If you thought the Catholic Church’s biggest battle was against sin, think again. Turns out they have always been waging war on horror films, and The Vatican Versus Horror Movies dives deep into their cinematic crusade. The book unearths decades of the Vatican’s moral panic over film, courtesy of the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche, their very own film review journal. Think Rotten Tomatoes, but with more guilt.

Author Matt Rogerson wasn’t planning to write about Vatican film criticism; they were researching Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci when they stumbled upon mentions of the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche. The Vatican’s reviews were obscure, untranslated, and, let’s be honest, screaming for a wider audience. What began as an academic curiosity quickly turned into a full blown investigation, leading Rogerson to hunt down these elusive journals like a film scholar Indiana Jones. The result? The relevant study of how the Catholic Church has tried to control cinematic narratives for nearly a century.

Reading through these reviews, one trend becomes glaringly obvious: the Vatican cares less about on screen blasphemy than it does about films criticizing the Church itself. Sure, The Exorcist got a pass for portraying a heroic priest battling Satan, but Ken Russell’s The Devils? Condemned outright for daring to suggest that the church wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. Similarly, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, a grotesque but searing indictment of fascism and its church-aligned power structures, got a Vatican takedown that practically foamed at the mouth. Meanwhile Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead, where a priest’s suicide triggers the biblical apocalypse? Just a brief mention, mostly to grumble about the gore. Priorities, right?

One of the book’s juciest revelations is the Vatican’s selective outrage. Take Nunsploitation film works like Flavia the Heretic and The Nun of Monza, which the Church condemned for the historical inaccuracies while conveniently sidestepping the real life abuses that inspired them. The book carefully tracks these contradictions, showing how the Vatican’s film critiques often say more about their institutional anxieties than about the movies themselves. The Vatican Versus Horror Movies connects the dots between the Vatican’s long history of film censorship and more modern moral panics, such as Britain’s infamous Video Nasties era. Turns out the church had a hand in that too, because when evangelical conservatives and Catholic moralists join forces, horror films tend to get banned (and then become even more appealing). With sharp analysis and dark humor, Rogerson highlights how these patterns of suppression continue to shape horrors and genre cinema today.

Despite the heavy subject matter, the book remains engaging and accessible. Rogerson’s background in health research lends the work an analytical rigor: hypotheses are formed, evidence is tested, and conclusions are drawn with scientific precision. But unlike some dry academic texts, this one knows how to entertain. The humor is biting, the examples are juicy, and the insights are significant. For horror fans, film scholars, and anyone fascinated by the strange bedfellows of religion and censorship, The Vatican Versus Horror Movies is an essential read. It’s a wild, well researched and a frequently hilarious ride through decades of Catholic outrage, one that ultimately reveals just how much power the church has tried to wield over the stories we tell and the stories we see. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that the more you try to suppress horror, the more it thrives. Amen to that!

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