October is “Holy Horrors Month” on The Incarcerated Christian Podcast. Today we visit again with Dr. Steve Wiggins, with whom we spoke last October about the abundance and significance of biblical and religious symbols and themes in horror movies and the three films he calls “The Unholy Trinity”: The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary’s Baby. In today’s episode, we turn to the subject of demons, both biblical and cinematic, using Wiggins’s recent book, Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons as a starting point.
Listen to the episode to learn Wiggins’s perspective on what constitutes a demon, what defines demons in popular culture, and why people are so obsessed with demons.
Topics Discussed in This Episode:
- How Dr. Wiggins defines “demon”
- The inspiration for his book title
- Where most people get the idea of what a demon is
- What defines demons in current popular culture
- Why we’re obsessed with demons
- The differences between Biblical and cinematic demons
- When American cinema began to portray demons
- Why women are frequently the targets of demonic possession in horror movies
- Demons as depicted in both American and global media
- How demons are portrayed in such horror movie franchises as The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror
- Academic studies of horror movies