For Fans of The Exorcist

The Exorcist works because it is not skeptical about the supernatural. Friedkin and Blatty insist that demons are real, that the Church's rites mean something, that faith is a genuine power in the universe. That commitment is what separates it from most horror: you cannot feel true terror at a possession unless the film believes in the thing doing the possessing. The moment you sense a director winking, the fear drains away.

Both films locate supernatural evil inside domestic life, inside a loving family environment, and both use a woman's body as the site of invasion and violation. Roman Polanski's 1968 film built the template that Friedkin inherited: slow procedural dread, clinical detail, a protagonist surrounded by people who cannot see what she sees. If you love one, the other is essential.

Ari Aster's 2018 debut does something Friedkin would recognize: it earns its supernatural horror through exhausting, specific family grief first. The occult mechanics are secondary to a mother who cannot escape what has been done to her bloodline. The horror is that the worst thing that could happen to a family is exactly what happens, and something ancient is behind it all.

The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass both ask the same question The Exorcist asks: what does a person do when the supernatural meets their deepest grief or deepest faith? Flanagan is not interested in jump scares for their own sake. He is interested in what horror reveals about longing, addiction, family, and death. That ambition places him in direct lineage from Blatty and Friedkin.