The following ethnographic and folkloric analysis of American exorcism practices post-1998 centers on four Catholic priest-exorcists currently active in the United States. After a brief commentary regarding the place of Satanism within contemporary Catholic imagination, this article posits that the Catholic Church’s recent institutional support of its office of exorcist must not be viewed separately from its discursive fear of Satanic cults and larger narratives of religious declension. The current era of exorcism practice in America is chiefly characterized as a response to the media sensationalism surrounding not only prior cases of demonic possession but also of Satanic ritual abuse. Moreover, beyond these explicit issues of religious competition (e.g., Catholics versus Satanic conspirators), the current era of exorcism practice is also implicitly characterized by the changing belief systems of contemporary Catholics. Thus, this article ultimately concerns issues related to religious modernization, the apotropaic use of established religious tradition, popular entertainment and the mediatization of contemporary exorcism cases, institutionalized training curricula and the spaces allowing ritual improvisation, and the vernacular religious consumption of unregulated paranormal concepts that possess no clear analogues within official Church theology.

Through a neoteric methodology (speculative ethnography), we analyze the transmedia worldbuilding of the Mad Max franchise as a form of “Ozploitation.” This post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi series exploits culturally specific fears generated from Australia’s colonial past. Mad Max is a popular imagining of the Australian eschaton and its aftermath, a collective national nightmare where near-future Australia—“Maxtralia”—plummets into the savagery invented by generations of colonialist discourse. “Maximum madness,” the retrogressive technological, religious, and socioeconomic wasteland culture for which the series is known, signifies a Western reproach to indigeneity and locative culture, perpetuating attitudes of voyeuristic excitement towards primitivism.

Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of the Joker’s legacy and popularity. Our analyses of the Joker lead us to conclude that “lone wolf” terrorism is an inherent affordance of a politically pluralistic society, a morally relativistic culture that stresses self-determination and authenticity as top priorities. These values impact “lone wolves” like the Joker in their function as media-driven auteur killers--striving for post-mortem recognition and dissemination. Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) then proposes that this type of criminal can ironically result from a media-induced contagion, a discursive fear propagated by twenty-four-hour news cycles that incidentally creates a path for the socially impotent to make their television debuts.

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