We Believe in Miracles, Just Not on Film

Miracles may not necessarily be explained in the actual narrative for a film to be considered realistic, but our genre expectations, built over hundreds of episodes of Scooby Doo, is that they will be. The one possible exception to this rule, oddly enough, is in horror. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist turned the culture’s rejection of the supernatural on its ear by portraying the supernatural so vividly that the psychological debunking of doctors and priests looked foolish and facile. Since then—in an irony that would be appreciated by Lewis’s Screwtape—we have come to accept the presence of the demonic as compatible with the world we observe daily while continuing to doubt the countervailing presence of a supernatural God or even a supernatural good.