are you serious when you say "The Exorcist damaged me" ?

Lampy tripped over the VHS and fell down the stairs!

lol

I get drug to all the new horror movies as my wife is a fan. The only modern one that I actually enjoyed a decent bit was "The Lady in Black". It didn't scare me much although it does have some 'jumpy' scenes to it if your guard isn't up. However as a film, I enjoyed it about as much as I could for a horror flic. Except for the ending.

As a kid with a not-strict but present Catholic upbringing, "The Exorcist" definitely freaked me out in it's day. It's the last time I remember being scared at a movie. Well not entirely true. I was drug to "Message in a Bottle" and I was terrified it would never be over.

I remember liking John Carpenter's "The Prince of Darkness" as a teen in the 80's as well. Mostly because in the days when horror just equalled 'hack and slash,' it did try to blend religion and science together in an attempt to make it more believable. Pretty cheesy now by today's standards but the cameo by Alice Cooper as a zombie is still kind of fun.

At the time when the Exorcist was out, Satan and the occult were "all the rage". I read somewhere that the only way a person could be possessed was by thinking of Satan.

So, as a kid, I use to lie in bed trying NOT to think of Satan. Which of course, never worked!

Yeah, that's a toughie, alright! You might as well not think of dancing purple elephants!

Today, it's more subtle. You get possessed by listening to music and watching movies.

it appears that some music band or bands went so far as to record songs that, when played backwards, you could hear the devil speaking secret messages.
of course, every one had a cassette player or an 8 track machine that could play backwards, otherwise...you were out of luck.

And TV commercials while not wearing your tinfoil hat.

And then there was that scary thing that happened if you played a MS Windows CD.......It installed Windows!!!!!