The Satanic Panic of the Warrens – ”The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” and the Satanic Cult Horror Film

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the Satanic cult in horror film – historically and in contemporary horror films. A quantitative analysis of horror films with themes of Satanism and Satanic cults is presented, in which three particular upswings in the themes are seen – one in the 1970s, one in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as one from the mid 2010s and onwards. In the thesis’ second part, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (Michael Chaves, 2021) is examined. The film differs affectively from other Satanic cult horror films of its time, and this thesis tries to find out why. The film is examined with the help of genre theories of genre life cycles, but most importantly, it focuses on the film’s interchange of the common character types of the ”doubter” and the ”expert”. This interchange, the author argues, has huge implications for the film, making it affectively validate the notion of an underground Satanic threat – societal as well as spiritual – thus somewhat aligning it with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s.