Religion makes great material for horror stories. It wrestles with the same mysteries as that genre does — death, the soul, the nature of evil. It traffics in awe, which is a closely related emotion to terror. Catholicism, with its richness of symbols and incense-perfumed ritual, has been a staple of scary fiction right up through Fox's current iteration of “The Exorcist.”
HBO's “The Young Pope,” beginning on Sunday and showing Sundays and Mondays, is a visually sublime but textually ridiculous horror tale in which the monster is the pontiff himself.
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