Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America

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NYU Press · 2026

The book

The Catholic roots of American horror.

Why does American horror keep returning to Catholicism? Its possessed children, haunted convents, and uneasy encounters with the sacred have a history.

Four scholars follow those images through fiction, film, and American religious history. They examine how Catholicism has shaped horror and how the Church’s own histories of power, colonialism, and abuse trouble the distinction between imagined terrors and actual events.

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Early praise

Praise for the book.

Chilling, terrifying, and hauntingly good, Body and Blood shows how Catholic horror and Catholic history intersect to offer a new story of Catholics in America. Catholic history emerges as an American horror story, and horror emerges with a Catholic tenor. A necessary read that often hurt to read, but I couldn't put down.

Kelly J. BakerAuthor of The Zombies Are Coming

The very first paranoia of this very paranoid nation was anti-Catholicism and it has never gone away. Cressler, Downey, Holscher, and Pasquier show how the horror of Catholics in the Protestant(s) imagination leeched into every corner of American culture. Body and Blood is essential reading for understanding the place of Catholicism in the bloody sacred heart of American modernity.

Robert A. OrsiAuthor of History and Presence

The authors of Body and Blood pull off an engaging work of cultural history. Intertwining 'on screen' and 'off screen' life, the sections are bound up with power, abuse, colonization, and collectively form something we might call the 'real world.'

SB Rodríguez-PlateAuthor of Religion and Film

Source: NYU Press