So as not to hijack the Anthony Hopkins The Rite thread, here’s something I’ve wondered on a related topic:
I remember a scene in the 1970s comedy Love at First Bite in which Dracula (George Hamilton) is confronted by Van Helsing’s descendant (Richard Benjamin) who pulls a Star of David. Dracula winces at first then says “Wrong one” or something like it and Van Helsing gives a “Damn!” and that’s it. At the time I was a kid but something of a vampire geek and I remember thinking “Actually the Star of David would work” according to the stuff I’d read- it was basically any religious symbol. (This was based on kids vampire books I’d read.)
In The Exorcist movies and in other movies about possession the excorcism is almost always carried out in clerical Latin. This makes sense when the excorcist is a Catholic priest, but even in movies and shows where the characters are not priests (most Dracula incarnations, Lost Boys, Supernatural and many others) the rituals and rites and religious practices used to fight the supernatural are usually Catholic: a crucifix (sometimes a cross), holy water, Latin rites of excorcism, etc… I’ve even seen rosaries cause vampires to sizzle in movies; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scene in which a vampire or possessed person drinks consecrated wine but I’m guessing “That’s gotta hurt”; I think the Excorcist movies did use a wafer.
For some reason it particularly irks me on the show Supernatural, a show I actually generally like, that the two guys- who are not priests- use Latin on demons who were probably around thousands of years before Judeo-Christian religions. Why would Latin be any scarier to them than the same rite in English or French or Arapaho? Certainly the Romans weren’t renowned for their holiness and clean living (not that clerical Latin would be that easily understood in ancient Rome probably) and most of the world isn’t Christian, let alone Catholic, and most religions don’t have holy water.
I know there are many movies in which this stuff is seen as strictly superstitious to the vampires- they’re not afraid of crosses or holy water- and the only thing that kills them is staking or burning or whatever, but are there any movies in which the excorcist or “evil be gone” kit IS religious in nature BUT not Catholic? A Rajiv the Vampire Hunter or Muhammad & Sons Jinnbusters or Dr. Miriam Goldbaum, Excorcist would be an interesting change of pace.
In Japanese movies, and generally going to be Shinto, or else Buddhist. Every so often, a western influence will come through in a Christian (OK, Catholic) organization being used, but traditional exorcisms and wards are more common.
Neither do Catholics, really: Holy water is just water that’s set aside to be used for some religious purpose. There isn’t any mystical hocus-pocus (and yes, the choice of words there was deliberate) associated with it. So in that sense, any religion that uses water in some sort of ceremony or ritual (which I suspect would be most of them) has “holy water”.
That’s another thing that irks me in a lot of those movies- Lost Boys for instance. As little as I know about Catholicism I know that not all water that’s in a Catholic church is holy. Movies imply you could just about buy a Dasani from the local church’s rec room vending machine and use it as holy water.
In the “old timey” vampire lore (which of course is different from time to time and geographical region to geographical region) it was moving water that was the biggest deterrent to vampires. They could cross a still pond or big puddle or a well but not a flowing stream, a nod to Jesus referring to himself as “a living spring” as opposed to well or cistern water.
And the reverse in Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers, where a Jewish vampire laughs when a girl tries to ward him with a crucifix.
I recall in some Arab movie a talk about a girl getting rid of a djinn. I guess the imam or the exorcist would use verses from the Koran (since Arab for the Koran is pretty much like Latin for the Bible).
I know that one episode of Days of Our Lives, while using a Catholic priest, actually used a more Protestant style exorcism. No Latin, no chanting, just a direct command to the demon to come out “in the Name of Jesus.” I specifically remember this because my mother was very surprised.
I watch a lot of Chinese ghost and hopping-vampire movies, and in many of them a sort of Daoist priest will show up with all kinds of cool incantations and spells and magic thingies.
Of course Asian movies are going to use Asian religious beliefs.
For American movies, the two that jump to mind give some props to Native American beliefs/rituals: Poltergeist (2? 3? I forget which) and The Prophecy.
Not a movie, but the two Hellsing series’ features a British vampire-hunting organization that’s explicitly Anglican. (They come into conflict with the Vatican’s vampire hunters on more than one occasion)
2004’s Van Helsing, curiously, seems to feature several non-Catholics in the Vatican monster-hunting HQ, as background characters—IIRC, you see a Buddhist monk, and someone in the background yells “What in Allah’s name is wrong with you!?” after a lab mishap. Perhaps members of an officer exchange with the other religions’ monster-hunting organizations, or just converts.
In The Omen Gregory Peck goes after the antichrist with the seven daggers of Megiddo. The Catholic priests in the movie are actually sort of the bad guys, being the ones who conspired to foist the antichrist on us.
On TV (which the OP did not ask for, I know), one of my favorite X-Files episodes involved a clash between a backwoods, snake-handling Congregationalist preacher and a liberal, mainstream Methodist minister. One of them was actually evil incarnate.
This actually makes perfect sense in the context of shows like “Supernatural”.
These guys have no real idea of why the rituals work. They just know that they do from doing research. Most of that research is going to be based upon old European writings, and most of the stuff on vampires on old Easter European writings. Moreover most of the material is going to be clerical writings, both because most pre-Reformation writing was clerical and because clerics are the only ones likely to be writing about how to dispose of evil beings.
So what you have a situation where some basically ignorant schmucks discover a formula that works to get rid of an evil spirit. The ritual will have been written in Latin and originally performed in Latin. They have no idea why it works. They don’t have time to experiment with variati0ons to see if they work. They are just going through the motions.
Although it’s never spelled out, this concept makes perfect sense. It has also been spelled out in numerous other works, especially Lovecraft’s works, where rituals are often performed in non-Latin languages using non-Christians props such as daggers simply because that is how they work. The participants don’t even understand what they are saying half the time.
Let me put it this way. If you were being attacked by an evil bogey man, and you discovered a medieval text with a ritual that could stop it, would you really be experimenting with the ritual? Would you really be saying “Well the creature is older than the universe, so it must be just water that is essential so Pepsi Cola will work just as well as holy water”, and “The creature predates Latin, so I will compose a gangsta rap version of the ritual Latin chant and that will work just as well”?
For all the people involved know there may be something in the cadence of the words or the specific sounds that make the ritual work, and changing it from Latin to English could destroy it. Similarly maybe Holy water isn’t essential, maybe any weak acid will work and the Medieval Church happened to stumble upon the right formula using holy water and just stuck with it. Or maybe there really is something that makes holy water necessary. The heroes don’t know and they are never in a position to experiment.
So the fact that the rituals are in Latin and use props such as holy water and crucifixes makes perfect sense to me.
On Supernatural, there have been alternate exorcism rituals spoken in “Old Enochian” language which seems to work faster and better than the Latin rituals.
Unless your definitions sare different from mine, this isn’t true.
Holy water is water than has been blessed by a priest. It’s not merely “set aside”, and “blessed by a priest” pretty much fits my definition of “mystical hocus pocus”.
Holy water blessed at Easter Time gets a whole series of treatments, including having Holy Oil poured in it and having the Paschal Candle dipped in it.