In Saint Maud, belief is internalised: the body becomes the site of self-monitoring, discipline, and ecstatic surrender, so that authority no longer needs to come from outside because it has already been absorbed into bodily habit. In The Exorcist, by contrast, belief is externalised: the body is presented as a violated threshold through which an alien force enters, displaces the self, and makes spiritual conflict visible. One film portrays the horror of belief as inward pressure, while the other presents it as invasive rupture.
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Belief for Maud does not commence with doctrine. It initiates as a tightening sensation within her body, a feeling that originates in her chest and then expands until her body feels not entirely her own anymore. In this situation, belief is not an idea she contemplates but rather an experience she undergoes, a pressure that controls her, restricts her, and at certain moments, inundates her.
This is where modern horror finds one of its most disturbing possibilities. Films such as Saint Maud and The Exorcist do not view belief as a collection of ideas or symbols. They depict it as an experience that grips the body, sometimes from the inside and sometimes as an outside force, until the line between the self and authority starts to blur.
What comes forth is not just a common imagery between Christianity and horror but a common structure. As Rudolf Otto points out, religious experience can appear as a force that exceeds rational understanding and is first felt as sensation (Otto 1958, 7). Belief is not kept at a distance; it is written into the body, lived through; and at times, it is something that causes suffering.
Christianity and horror often connect through similar images, but the focus here is on how belief manifests as a physical experience. In Saint Maud, the religious experience is shown as an internal intensity, which is a punishing closeness that comes from inside. In The Exorcist, belief is depicted as an external violation that happens through possession and the fight to take back control of the body. These films are linked by the way belief is turned into a physical experience, creating a tension between spiritual authority and bodily autonomy that is central to religious horror.
In Saint Maud, belief is presented as an internal force that is closely linked to the body and is experienced more as sensation than as doctrine. Maud’s connection to the divine does not start as an idea but as a pressure that seems to rise from within her body. The film suggests that religious experience in this context cannot be simplified to rational conviction. Instead, it resembles what Rudolf Otto describes as a state that is “perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other” (Otto 1958, 7). Thus, belief in Saint Maud shows itself as bodily intensity, a force that constricts, disciplines, and overwhelms. Religion operates as a system of internal regulation where rituals and acts of self-denial become what Julia Kristeva refers to as a “scription” of the real, a process that seeks to “parcel out, demarcate, delineate an order, a framework, a sociality,” while maintaining the fragile boundary of the “clean and proper body” against what is seen as impure or abject (Kristeva 1982, ix, 71–74). Maud’s faith is therefore tied closely to self-monitoring. She observes and corrects herself under an authority that is so deeply ingrained that it does not feel external anymore. This reaches its most extreme form during her solitary prayers when her body bends and shakes in what Otto describes as an eruption of feeling that might break out in “spasms and convulsions” and culminate in “frenzy,” “transport,” and “ecstasy” (Otto 1958, 12–13). In these moments, Maud feels what Otto calls the “creature-feeling,” which is the sensation of being “overpowered by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures” (Otto 1958, 10). Ryan Duns helps clarify why this experience becomes horrifying by defining horror as the “embodied response of an agent to the advent of a horrifying entity, whose unexpected arrival creates a rupture in the known world” (Duns 2024, 7). In Saint Maud, belief turns terrifying when it stops being a thought and instead becomes a physical submission to an unseen authority that feels both intimate and absolute and destructive.
In The Exorcist, belief is shown as an invasion of the body, where possession transforms the body into a battleground that features spiritual power against the loss of personal identity. Unlike the internal discipline that is observed in Saint Maud, belief in The Exorcist is depicted as an external force that completely disrupts the self. Regan MacNeil’s body stops being an autonomous subject and instead becomes a site of conflict between different systems: medicine, which Ryan Duns refers to as “medical materialism” that reduces the supernatural to a “disorder of the nerves” (Duns 2024, 112), and the Church, which uses ritual as what Julia Kristeva describes as a “‘writing of the real’ (scription),” aiming to “parcel out, demarcate, delineate an order, a framework, a sociality” on the body (Kristeva 1982, 71–74). The horror in this context is purely invasive, characterised by the complete loss of bodily control to what Duns describes as the emergence of a horrifying entity “whose unexpected arrival creates a breach in the known world of someone and threatens that world with annihilation” (Duns 2024, 7). Through actions like “projectile vomiting” and “words embedded in the flesh,” possession exposes the fragility of bodily integrity, indicating that the “wholeness of the body is only transitory” (Duns 2024, 272). At the core of this intrusion is what Kristeva identifies as the abject, which “does not respect borders, positions, rules” and “disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva 1982, 4).
In The Exorcist, belief becomes terrifying when authority is made visible through physical manifestation and when the body is transformed into the violated threshold through which both the sacred and the monstrous enter simultaneously.
When looking at Saint Maud and The Exorcist together, it becomes clear that religious horror not only uses Christian symbols but also relies on the body as the location where spiritual authority becomes tangible. The films are linked not so much by their theological content as by the shared insistence that belief must be experienced physically in order to exert power. However, they present this embodiment in very different ways. In Saint Maud, belief is internalised: the body becomes the site of self-monitoring, discipline, and ecstatic surrender, so that authority no longer needs to come from outside because it has already been absorbed into bodily habit. In The Exorcist, by contrast, belief is externalised: the body is presented as a violated threshold through which an alien force enters, displaces the self, and makes spiritual conflict visible. One film portrays the horror of belief as inward pressure, while the other presents it as invasive rupture.
What both films reveal, however, is that religious horror emerges when the body stops functioning as a secure boundary of the self and instead becomes the medium through which transcendent power is suffered. In this sense, belief is frightening not only because of what it means but because of what it does: it disciplines, possesses and transforms the body until the subject can no longer claim full sovereignty over it. Ultimately, both films suggest that belief is most terrifying when it is no longer simply thought, but endured.
Bibliography
Booth, Rebecca, Valeska Griffiths, and Erin Thompson, eds. 2020. Scared Sacred: Idolatry, Religion and Worship in the Horror Film. House of Leaves Publishing.
Duns, Ryan G., SJ. 2024. Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films. University of Notre Dame Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press.
Otto, Rudolf. 1958. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press.
Filmography
Saint Maud. 2019. Directed by Rose Glass. United Kingdom.
The Exorcist. 1973. Directed by William Friedkin. United States.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
