may seem, each has an element of Catholic horror to it as well.

As I’ve written elsewhere for The Revealer, “Catholic horror” is a subgenre that invokes demonic forces in order to reinforce the power of the divine and, by extension, the supernatural authority of the Catholic Church. It runs on nostalgia for an imagined past when people recognized the real presence of God (and the Devil) in their midst and lived accordingly. (This is why so much Catholic horror is framed as “based on a true story.”)

What is missing from most Catholic horror—what Baldwin critiqued as “mindless and hysterical banality”—is any real assessment of the frightening human capacity for evil. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest accomplish this to devastating effect. And, it turns out, the central figures of both films happened to be Catholic. For this reason, I argue we should consider both to be Catholic horrors movies. If Catholic horror (singular) invokes supernatural evil to reinforce the authority of the Church, a Catholic horrors film (plural) reveals the human evil unleashed by Catholics and their Church in history.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s begin with a word on the ostensible subject of all three films: “evil.” The word has an absolutism about it. No ifs, ands, or buts, it seems to say. Things may be wrong, people may be bad (or very very wrong and very very bad), but evil is something else entirely. To call something “evil” is to comment on an exceptional quality, to place it beyond the pale and far past the point of redemption.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Evil (with a capital-E) is alive and well in horror. Horror fans can’t wait to watch irredeemably insidious, sinister, malignant, and barbaric figures wreak havoc on the world. In the nightmare realms of serial killing psychopaths and the supernaturally possessed, the Devil really does prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Weirdly, this is what makes such movies fun and reassuring. They operate with a kind of Manichean moral clarity. Evil is real. The point is to send it back to Hell, or, more modestly, to survive it.

All of which can feel too trite to be “high art.” Evil is the pulpy stuff of B-movies, par excellence. High-brow cinema (the literature of the multiplex) traffics, instead, in complexity and moral ambiguity. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest buck this trend, though.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese adapted David Grann’s book of the same name and produced a harrowing portrayal of the Osage Reign of Terror in 1920s Oklahoma; the period in which white settlers conspired to murder over sixty Native Americans of the Osage nation in a plot to inherit their oil wealth. In The Zone of Interest, Glazer loosely adapted Martin Amis’s work of historical fiction to make a movie that follows a Nazi commandant’s family as they live a disturbingly ordinary existence just outside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

These unrelenting reflections on evil were two of the most critically acclaimed films of the past year. Killers was nominated for ten Academy Awards. Zone took home Oscars for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound. Neither invited sympathy nor explored complex motivations. They both projected evil onto the silver screen and insisted you watch without blinking. Quite like a horror movie. Indeed, the first time I saw Killers of the Flower Moon I thought to myself: “My god, that was a Catholic horror movie.”

Yet, as I alluded to earlier, “Catholic horror” wasn’t quite the right descriptor. The Exorcist is archetypal Catholic horror. Evil in the 1973 film is a personified physical force. It is not a symbol for human suffering or a metaphor for civil strife. As writer Patricia Lockwood recalls her father putting it to her when she was a child: “This story is absolutely true…This was not a psychological disturbance. This was not puberty. Don’t listen to the shrinks. This was the presence of evil, pure and simple.” (Her father happens to be a Roman Catholic priest.) Fifty years of Catholic horror followed in its footsteps and the subgenre continues to insist that evil is the demon possessing your daughter and your only hope is the compelling power of Christ.

Killers of the Flower Moon, in this sense, should not be considered Catholic horror. The evil presented is real, to be sure. It is no metaphor for Scorsese. Yet, the evil in this picture is decidedly human. White settlers unleashed it upon the Osage. White Catholic settlers, as a matter of fact. This is why I describe it as a Catholic horrors film. I doubt Scorsese would dispute the claim. He is, after all, a Catholic filmmaker whose commitment to narrating histories of violence is only matched by his commitment to cinematic spiritual exploration.

Killers of the Flower Moon is full of Catholics—whether we’re talking about the Osage themselves or key figures among the white settlers conspiring to kill them. Scorsese knows what he’s doing when he has Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman with headrights to oil money, ask Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), early on in their courtship, “What’s your religion?” Dumbfounded, he responds, “Catholic,” as if to say “What else would I be?” The film soon cuts to Mollie and Ernest attending Mass with the rest of the Osage community.

(Scorsese holds a pair of rosary beads in a pew next to Lily Gladstone on the set of the film’s chapel.)

Little has been made of the religiousness of the film’s villains. Ernest is a white Catholic who, over the course of the film, we watch rob a wealthy Osage couple at gunpoint; aid and abet the murder of Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers); arrange the bombing of the home of another one of Mollie’s sisters, Reta (Janae Collins); and even poison his own wife, Mollie; all for money. “I do love that money, Sir,” he exclaims at various points. Ernest, though, is just a blunt instrument in comparison to his scheming uncle. William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), the notorious “King of the Osage Hills,” conspired to murder Mollie’s mother and sisters to steal the rights to their family’s wealth. Hale speaks in a Biblical vernacular throughout, citing the Books of Exodus and Job as he surreptitiously orders assassinations, bombings, insurance fraud, and murder. Given the depths to which Hale embedded himself in the Osage community, he undoubtedly attended Catholic Masses and donated to Catholic schools, churches, and hospitals. (In the film we see him bear witness to Mollie and Ernest’s wedding.) Moreover, it appears that the historical Hale at the very least died a Catholic. A rosary was offered at his nursing home upon his death and his funeral was held at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic church in Wichita.

Categorizing The Zone of Interest as a Catholic horrors movie might seem more of a stretch. It examines the bucolic life of the Höss family as they live Hitler’s Nazi dream as German settlers in Poland. Nevertheless, it takes only a little digging to discover that the historical Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, was Catholic too. In “Auschwitz in Retrospect,” Joseph Tenenbaum, a Jewish historian who survived Auschwitz, begins his brief biography of the mass murderer by noting that “Rudolf grew up full of piety and devotion to Church and authority” under “a morose, bigoted Catholic [father] who dreamed of making his son a God-fearing priest.” Rudolf’s childhood was “dedicated to the ‘work of God,’” or, at least, that was his father’s mission. He “spent much time with [Rudolf] talking about the miracles, and took him to the shrines of Germany, Switzerland and even to Lourdes.” Tenenbaum paints a portrait of a man whose religious and moral formation cannot be understood outside of his father’s Catholicism and his broad German Catholic foundation. When Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 he formally renounced the Roman Church, as was his duty, yet he returned to the fold shortly before his execution. Just days before his death by hanging in 1947, he received the sacraments of penance and the eucharist from a Polish Jesuit.

(Image: Scene from The Zone of Interest)

Now, I know what you may be thinking: “Hale and Höss were bad Catholics, clearly. Surely, we can’t learn anything about Catholics, Catholicism, or the Catholic Church from them.” I’ve argued elsewhere that this attempt to distance religious people and their institutions from evil is neither morally tenable nor historically accurate. For one, it risks “ignoring the crimes committed every day in the name of faith,” thus preventing us from reckoning with “the complicity of [religious] traditions and institutions in the sins of the world.” It also makes a categorical distinction that we’d be hard pressed to find in the historical sources themselves. For instance, the white Catholics who fiercely (and sometimes violently) resisted efforts to desegregate schools in the 1960s and 1970s understood themselves to be “real, good, and sincere Catholics” and drew on their religious formation to make their case.

If we’re courageous enough to think through some of the conclusions Killers and Zone offer up, these Catholic horrors films illuminate a particular kind of evil that we must reckon with. They portray what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Indeed, they seem to have returned her famous and somewhat controversial phrase to public discourse. As film critic Alissa Wilkinson put it when the films first debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, “The banality of evil was hot at Cannes this year.” Robert De Niro preempted this framing when he answered a question about his character: “It’s the banality of evil. It’s the thing we have to watch out for.”

De Niro’s framing clearly stuck. To cite just a few reviews, Baltimore Magazine’s movie critic began: “Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘The banality of evil,’ kept popping into my head as I watched Martin Scorsese’s elegiac and powerful Killers of the Flower Moon.” The Tatler described how “Scorsese explores racism, the banality of evil and the greed in men’s hearts.” Anthony Lane, writing for The New Yorker, titled his essay: “‘The Zone of Interest’ Finds Banality in the Evil at Auschwitz.” IndieWire, too, called “Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust Anti-Drama … a Chilling Look at the Banality of Evil.”

Of course, I’m not the first to note the thematic similarities between these two films. As Alissa Wilkinson put it:

“Both are about mankind’s ability to exterminate one another while deluding themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. Both are about atrocities so heinous they’re hard to wrap your mind around. And both feel eerily contemporary, in an age where prejudice, racism, and fascism are on the rise around the globe.”

(Along with Wilkinson’s full review of The Zone of Interest, I highly recommend Lyndsey Stonebridge’s and Charlotte Higgins’s review essays for insightful Arendtian readings of Zone.)

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her coverage of Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial. Her reflections were revised and published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). As one might imagine, the use of the word “banal” to characterize Eichmann’s orchestration of the genocidal murder of six million Jews was controversial, to say the least. Herself a Jew who had to flee Europe, Arendt by no means meant to exculpate Eichmann or lessen our instinctive horror at his crimes. Much the opposite. While many had assumed that only monsters could be capable of evil on such an industrial scale, what she saw in Eichmann, instead, was a bumbling bureaucrat. “The trouble with Eichmann,” as she put it, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

It is not simply that the Eichmanns and Hösses (and Hales and Burkharts) of the world were “just following orders,” as it were. Arendt identified the ways in which certain societies had so thoroughly inverted moral order and dehumanized Others that “only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally.’” As I mentioned earlier, we tend to speak of “evil” as an exceptional quality, a term we use to describe people and actions we can scarcely imagine. But Arendt incisively identified how in Nazi Germany (or, we might add, among the white settlers of Osage County Oklahoma) evil had become the norm. It had become, in a word, banal.

“Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom…, and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”

In naming the “banality” of Eichmann’s evil, she indicted the society that had produced him.

Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest should do the same for us, as Americans and, indeed, as Catholics for those of us who identify as such (as I do). Both are about the ways people in power administer the extermination of others in order to plunder their wealth. This is, more or less, what Killers is about from start to finish. It is also the subject of two of the most chilling scenes in The Zone of Interest: one in which Rudolf Höss’s wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), tries on a fur coat and lipstick that have been stolen from a Jewish woman condemned to the death camps; the other, when Hedwig’s mother speculates that the Jewish neighbor she once cleaned for might be on the other side of the wall in Auschwitz and laments how she wasn’t able to win her drapes at an auction. Both scenes convey the normality of an inverted moral order.

The differences between the two films are instructive as well. Scorsese seems less focused on banality and more on the ubiquity of evil. While it brutally portrays the seeming passionless management of murder, it is more explicitly about how an entire community conspired to plunder and murder the Osage. In a chilling motif, Scorsese repeatedly walks the camera through crowds of predatory white settlers. They stare directly into the camera, which has the effect of rendering them as wolves preying on the Osage in their midst. By the end it is clear that not just Hale and the Burkhart brothers, but also the town’s doctors, sheriffs, salesmen, chauffeurs, lawyers, mothers, and daughters—in other words, all the white settlers—are in on the scheme to some extent. Not only that, the film also exposes Catholic horrors extending beyond the actions of a particular perpetrator and into the very institutions that participated in cultural genocide, as Delaney Coyne demonstrates in her powerful reading of the Catholic history behind the film for America Magazine.

The Zone of Interest, on the other hand, is effectively Arendt’s work translated into a taut horror film. While it is ostensibly adapted from Amis’s 2014 novel, Wilkinson argues that it is best understood as a “as a sidelong horror-film adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem.” When Rudolf (Christian Friedel) phones his wife and admits he was unable to enjoy a party because he was too preoccupied with the logistics of how best to gas the room full of partygoers, or, when we witness enterprising businessmen pitching the commandant on their top-of-the-line ovens, we see evil rendered as fastidious routine.

Which brings me back to where we began: “the mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist.” Rather than employ Arendt’s phrase in praise, James Baldwin wielded it to critique the horror classic’s naivete on the subject. Whether or not he would have appreciated Killers or Zone, Baldwin would have at the very least recognized the evil they presented. As he observes elsewhere in his essay:

“For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in the mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. This devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.”

Evil cannot be easily exorcized. It has, in no small part, made the world in which we live and move and have our being. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest, like Baldwin and Arendt before them, insist that we see evil for what it is. It is only in recognizing it that we can do anything about it.

Matthew J. Cressler is an independent scholar of religion and chief of staff of the Corporation for Public Interest Technology. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migrations and the creator of Bad Catholics, Good Trouble, an educational webcomic series. He is currently co-writing Body & Blood: Catholic Horror in America with Jack Lee Downey, Kathleen Holscher, and Michael Pasquier.