I mean, I don't care in the sense of "America, fuck yeah" but I also don't have a problem calling them silly and juvenile either.

I refuse to believe that people who follow Danzig on tour have more income than boomers who paid off their mortgage in 1973.

Oh, OK, so then your argument actually has nothing to do with the original point. Rock on.

The film is not an indictment of religion itself, or even Christianity in particular. It's more of a psychological study of how fanaticism can be problematic.

That's rather sad. I grew up in the Protestant tradition (and consider myself an unorthodox non-denominational Christian now) and found that resistance to questioning was generally limited to particular congregations' leaders than entire denominations themselves (although some obviously have a bigger problem with it).…

You might be "OK with it" but that's a different topic of discussion. And the organization's raison d'etre in this case seems to make it less like a real religion than more so.

It's a perfect analogy. Your argument is that you have to be a certain thing in order to understand it critically. This is, of course, absurd.

He works for The AV Club so I doubt he could make that argument with a straight face.

That's fair enough. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to mount a defense of the film, which I think certainly has its problems. My overall point was that I think the filmmaker was trying to do both things you mentioned above: make a horror movie about a real malevolent entity AND be critical of the sort of fundamentalist…

Here comes the old "if you're not a drunk driver you can't talk about drunk drivers" logical fallacy.

I tried it once but couldn't get past the patchouli scent-masking and black eyeliner camouflage.

Yeah, this. I haven't noticed any renaissance. The most hyped horror of last year, "It Follows", was mediocre at best.

I was victimized from watching Basic Instinct. Because it was vapid and awful.

One could argue that the irrational behavior was what caused the family to be in the witch's neck of the woods (pun intended) in the first place—they were cast out by the Puritans (and no theological liberals, they) for their views. Their response to what was occurring was rational inasmuch as the witch was a real…

I didn't get the sense that the film was offering any legitimacy to witchcraft, at least of the type presented on-screen. It seemed more like a yin-yang argument—e.g.-if you go crazy with the fundamentalism, don't be surprised when you unwittingly give fuel to horrible evils looking to destroy you.

Virtually no jump scares, but LOTS of slow-burn unnerving mood.

I think the film is about irrational religious hysteria causing the family to be torn apart by a malevolent outside force. The film's worldview seems to be that God and Satan are very real beings, but fundamentalist hysteria gives Satan a key to the back door.

I am not Catholic myself and was not raised Catholic, so there may be things in his theology that were beyond my periphery of knowledge (I was studying him more as his theology pertained to wealth and politics). Direct persecution of heretics seems much more in line with nascent Calvinism.

I've studied Aquinas in the past and never got the sense that he advocated for violent persecution of non-Christians. But I could be wrong.

I'm pretty sure all the demonstrative, visible Satanists are non-deistic.