A controversial horror film embodies the real-life horrors of church abuse
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on May 22, 2024.
There’s a thin line between reading a memoir written by somebody who grew up in conservative Christianity and watching a horror movie.
As Christa Brown, a frequent contributor to Baptist News Global, releases her new memoir Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation, it’s hard to miss the parallels between the horror she and many of us have faced in conservative Baptist churches and the trauma Sydney Sweeney’s character named Sister Cecilia experiences in the new horror film Immaculate.
One is fictional and one is nonfiction, but the stories harmonize.
And just as Brown has been demonized by being labeled a “spawn of Satan,” so has Sweeney’s film.
Catholic Review called Immaculate “a vile piece of horror tripe,” “morally offensive,” said it “contains blasphemy” and claimed “the viewpoint is entirely secular rather than Protestant while the animus is more broadly anti-Christian.”
According to Focus on the Family, the central message of Immaculate is that “religion needs to become extinct.”
Reaction to the movie from many on the right has been so strong that Neon, the production company behind the film, began using some of the criticisms in their marketing.
According to one user on X whom Neon quoted for a T-shirt, Immaculate is a “blasphemous, satanic, feminist, pro-abortion, anti-life movie degrading Christians! This movie also debases Mary, mother of Christ!”
“Diabolical, sacrilegious, pure evil and grossly offensive,” wrote another. “It is profane and has a third act that spits in the face of all that is holy. Just … evil.”
But as the stories of Sister Cecilia and Christa Brown remind us of the sexual abuse scandals within Catholic and Baptist churches, one begins to question who is really spitting in the face of all that is holy.
I think Flannery O’Connor would approve of this article.