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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1585 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 23, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I recently had some houseguests, The conjuring came up on movie night, and the guy's girlfriend turned out to be a huge fan. They're competently done horror films, but I was a little bit surprised to find out that she thinks that they're real, and it took an effort of will for me to not go overboard poking holes in the Warrens. So now I've got all these thoughts about The conjuring.

Even in a film that glazes them, you can see the underlying shape of the grift. The mythos doesn't match up with other supernatural fiction, it matches up with the vague folk-Catholicism of a dumb person. Why is Ed Warren, who knows all there is to know about demons and exorcism rituals, less supernaturally potent than a Catholic priest, who probably thinks demons are imaginary? Why only a Catholic priest, why not a minister or a voodoo guy? Why is it relevant that the satanic witch ghost had a relative who was killed in the Salem witch trials? In the universe of The Conjuring, did the witch trials find real witches, rather than it just being a jilted lover and ergot poisoning? Just seems like such a unnecessary story element. Catching an actual witch at a witch trial is usually a punchline, like in Widows Bay or Treehouse of Horror. In the 70s did median American believe the Salem witch trials were real?

When a story is presented as fiction, this kind of inconsistency doesn't bother me as much, I don't ask why Patrick Swayze can walk through walls but not through floors, because ghost doesn't pretend to be a documentary.

Speaking of dumb folk-Catholicism, I was somewhat recently coerced into watching The Nun, which a friend of mine (a lapsed Roman Catholic) described as the scariest horror movie he’d ever seen. I, in contrast, thought it had one of the dumbest plots I’ve ever seen.

Basically, a demon appeared in a convent and started possessing the nuns. It turns out the convent structure was once a castle owned by a satanist, before the Knights Templar killed him and sealed the demon in a hole in the ground. They used a vial containing (dramatic pause) the blood of Christ (second dramatic pause) to seal him in and stop him from escaping. A priest and a nun were sent by the Vatican to figure out what was going on, and once they learned all this, they spent the rest of the movie trying to find the vial, instead of just consecrating new wine, which Roman Catholics believe is also the blood of Christ. The whole thing could have been over in 10 minutes if the priest had just celebrated Mass.

They could have just said it's the sweat of Christ and it would have made it work, but by reaching for something that felt more meaningful they basically broke it in a way any Catholic would notice. I wonder if anyone raised the objection during production.

Though I think people who like it don't really care because those movies seem to mostly hit for people who aren't Catholics, but like the demon/witches/exorcisms aesthetics. My wife's like that, she doesn't believe in Christianity but she really wants to believe that stuff like what the Warrens did was real. Because even to atheists, fighting primordial evil is cool, even if wasting time on being lied to in church by hypocritical clergy, being brainwashed to ignore science and hate gays is not (which is what they identify Christianity with).

Some of these religious horror movies try to make it intellectually palatable to believe in the specific Catholic evil, and the power of Catholic rites against it, without believing in the Christian God by making it more of a matter of generic, form changing evil vs a nebulous "force of belief" in general. The last and horrible The Exorcist movie is like that; white voodoo witch doctor rites are powerful against demons too, as long as the person performing it believes. And if it some cases it takes the dramatic form of Catholic demons and Catholic exorcism, then it's just a matter of it being what the character believes.

Anyway, The Nun had nice set designs that made my time watching it not wasted, but otherwise it's not the strongest in that genre by any means.

Obviously an actual vial of Jesus blood is more potent than metaphysical/metaphorical wine-blood. Otherwise Catholic-run hospitals could produce infinite blood for transfusions.

Not in Catholic teachings: despite keeping the attributes of bread and wine, the Eucharist is transsubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ in a litteral, not metaphorical way. Keeping their bread and wine attributes is probably the reason why Catholic run hospitals aren't transfusing communion wine into people, but a Catholic still has to believe that it is The Litteral Blood of Christ.

This is the tradcath equivalent of Transwomen are Women.

Imagine a religion teaching that everything has secret traits that are more important than the mundane ones and not only unobservable, but must be accepted as true in order to be a good person.

If anything, "Transwomen are Women" is the transubstantiation of progressivism.

Indeed, the primary schism in trans-affirming circles boils down to "trans women aren't really women, but we should treat them as if they are to spare their feelings" (i.e. consubstantiation) and "no, trans women are literally women, with all that that implies" (i.e. transubstantiation). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And the frustrating thing is, sometimes consubstantiation is the motte and transubstantiation is the bailey. Catholics rarely pretend to be Protestants in order to make their beliefs seem more palatable to the godless.

Isn't the conclusion obviously that the catholic god is real?

But not the protestant God. And also satanic witches are real.

The priestly representative of the Catholic God has the full weight of placebo mysterium behind him, that power which comes from arcane murmurings in dead languages, gestures in draping vestments, an ancient legacy, etc. Your local Protestant has his entire theology in the bookshelf behind him when he does a livestream Q/A. So of course you have to fly in an exorcist from the Vatican, especially if the witchery is psychogenic.

Now I'm wondering if there has ever been a horror movie which was actually based on (not "inspired by") true events and didn't take major dramatic license. I suppose Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although it's more of a thriller than a horror film. Likewise assorted films about real-life serial killers (Gacy, Dahmer etc.).

I'm not objecting to dramatic license, I'm objecting to the "mythos" and metaphysics. Whether the ghost actually dragged someone around a basement or held a door shut doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Salem Witch Trials thing.

Out of curiosity, did the movie specify how the witch was originally killed? It always bugs me when someone claims one of the Salem witches was burned at the stake.

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