(Scene of Maika Monroe in Longlegs)
When Longlegs, the Satanic horror thriller from writer-director Osgood Perkins, arrived in theaters in July 2024, many critics lauded it because the scariest film of the yr, even of the last decade. However in a yr that has seen file quantities of anti-trans laws, the deaths of two pregnant ladies in Texas because of the state’s anti-abortion legal guidelines, and racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and sacrificing pets in Springfield, Ohio, I discover Hollywood Satanism far much less horrifying than real-life Christian violence, and Longlegs notable not for its horror, however for the humor with which it skewers Christian conspiracy myths of evil.
As David Frankfurter factors out in his ebook Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in Historical past, cultures from the traditional Roman Empire to twentyth century Africa have believed in secret evil sects that ritualistically torture, cannibalize, and sacrifice youngsters, typically resulting in violent scapegoating of susceptible people. A Christian iteration of this delusion swept america through the Satanic panic of the Nineteen Eighties. Media, politicians, social employees, and legislation enforcement promoted the idea that Satanic cultists had infiltrated preschools and daycare facilities and subjected youngsters to Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) involving cannibalism, sacrilege, animal sacrifice, and sexual molestation. By 1994, 12,000 claims of SRA had been made, none of them substantiated. Queer individuals particularly suffered, with 4 lesbian ladies in San Antonio and a homosexual 19-year-old instructor’s aide in Massachusetts falsely convicted of kid sexual abuse. Some defendants accused of SRA, like New Jersey day care instructor Kelly Michaels, hid same-sex relationships from juries even when it made their protection tougher, given the inaccurate cultural affiliation of linking queerness with youngster abuse.
The panic had quieted by the mid-Nineteen Nineties, however a lot of its tropes resurfaced in 2017 with the QAnon conspiracy, which claimed Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities belonged to a cabal of Satanic pedophiles. A social media crackdown on QAnon-promoting accounts adopted the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol assault, however the motion seems to have had a direct affect on paranoid right-wing narratives round LGBTQ “grooming” in public school rooms. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw framed his controversial 2022 “Don’t Say Homosexual” curriculum legislation as an “Anti-Grooming Invoice,” and extremist web sites like Patriot.win and information shops like Fox Information have accused mother and father and lecturers who search to validate trans youngsters’s identities of being pedophiles.
Clearly, Christian myths of evil conspiracy have had a pervasive and damaging impact on our politics. But the leisure business typically reifies these myths in non secular horror motion pictures. Frankfurter theorizes that evil conspiracy myths come up when globalizing cultures, such because the Roman Empire, the Catholic church, or late capitalism, subsume native non secular worlds, reinterpreting native experiences of struggling and misfortune inside the framework of demonology. Codified in textual content, these demonologies turn into sources of authority for people entrusted with discerning and expunging evil. Satanic horror motion pictures from The Exorcist to The Conjuring have perpetuated this delusion for contemporary America, pitting heroic authorities—from Catholic clergymen to freelance occult investigators—towards demonic forces.
At first, Longlegs appears as if it’s going to comply with this template. Clairvoyant FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to research a mysterious, decades-long crime spree during which fathers are pushed to kill their households and themselves. The mastermind behind the crimes leaves an occult-coded word at every scene, signed “Longlegs.” Via analysis and supernatural instinct, Harker unravels Longlegs’ id: a freakish-looking, devil-worshipping, failed glam rocker named Dale Ferdinand Cobble (Nicholas Cage), who drives fathers to kill with black magic-infused dolls.
Together with her investigative prowess and stoic resolve, Harker at first appears to embody the archetype of knowledgeable “discerner of evil.” Throughout the Nineteen Eighties Satanic panic, such “consultants” derived their authority from each secular and religious credentials. Evangelical and Catholic charismatic cops—“cult cops”—claimed the power to sense the presence of demons, whereas social employees and psychiatrists claimed experience by “cursory analysis in previous books on Satan-worship and human sacrifice,” recovered reminiscence remedy methods, and claims of firsthand victimization by Satanic cultists. Harker possesses many of those credentials: an FBI badge, obvious psychic presents, familiarity with Biblical scripture and occult books, and firsthand victimization by Cobble, the reminiscence of which she recovers late within the movie, in a way harking back to recovered reminiscence remedy.
However in a grimly ironic twist, the film denies the efficacy of any of those credentials. Harker discovers her outwardly pious mom is an confederate to Cobble, and she or he is compelled to kill her, whereas Cobble, who dedicated suicide to flee punishment, taunts her from past the grave, hinting that Devil has rewarded his crimes with immortality. Devil is just not a cosmic combatant towards God, however an omnipresent trickster spirit whose mindless cruelties can’t be averted by any authority, secular or non secular. It’s a nihilistic imaginative and prescient, but additionally a bitterly humorous one, satirizing the false consolation of Satanic panic narratives—the consolation of attributing struggling, together with struggling inflicted by sacrosanct establishments like church, state, and household, to an organized conspiracy that may be recognized and destroyed.
This subversive humor can be present in Nicholas Cage’s efficiency. Frankfurter describes how myths of evil turn into “actual” by the performances of people “who act ‘as if’ a Satanic or witch-conspiracy and its core atrocities have been really tangible”—the exorcist-priest performing an exorcism, or the possessed particular person performing possession—and that such performances inevitably veer into parody: “…the mimetic efficiency of evil is all the time parody—critique or caricature—in some sense, as a result of it should function at a essential distance from the mythic roles it brings into public presence. Distortion, exaggeration, and typically even comedy happen within the house of that distance.”
(Nicholas Cage in Longlegs)
Nicholas Cage followers are inclined to count on some extent of distortion, exaggeration, and comedy in his performances, and his flip as Cobble doesn’t disappoint. Although the character unsettles together with his powdered, plastic surgery-ruined face, wheedling voice, and creepy fixation with the “birthday” of any feminine character, Cage’s mannerisms typically triggered me to snigger out loud within the theater. Whereas driving in silence down an ominous highway by the woods, Cobble abruptly shrieks “Mommy! Daddy! Unmake me, and save me from the hell of residing!” on the prime of his lungs. The sentiment could be disturbing, however Cage exaggerates the amount and inflection to such an extent that it almost breaks the fourth wall. In a flashback scene, Lee’s mom confronts Cobble for chatting with a younger Lee, demanding to know who he’s and what he desires together with her daughter. Cage silently and dramatically holds up his arms, performing a sequence of gradual, exaggerated, Tai Chi-like gestures earlier than unexpectedly bursting into track. His lyrics are a chilling, cryptic message of warning, however his weird actions and affected vocals encourage laughter. And later, when Harker interrogates an arrested Cobble, Cage contorts and spins in his chair, as if trying a possessed Linda Blair impression, then menacingly leans ahead, adopting self-consciously “scary” voices as he delivers a vaguely sinister word-salad, concluding with a campy “Hail Devil.”
Removed from simply one other hyperbolic show of Cage rage, these excesses come up from Cage performing as a clumsy, remoted human character, Cobble, who’s in flip searching for to “carry out” the mythic position of Satanic killer. In his hideaway within the basement of Lee’s childhood house, we see Cobble engaged in Satanic dollmaking whereas surrounded by posters of T. Rex and Lou Reed, hinting at his loneliness and failed goals whereas additionally recalling the Satanic panic’s affiliation of rock music with demonic evil. By exaggerating Christian stereotypes of evil—altering voices, wild gesticulations, fashionable music as a gateway to Satanic crimes—Cage makes these stereotypes appear ridiculous, introducing a stage of “essential distance” between the viewers and the parable his character seeks to embody, thus making house for parodic humor.
Even so, for all its subversive components, Longlegs’ conception of evil is disappointingly just like that present in trendy Christian conspiracy myths, from the Nineteen Eighties panic to the present “groomer” fixation. As in these myths, Longlegs locates the supply of evil not inside social buildings just like the nuclear household, patriarchy, or capitalism, however in an omnipresent, irredeemably evil Different. Christian fathers kill their wives and daughters, however these crimes are ascribed to Devil, embodied by a deviant social outsider. The film’s parodic humor subsequently fails to subvert Christian myths of evil. Slightly, it reshapes and revitalizes these myths for a disillusioned, secular trendy viewers.
Such a critique might sound unfairly burdensome for an escapist horror film, however horror motion pictures have performed a substantial position in shaping trendy American Christian conceptions of evil. In his ebook American Exorcism: Expelling Demons within the Land of A lot, Michael W. Cuneo factors out that demand for exorcisms elevated dramatically after the Nineteen Seventies, which noticed the runaway success of movies like The Exorcist and books like Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Satan. Such media influenced representations of the demonic are present in bestselling Satanic ritual abuse memoirs like Michelle Remembers and within the practices and beliefs of a variety of Christian denominations. In line with Cuneo, Catholic charismatic deliverance ministers Father Richard McAlear and Betty Brennan created the observe of “binding spirits” to discourage the Exorcist-influenced performances of their demonically-assailed shoppers, which tended to contain quite a lot of spitting, swearing, and vomiting.
At a time when the Spiritual Proper continues to weaponize such myths of evil towards susceptible populations, together with LGBTQ individuals, horror motion pictures can provide resistance, combatting reactionary discourses of evil with humanistic ones. The psychological horror of Skinamarink, the 2022 characteristic debut by Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, provides an instance of what such resistance would possibly appear like.
Like Longlegs, Skinamarink is about within the Nineteen Nineties whereas taking part in with Nineteen Seventies aesthetics, the hazy analog cinematography recalling low-budget horror from the period. Two babies, Kevin and Kaylee, awake in the course of the evening to seek out their mother and father lacking, and the doorways, home windows, and objects of their suburban home disappearing. A seemingly supernatural entity has invaded, and topics the youngsters to escalating bodily and emotional torture. Simply as in Longlegs, evil triumphs on the finish; the youngsters stay trapped inside the entity’s clutches, with no understanding of what it’s, how you can escape, or why it’s claimed them.
(Scene from Skinamarink)
Though the trope of a suburban house possessed by supernatural evil is acquainted to the purpose of cliché, the movie complicates the supernatural by depicting it as a psychological actuality, quite than a literal one. A gap title card relationship the film to “1995,” coupled with murky visuals, shot from the youngsters’s perspective, counsel a childhood nightmare recalled as an grownup. In an early scene, their father mentions on a telephone name that Kevin has harm his head by “falling down the steps,” leaving open the likelihood that the following dreamlike sequence of occasions expresses a fearful, injured, presumably abused youngster’s psyche.
The film makes no references to faith. However the scenario—two harmless youngsters condemned to a loop of infinite torture for no discernible motive—jogged my memory of nothing a lot as conceptions of hell, historical and trendy, from St. Augustine’s insistence on the damnation of unbaptized infants to infernally-obsessed denominations just like the Westboro Baptist Church and Catholic Traditionalism. By grounding its imaginative and prescient of hell within the psyche quite than in an exterior, goal realm, the film not solely confronts audiences with the horror of that imaginative and prescient, however raises questions as to the way it might come to exist in a baby’s thoughts in any respect, forcing audiences to reckon with hell as an idea formed by cultural discourses of evil, quite than as a literal actuality.
Watching the descent of two babies into psychological torment, it’s not possible to not contemplate the non secular trauma doctrines of hell have inflicted upon queer youngsters, or upon neurodivergent youngsters, for whom concepts of everlasting damnation can show particularly distressing. This in flip prompts the viewer to contemplate how church buildings can all too typically use such ideas to mythologize human-made norms and social preparations as divinely ordained, and implement compliance and conformity. On this method, Skinamarink helps us to look at our cultural conceptions of evil with higher readability, whereas Longlegs finds new methods to mystify them.
The Satanic panic could have been unfounded, however it led to actual struggling, illustrating Frankfurter’s level that “the true atrocities of historical past appear to happen not within the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult however quite in the middle of purging such cults from the world. Actual evil occurs when individuals converse of evil.” As Christian nationalism continues to achieve energy, horror motion pictures like Skinamarink assist us to look at how we converse of evil by the myths we take with no consideration, and thus stop actual evil from coming to go.
Erik VanBezooijen is a Brooklyn-based journalist and fiction author. His articles on faith, politics, and tradition have appeared in America, Commonweal, Jacobin, and Sublation Journal, and his fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and Flame Tree Fiction E-newsletter.
(Scene of Maika Monroe in Longlegs)
When Longlegs, the Satanic horror thriller from writer-director Osgood Perkins, arrived in theaters in July 2024, many critics lauded it because the scariest film of the yr, even of the last decade. However in a yr that has seen file quantities of anti-trans laws, the deaths of two pregnant ladies in Texas because of the state’s anti-abortion legal guidelines, and racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and sacrificing pets in Springfield, Ohio, I discover Hollywood Satanism far much less horrifying than real-life Christian violence, and Longlegs notable not for its horror, however for the humor with which it skewers Christian conspiracy myths of evil.
As David Frankfurter factors out in his ebook Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in Historical past, cultures from the traditional Roman Empire to twentyth century Africa have believed in secret evil sects that ritualistically torture, cannibalize, and sacrifice youngsters, typically resulting in violent scapegoating of susceptible people. A Christian iteration of this delusion swept america through the Satanic panic of the Nineteen Eighties. Media, politicians, social employees, and legislation enforcement promoted the idea that Satanic cultists had infiltrated preschools and daycare facilities and subjected youngsters to Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) involving cannibalism, sacrilege, animal sacrifice, and sexual molestation. By 1994, 12,000 claims of SRA had been made, none of them substantiated. Queer individuals particularly suffered, with 4 lesbian ladies in San Antonio and a homosexual 19-year-old instructor’s aide in Massachusetts falsely convicted of kid sexual abuse. Some defendants accused of SRA, like New Jersey day care instructor Kelly Michaels, hid same-sex relationships from juries even when it made their protection tougher, given the inaccurate cultural affiliation of linking queerness with youngster abuse.
The panic had quieted by the mid-Nineteen Nineties, however a lot of its tropes resurfaced in 2017 with the QAnon conspiracy, which claimed Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities belonged to a cabal of Satanic pedophiles. A social media crackdown on QAnon-promoting accounts adopted the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol assault, however the motion seems to have had a direct affect on paranoid right-wing narratives round LGBTQ “grooming” in public school rooms. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw framed his controversial 2022 “Don’t Say Homosexual” curriculum legislation as an “Anti-Grooming Invoice,” and extremist web sites like Patriot.win and information shops like Fox Information have accused mother and father and lecturers who search to validate trans youngsters’s identities of being pedophiles.
Clearly, Christian myths of evil conspiracy have had a pervasive and damaging impact on our politics. But the leisure business typically reifies these myths in non secular horror motion pictures. Frankfurter theorizes that evil conspiracy myths come up when globalizing cultures, such because the Roman Empire, the Catholic church, or late capitalism, subsume native non secular worlds, reinterpreting native experiences of struggling and misfortune inside the framework of demonology. Codified in textual content, these demonologies turn into sources of authority for people entrusted with discerning and expunging evil. Satanic horror motion pictures from The Exorcist to The Conjuring have perpetuated this delusion for contemporary America, pitting heroic authorities—from Catholic clergymen to freelance occult investigators—towards demonic forces.
At first, Longlegs appears as if it’s going to comply with this template. Clairvoyant FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to research a mysterious, decades-long crime spree during which fathers are pushed to kill their households and themselves. The mastermind behind the crimes leaves an occult-coded word at every scene, signed “Longlegs.” Via analysis and supernatural instinct, Harker unravels Longlegs’ id: a freakish-looking, devil-worshipping, failed glam rocker named Dale Ferdinand Cobble (Nicholas Cage), who drives fathers to kill with black magic-infused dolls.
Together with her investigative prowess and stoic resolve, Harker at first appears to embody the archetype of knowledgeable “discerner of evil.” Throughout the Nineteen Eighties Satanic panic, such “consultants” derived their authority from each secular and religious credentials. Evangelical and Catholic charismatic cops—“cult cops”—claimed the power to sense the presence of demons, whereas social employees and psychiatrists claimed experience by “cursory analysis in previous books on Satan-worship and human sacrifice,” recovered reminiscence remedy methods, and claims of firsthand victimization by Satanic cultists. Harker possesses many of those credentials: an FBI badge, obvious psychic presents, familiarity with Biblical scripture and occult books, and firsthand victimization by Cobble, the reminiscence of which she recovers late within the movie, in a way harking back to recovered reminiscence remedy.
However in a grimly ironic twist, the film denies the efficacy of any of those credentials. Harker discovers her outwardly pious mom is an confederate to Cobble, and she or he is compelled to kill her, whereas Cobble, who dedicated suicide to flee punishment, taunts her from past the grave, hinting that Devil has rewarded his crimes with immortality. Devil is just not a cosmic combatant towards God, however an omnipresent trickster spirit whose mindless cruelties can’t be averted by any authority, secular or non secular. It’s a nihilistic imaginative and prescient, but additionally a bitterly humorous one, satirizing the false consolation of Satanic panic narratives—the consolation of attributing struggling, together with struggling inflicted by sacrosanct establishments like church, state, and household, to an organized conspiracy that may be recognized and destroyed.
This subversive humor can be present in Nicholas Cage’s efficiency. Frankfurter describes how myths of evil turn into “actual” by the performances of people “who act ‘as if’ a Satanic or witch-conspiracy and its core atrocities have been really tangible”—the exorcist-priest performing an exorcism, or the possessed particular person performing possession—and that such performances inevitably veer into parody: “…the mimetic efficiency of evil is all the time parody—critique or caricature—in some sense, as a result of it should function at a essential distance from the mythic roles it brings into public presence. Distortion, exaggeration, and typically even comedy happen within the house of that distance.”
(Nicholas Cage in Longlegs)
Nicholas Cage followers are inclined to count on some extent of distortion, exaggeration, and comedy in his performances, and his flip as Cobble doesn’t disappoint. Although the character unsettles together with his powdered, plastic surgery-ruined face, wheedling voice, and creepy fixation with the “birthday” of any feminine character, Cage’s mannerisms typically triggered me to snigger out loud within the theater. Whereas driving in silence down an ominous highway by the woods, Cobble abruptly shrieks “Mommy! Daddy! Unmake me, and save me from the hell of residing!” on the prime of his lungs. The sentiment could be disturbing, however Cage exaggerates the amount and inflection to such an extent that it almost breaks the fourth wall. In a flashback scene, Lee’s mom confronts Cobble for chatting with a younger Lee, demanding to know who he’s and what he desires together with her daughter. Cage silently and dramatically holds up his arms, performing a sequence of gradual, exaggerated, Tai Chi-like gestures earlier than unexpectedly bursting into track. His lyrics are a chilling, cryptic message of warning, however his weird actions and affected vocals encourage laughter. And later, when Harker interrogates an arrested Cobble, Cage contorts and spins in his chair, as if trying a possessed Linda Blair impression, then menacingly leans ahead, adopting self-consciously “scary” voices as he delivers a vaguely sinister word-salad, concluding with a campy “Hail Devil.”
Removed from simply one other hyperbolic show of Cage rage, these excesses come up from Cage performing as a clumsy, remoted human character, Cobble, who’s in flip searching for to “carry out” the mythic position of Satanic killer. In his hideaway within the basement of Lee’s childhood house, we see Cobble engaged in Satanic dollmaking whereas surrounded by posters of T. Rex and Lou Reed, hinting at his loneliness and failed goals whereas additionally recalling the Satanic panic’s affiliation of rock music with demonic evil. By exaggerating Christian stereotypes of evil—altering voices, wild gesticulations, fashionable music as a gateway to Satanic crimes—Cage makes these stereotypes appear ridiculous, introducing a stage of “essential distance” between the viewers and the parable his character seeks to embody, thus making house for parodic humor.
Even so, for all its subversive components, Longlegs’ conception of evil is disappointingly just like that present in trendy Christian conspiracy myths, from the Nineteen Eighties panic to the present “groomer” fixation. As in these myths, Longlegs locates the supply of evil not inside social buildings just like the nuclear household, patriarchy, or capitalism, however in an omnipresent, irredeemably evil Different. Christian fathers kill their wives and daughters, however these crimes are ascribed to Devil, embodied by a deviant social outsider. The film’s parodic humor subsequently fails to subvert Christian myths of evil. Slightly, it reshapes and revitalizes these myths for a disillusioned, secular trendy viewers.
Such a critique might sound unfairly burdensome for an escapist horror film, however horror motion pictures have performed a substantial position in shaping trendy American Christian conceptions of evil. In his ebook American Exorcism: Expelling Demons within the Land of A lot, Michael W. Cuneo factors out that demand for exorcisms elevated dramatically after the Nineteen Seventies, which noticed the runaway success of movies like The Exorcist and books like Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Satan. Such media influenced representations of the demonic are present in bestselling Satanic ritual abuse memoirs like Michelle Remembers and within the practices and beliefs of a variety of Christian denominations. In line with Cuneo, Catholic charismatic deliverance ministers Father Richard McAlear and Betty Brennan created the observe of “binding spirits” to discourage the Exorcist-influenced performances of their demonically-assailed shoppers, which tended to contain quite a lot of spitting, swearing, and vomiting.
At a time when the Spiritual Proper continues to weaponize such myths of evil towards susceptible populations, together with LGBTQ individuals, horror motion pictures can provide resistance, combatting reactionary discourses of evil with humanistic ones. The psychological horror of Skinamarink, the 2022 characteristic debut by Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, provides an instance of what such resistance would possibly appear like.
Like Longlegs, Skinamarink is about within the Nineteen Nineties whereas taking part in with Nineteen Seventies aesthetics, the hazy analog cinematography recalling low-budget horror from the period. Two babies, Kevin and Kaylee, awake in the course of the evening to seek out their mother and father lacking, and the doorways, home windows, and objects of their suburban home disappearing. A seemingly supernatural entity has invaded, and topics the youngsters to escalating bodily and emotional torture. Simply as in Longlegs, evil triumphs on the finish; the youngsters stay trapped inside the entity’s clutches, with no understanding of what it’s, how you can escape, or why it’s claimed them.
(Scene from Skinamarink)
Though the trope of a suburban house possessed by supernatural evil is acquainted to the purpose of cliché, the movie complicates the supernatural by depicting it as a psychological actuality, quite than a literal one. A gap title card relationship the film to “1995,” coupled with murky visuals, shot from the youngsters’s perspective, counsel a childhood nightmare recalled as an grownup. In an early scene, their father mentions on a telephone name that Kevin has harm his head by “falling down the steps,” leaving open the likelihood that the following dreamlike sequence of occasions expresses a fearful, injured, presumably abused youngster’s psyche.
The film makes no references to faith. However the scenario—two harmless youngsters condemned to a loop of infinite torture for no discernible motive—jogged my memory of nothing a lot as conceptions of hell, historical and trendy, from St. Augustine’s insistence on the damnation of unbaptized infants to infernally-obsessed denominations just like the Westboro Baptist Church and Catholic Traditionalism. By grounding its imaginative and prescient of hell within the psyche quite than in an exterior, goal realm, the film not solely confronts audiences with the horror of that imaginative and prescient, however raises questions as to the way it might come to exist in a baby’s thoughts in any respect, forcing audiences to reckon with hell as an idea formed by cultural discourses of evil, quite than as a literal actuality.
Watching the descent of two babies into psychological torment, it’s not possible to not contemplate the non secular trauma doctrines of hell have inflicted upon queer youngsters, or upon neurodivergent youngsters, for whom concepts of everlasting damnation can show particularly distressing. This in flip prompts the viewer to contemplate how church buildings can all too typically use such ideas to mythologize human-made norms and social preparations as divinely ordained, and implement compliance and conformity. On this method, Skinamarink helps us to look at our cultural conceptions of evil with higher readability, whereas Longlegs finds new methods to mystify them.
The Satanic panic could have been unfounded, however it led to actual struggling, illustrating Frankfurter’s level that “the true atrocities of historical past appear to happen not within the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult however quite in the middle of purging such cults from the world. Actual evil occurs when individuals converse of evil.” As Christian nationalism continues to achieve energy, horror motion pictures like Skinamarink assist us to look at how we converse of evil by the myths we take with no consideration, and thus stop actual evil from coming to go.
Erik VanBezooijen is a Brooklyn-based journalist and fiction author. His articles on faith, politics, and tradition have appeared in America, Commonweal, Jacobin, and Sublation Journal, and his fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and Flame Tree Fiction E-newsletter.
