(Image source: John Wilson/Netflix/Entertainment Weekly)

A young attractive priest, skilled as a boxer, experiences a crisis of faith. Nonetheless, with the help of an older mentor with more star power, he must confront the forces of evil. Said forces are closely associated with a single woman whose presumptuousness, it is implied, has opened the door to sin.

You might recognize this as the plot of the classic horror blockbuster The Exorcist. Alternately, you might have read it as referring to the more progressive and star-studded detective feature Wake Up Dead Man.

The Exorcist was released in 1973; Wake Up Dead Man thirty-years later in 2025. The first, in its fear that young people will overthrow the established order of their elders, is subtextually conservative; the second in its explicit rejection of right-wing hate and misogyny is more consciously progressive. Yet they both feature the same protagonist (that young, conflicted priest) struggling with the same problem—a single woman with too much authority.

Rian Johnson, the director of Wake Up Dead Man, has surely seen The Exorcist, and may be nodding to and questioning the earlier film to some degree. Still, it’s worth asking why this narrative—this hero, and this anxiety about female authority—has such resonance over decades despite its portrayal in two films with what are, on the surface, quite different political messages.

The answer, I think, is that Catholic religious structures dovetail with Hollywood’s male-protagonist default to offer the same cosmological and narrative solutions to evil and injustice—cosmological and narrative solutions which are, in a word, patriarchal. For both Hollywood and the Catholic Church, a new patriarch remains a very popular and satisfying answer to the problems of the old patriarch.

At least it does on the screen. Out here in the three-dimensional world, though, the Church’s demand for male leadership and Hollywood’s demand for male stories are both deeply inadequate responses to the patriarchal—and often Christofascist authoritarian—movements that build power through toxic masculinity and the subjugation of women and queer people. The calcified tropes that show up in The Exorcist and Wake Up Dead Man—and in 2024’s Conclave as well—suggest that resistance requires a better Church and better stories. We can find both if we’re willing to look beyond mainstream Hollywood and beyond the institutional Catholic Church.

The Devil You Know

To be clear, The Exorcist was not meant to challenge patriarchy. The movie is most focused on the visceral spectacle of vomit and desecration. But to the extent it has a message, it provides a defense of hierarchical verities. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is a wealthy movie actress who is in Washington, D.C. to star in a film about student protest. With the father absent, the devil himself steps in to possess Chris’ daughter Regan (Linda Blair).

After the medical establishment fails to explain why Regan spews profanity in a guttural voice and makes her bed rise off the ground, Chris turns to the Church. Damien Karras (Jason Miller), an attractive Jesuit and psychologist, is skeptical that God exists, much less demons—his faith has been weakened by the death of his mother. Nonetheless, he agrees to perform an exorcism under the supervision of craggy priest/archaeologist Lankester Merrin, played with great earnestness by film icon Max von Sydow.

The film is a veritable legion of absent and weak fathers, and that absence and weakness is framed as an opportunity for the demon Pazuzu and his infernal kin. Regan’s father is divorced, offscreen, and uncaring. The priest Damien’s father is, we assume, long dead, and his morbid grief and guilt over his mother’s death—as well as his new-fangled psychiatry degree and modern notions—unmans him. Meanwhile, the authority of the nation itself has been undermined by the protests against the war in Vietnam. The unruly students who roil and rage in the film-within-a-film, mirror the desecration embodied in young Regan herself, a child bloated with sinful rebellion against God the father.

Against this dangerous revolution and feminization stands Father Lankester Merrin, filled with wisdom, patriarchal certainty, and star power. But even Merrin is not all he should be; his heart is weak, a physical ailment the devil is all too quick to take advantage of. The terror of The Exorcist is the fear of patriarchy’s toppling, and of what foul young feminized thing will rise in its place.

Still Awake

Wake Up Dead Man can be read as a (more or less deliberate) rejection of The Exorcist’s plea for a restoration of patriarchal order. The movie—the latest in the Benoit Blanc detective franchise—is centered on young, hot priest Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), a former boxer who has trouble putting his fisticuffs behind him.

After Jud decks a deacon, his superiors send him to become assistant pastor at the church of right-wing demagogue Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks has built his church on misogynist hatred and rejection of his dead mother Grace (Annie Hamilton). He refers to Grace as the “harlot whore” for no better reason than that she was once young and attractive and had a child. The fire and brimstone sermons radicalize Wicks’ flock against women, liberals, and a host of imagined modern evils. Jud, on the other hand, offers a message of reconciliation, healing, and love—but that may all be upended when he is accused of Wicks’ murder.

The film takes a firm stance against the Christofascist patriarchal right; one of the villains is Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), a right-wing online influencer who boasts about trying to build his career on homophobia and misogyny. The movie’s core moral message is that the misogynist hatred directed at Grace is a spiritual sin.

Yet, the spirit of The Exorcist is hard to banish. The core antagonist of the movie is eventually revealed to be not Wicks, and not Draven, but Martha (Glenn Close), a woman who volunteers as the church’s administrator, organist, and jane-of-all-trades. One of the running, telling gags of the movie is that Martha is constantly popping up and terrifying Jud. Bustling, interfering women are frightening in their ubiquity even before we learn they are murderers.

Martha believes she is the real arbiter of things spiritual; thus motivated, she attempts to overthrow the patriarchal hierarchy by murdering Wicks and framing Jud. Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig)—an atheist and a gay man who, it is suggested (but carefully not stated) has a difficult history with the Church’s homophobia—swoops in to restore law, order, and patriarchy.

(Glenn Close as Martha in Wake Up Dead Man. Image source: Netflix)

At the film’s climax, Blanc deliberately forgoes his own glory in solving the case in order to allow Jud to hear Martha’s confession. This is framed as an embrace not of Jud’s God (who Blanc doesn’t believe in) but of Jud’s message of love. It also, though, could be seen as a rebuke to the woman police officer (Mila Kunis) who wants to make an arrest to advance justice and her career. Blanc’s choice of Jud is, among other things, an expression of male solidarity.

There’s no doubt, in any case, that while the movie is ostensibly about rejecting Wicks’ violent patriarchy, much of the film has you rooting for the kinder, gentler patriarch to triumph over the female schemer who is trying to rob him of his rightful place at the head of the church. Feminist critique, and a gay man, are both enlisted in the cause of restoring the authority of the straight white male protagonist.

It’s not an accident that in its anti-patriarchal reaffirmation of patriarchy, Wake Up Dead Man echoes another recent Catholic Hollywood prestige drama, Conclave (2024). Set during the vote by the Church cardinals on papal succession, the twist ending is supposed to be a kind of feminist triumph; the new pope is intersex and has a uterus.

Yet, the pope identifies as a man and is played by a man (Carlos Diehz). More concretely, the film itself is almost entirely populated by male actors; women barely have speaking roles. The lead, Cardinal Lawrence, is played by Ralph Fiennes—yet another attractive, conflicted priest with doubts about the divine patriarchy who nevertheless, as a white man, gets to embody the patriarchal assumptions of Hollywood and of the Church. The demand that both movie leads and male priests stand at the forefront of their respective institutions means that even when they attempt to oppose patriarchy, they sideline women and, rather helplessly, reaffirm male primacy and authority.

Revolutionary Pregnancies

Unsurprisingly, films that do confront the Church’s hierarchy with more venom tend to be less prestigious (requiring less patriarchal capital). They are also more focused on the Church’s most patriarchal sexual politics—specifically on abortion and its denial of women’s bodily autonomy.

Both Immaculate (2024) and The First Omen (2024) are scuzzy B-movie exploitation horror films about a young American woman who travels to Italy to become a nun. In both, the ostensibly friendly priests and patriarchs who welcome her turn out to care less about her spiritual well-being and more about her body. Both heroines are valuable for their fertility, and both are raped in order to bring forth infant saviors.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is a touchstone for these films—though in that movie, the rape and the betrayal are perpetrated by an explicitly anti-Catholic demonic cult. In Immaculate and The First Omen, in contrast, fathers and churchmen, and nuns too, perform acts of horrific ritual violation; the church robs women of their voices (a woman’s tongue is torn out in The First Omen), of their free will (the protagonists are both drugged), and of their bodily autonomy. In both films, the heroines are forcibly reminded that their flesh is not their own, but the Church’s through physical marks: in Immaculate, the priests brand crosses on the feet of Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), in The First Omen, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) finds the mark of the devil on her head.

(Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate. Image source: IMDB)

These films have received much less attention than the more expensive, more polished, and more respectful Catholic-sploitation exercises of The Exorcist, Conclave, and Wake Up Dead Man. But Immaculate and First Omen’s depiction of the horrors of patriarchy are arguably more honest and more insightful than their upmarket cousins, not least because they are indecorous, messy, full of rage—and centered on women.

It is, after all, women who bear the brunt of policies that deny them vital medical care in the name of protecting fetal tissue that church and state have decided is more important than their lives. It is women who bleed out from sepsis, who are impoverished when they must bring unwanted pregnancies to term, who are imprisoned and criminalized when they have miscarriages. The Argentinian historical drama Belén (2025)—based on the true story of a woman framed and imprisoned for supposedly aborting the pregnancy that almost killed her—is much closer in spirit and truth to the supernatural Grand Guignol of First Omen and Immaculate than to the supposedly more naturalistic drama of Conclave or Wake Up Dead Man.

Evil Spirits, in Film and Elsewhere

Hollywood’s difficulty in portraying a patriarchal Church that fights fascist patriarchy is mirrored in the difficulty the actual patriarchal Church has in fighting the actual fascist patriarchy. The Catholic Church has been a courageous voice against some portions of the MAGA program. U.S. bishops condemned the Trumpian “vilification of immigrants,” and priests and clergy have been at the forefront of anti-ICE protests, with some church groups suing the administration in order to minister to detainees. Pope Leo has passionately and consistently spoken against the war in Iran, refusing to budge even when Trump has personally attacked him.

On other aspects of Trumpism, though, the Catholic Church has been largely silent. Trump and the GOP are currently pursuing a vicious campaign of hatred and discrimination against trans people, framing them as an existential threat to the family and to national security. Coupled with a flood of anti-trans legislation, the Lemkin Institute has warned that U.S. policy looks very much like the beginning of a genocide, “the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.”

Yet the Catholic Church still shies away from supporting, or even talking about, queer people. Similarly, the Church’s anti-abortion stance has undercut its criticism of Trump, since it continues to label Democrats’ pro-choice policies as “anti-life.” In fact, the Church and its outlets continue to agitate for even more draconian abortion restrictions—by, for instance, trying to ban abortion pills.

The reactionary policies of the Church—not least its claim that women are unfit to hold positions of authority in its hierarchy—also inspires and attracts some of the more repulsive figures in American politics. Vice-President J.D. Vance, in particular, is a Catholic convert whose account of his faith seems intimately intertwined with the Church’s misogyny and its fetishization of traditional patriarchal nuclear families. When Vance sneers at Democrats as “childless cat ladies,” for instance, he is leaning into the Catholic patriarchal view that women fulfill themselves by having children and obeying men. Women in authority are dangerous, wrong, and sinful—a view echoed in The Exorcist, Wake Up Dead Man, and in the male Church hierarchy itself.

There certainly has been principled, powerful, unequivocal opposition to fascist patriarchy from religious leaders. Mostly, though, that opposition has not come from Catholic leaders. Early in Trump’s second term, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde—who is, not coincidentally, a woman—spoke to Trump directly as he sat in her congregation, calling on him to have mercy on immigrants and LGBT people. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” she said, making the moral call that the Pope will not.

Looking to another tradition, Jewish women in Indiana have mounted a challenge to the state’s strict anti-abortion laws. The women argued that the law violates their religious liberty; for instance, one woman said she wanted to have a child, but her religious beliefs would require her to terminate the pregnancy if the fetus endangered her physical or mental health. This argument has been successful in courts, and other groups in other states are considering similar lawsuits.

These rebukes to fascist patriarchy cover more policy ground and are more uncompromising than the Catholic Church’s efforts. That’s because they oppose policies the Church does not. But it’s also because fascist patriarchy denies the right and the ability of women to lead.

Hollywood claims to defy patriarchy. But it, like fascism, is often reluctant to imagine a world in which women hold positions of responsibility and authority in narratives or in the Church. The same white male priest walks across the decades from film to film, tormented by doubts about hierarchy and whether or not the male God is in his heaven. Meanwhile, with a handful of exceptions (like last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee) there are few high-profile films about women religious leaders, whether that be women Episcopal priests or women rabbis.

On film and in life, we seem stuck in a vision of authority and spirituality that prioritizes the voices, stories, and leadership of men. It’s a faith we can’t seem to lose. But maybe it’s time to try and see if we can’t wake up.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024) is about Jewish diaspora; his newsletter Everything Is Horrible is about politics, culture, and how everything is horrible.