It’s that time of year again, when certain well-meaning but misinformed Christians sin against their fellow believers by questioning their salvation and accusing them of inviting demonic activity.

One young woman told me she is ‘called’ to spend her time looking into these things, so she can warn everyone about the evil of Halloween.

The crime in question? Participating, in any way, in anything related to Halloween. Well, except for denouncing it — the well-meaning/misinformed group enthusiastically participates in things like this:

Diane Schrader

I appreciate the zeal of the people who came up with this. They want people to stop being evil and turn to Jesus.

But there are so many things wrong with this approach.

Let’s unpack some of their base philosophies on this — all of them pretty questionable.

Halloween is evil

The first false assumption is that Halloween is inherently evil.

The history of Halloween is a mash-up of Catholic and pagan traditions. All Hallows’ Eve (“hallow” means holy) was the night before All Saints’ Day, an explicitly Catholic celebration to remember dead saints, which intersected with pagan harvest time traditions related to the belief that the dead could come back as ghosts — thus the “spooky” imagery of the holiday.

Trick-or-treating seems to have emerged from a medieval British practice called “souling,” where the poor would go door-to-door on November 1 or 2, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food, often “soul cakes.”

Are some pagan roots evident here? Yep, just like a lot of things in our culture. Our names for the days of the week, for instance, reflect the names of pagan gods — like Thursday is named for the god Thor.

The key point here, though, is that nobody will be worshipping Thor this next Thursday, most likely. Because how something started is largely irrelevant. What matters is how it is today.

Halloween traditions brought to the U.S. by immigrants from Britain, Ireland, and Scotland became increasingly mischievous and destructive in the early 20th century, sometimes leading to outright vandalism or violence. To curb this behavior, in the 1930s, various community groups, civic organizations, parents, and churches began promoting organized, door-to-door treat-collecting for younger children.

Trick-or-treating exploded in popularity after World War II and, as it was heavily marketed by the candy companies, grew into a cultural staple representing good clean fun for America’s kids.

That is what changed, and for the vast majority of Americans, that is where we are today.

So no, Halloween is not inherently evil, even in its history, nor is the American tradition of trick-or-treating.

Light should have nothing to do with darkness …

We can agree on this one; it’s in the Bible, of course — “what fellowship has light with darkness?”

The problem is, as we just clarified above, that children trick-or-treating, which is 99.99% of Halloween for most American families, is not “darkness.”

Ironically, the misled are actually taking this passage out of context, because it certainly is not arguing that we can’t go out and be around “darkness” (unbelievers). On the contrary, how can we love them if we hide away from them?

The real meaning of the passage surfaces when we read the whole thing:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? —2 Corinthians 6:14

This is prohibiting close attachments with non-Christians that might compromise the Christian’s faith — think marriage or perhaps a business partner.

It’s hardly an injunction against going outside on an October evening and chatting with trick-or-treaters.

… but we’re just fascinated with darkness

It is my observation that the misled crowd tends to be more interested in ferreting out sordid aspects of the darkness than they are in bringing light.

Some even boast of having “gone down the rabbit hole” of “research” on Halloween. But it isn’t actual research, or they would at least have some of the basics down (see above, “Halloween is evil” section).

Instead, they grab onto and fearmonger the most horrific (yet undocumented) claims. We’re talking about TikTok videos from highly questionable “pastors,” spurious claims by “ex-witches,” or paragraph after paragraph detailing pagan gods and occult practices — none of this is a good use of time for most Christians.

One young woman told me she is “called” to spend her time looking into these things, so she can warn everyone about the evil of Halloween. She might be called; I’m just not sure who’s doing the calling. Because this is what we’re told to focus on:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is dignified, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, consider these things. —Philippians 4:8

There’s no darkness in that (above) at all!

Anyway, here are a few of the claims repeatedly made “from the dark side.”

CLAIM: You’re worshipping the devil when you trick-or-treat, whether you want to or not! (A lot of credit is given to what satanists have allegedly said about all this.)

FACT-CHECK: You can’t be “tricked” into worshipping the devil.

CLAIM: Halloween is the worst day for human trafficking!

FACT-CHECK: There is zero supporting evidence; there is no “worst day” for human trafficking, according to law enforcement.

CLAIM: Also human sacrifice.

FACT-CHECK: Again, zero supporting evidence for this.

CLAIM: Witches are out casting spells on Halloween; being outside risks having a demon attach to you.

FACT-CHECK: You can’t accidentally pick up a demon; you have to willfully sin to invite that kind of activity.

CLAIM: If your neighbor is a witch or a satanist, the neighbor curses the candy, and that demonic presence comes into your home!

FACT-CHECK: Your neighbors are most likely not witches or satanists. And if they are? “Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” —1 John 4:4

RELATED: The last ethnic Halloween costume nobody apologizes for

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All demons, all the time

There is a flavor of Christianity that tends to fall into this obsession with darkness, and it reaches its pinnacle in so-called “deliverance ministry.”

Deliverance ministry focuses on casting out demons and tearing down spiritual strongholds and uses language about curses, “soul ties,” and the “legal rights” of demons. Much of this is not biblical. There are people who claim “deliverance” is their gift, and they dig deep into the darkness because of that.

The problem is that there is no such gift in the Bible. Only Jesus and the apostles were able to cast out demons. No instruction about that is given to us, and there is not even the suggestion that we should try to interact with demons in any way. On the contrary, actually, as we’ll see below.

Instead, every believer is given everything we need to win at spiritual warfare, in the fight against the demonic:

We are to put on the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18).We are to resist the devil (James 4:7).We are not to give him room in our life at all (Ephesians 4:27).We are to seek God, who tells us we can overcome the world, by simple faith (1 John 5:4).We are to be alert and of sober mind (1 Peter 5:8-10). A magnificent passage, and not a word in there about ordering demons around.

The things I have heard some Christians say about “opening a door to demons” are truly troubling. Touching a crystal opens the door. Stretching your body in a way that yoga teaches opens the door. A pumpkin on your porch opens the door — and the person wasn’t even talking about a carved pumpkin — just a pumpkin. Or my very (least) favorite: Using alternative medicine opens the door.

Some of the most outspoken purveyors of this kind of thinking are people who were formerly involved in the occult. I respect their desire to stay far from anything that reminds them of their old lives. But they overstep when they blindly condemn others for a pumpkin, a stretch, or a trip to a functional medicine provider.

Believers, of course, cannot “accidentally dance with the devil.” We are sealed in Christ, who never lets us go, as multiple Scriptures attest. We have nothing to fear from demons while we walk in His light. We can walk outside on Halloween night, and we can even bring home a Hershey bar and not fret that it’s “cursed.”

However, Christians can certainly make choices that open them to satanic influence. Mindfully disobeying God puts you in a dangerous place. But we are bought and paid for by the blood of Christ, and obeying the Scriptures above is our ticket to spiritual safety.

The bad attitude of the demon-obsessed

It shouldn’t be too surprising that people who get caught up in demon obsession are going to respond very negatively to being told they’re on the wrong track.

But they prove they’re wrong with how they interact with the rest of us. Because it is wrong to demonize (pun intended) fellow believers who participate in neighborhood trick-or-treating. The spiritual pride of those who think they have it right leads to them saying some pretty appalling things.

This guy on the right below is a prime example, and Red Pen Logic does an excellent job of explaining how he’s wrong in this brief video.

The ‘Halloween Halters’

As for the “Halloween Halt” event advertised in the graphic at the beginning of this article, I think it’s pretty obvious that accosting families with children to tell them that their Halloween celebration is satanic is highly unlikely to win anyone to the cause of Christ, but it will certainly embitter, anger, and antagonize moms and dads just trying to enjoy this cultural tradition with their little ones.

Two truths the Halloween halters and haters are missing:

God put you in your neighborhood for a reason.One night a year, God literally brings your neighbors to your door.

This is called a gospel opportunity, and next week I’ll share some ideas on how to make it truly a night of light.

This essay previously appeared at the She Speaks Truth Substack.

​All hallow’s eve, All saints day, Catholicism, Christian living, Christianity, Culture, Deliverance ministry, Demonic, Halloween, Lifestyle, Samhain, Satanic influence, Spiritual warfare, Trick-or-treating, Faith 

Democrats aren’t hiding anything when it comes to what they want for not only our immigration system, but the future of America — and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sick of hearing it.

“They’re just saying it out loud,” Gonzales says, noting that all she has to do is “roll the tapes.”

“I’m going to have to remind you guys what this country will look like again with Democrats in power,” she continues, adding, “One of their endgames is to flood this country with immigrants to replace us.”

“And this is an area that we really need to have a healthy and robust immigration program,” Democrat Senate candidate Josh Turek said to an audience.

“You’ve got around 41% of the direct care workers that are immigrants. And so I think we also need an easier pathway to earn citizenship so that we can bring in more workers, not only for that industry but as well as the agriculture industry and the meatpacking plants,” Turek continued.

“I mean, this is a state that’s really, really struggling,” he added.

“No, no, no,” Gonzales says. “Literally all across the country, we are all saying the same thing. We do not need more foreign workers. We do not need more immigrants. We actually need less. We just voted in November of 2024 for mass deportations. We want people gone.”

“‘Meatpacking plants are struggling, let’s bring in cheap foreign labor,’” she mocks.

“Because you know, that’s always the Democrats’ plan. The Democrats’ plan is always, ‘Let’s figure out how to make slavery legal again in every way, shape, or form,’” she adds.

But Turek isn’t the first one to make his case for what Gonzales calls “slave labor” in the United States.

“Mass amnesty for cheaper labor,” Gonzales says. “Chuck Schumer actually let that cat out of the bag all the way back in 2022.”

“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers,” Schumer said in a 2022 speech. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants. The dreamers and all of them.”

“Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” he added.

“What are we doing?” Gonzales, annoyed, asks.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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Arizona State University’s Ratio Christi chapter hosted Christian apologist Frank Turek Monday night. The topic especially caught my attention as a philosophy professor: If God exists, why is there evil?

I call this the major objection to belief in God. Atheists may begin elsewhere, but once the other objections are answered, the problem of evil keeps returning. I have found that true whether I am talking with an atheist at a bar watching a ball game or an elite physicist at Cambridge.

What if the very problem of evil that you think disproves God actually points to God?

Turek made the question as pointed as possible. He told the audience that when he and Charlie Kirk were approaching Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, Kirk asked him to pray. Turek prayed for the event to be effective and safe.

“God said no,” Turek told the audience. About 20 minutes later, Kirk was fatally shot. Turek has asked the same question publicly ever since: Where was God?

To some smug atheists, and a few conspiracy-minded people, the story invites a sneer: If Kirk was such a good Christian, why didn’t his God protect him? Why would anyone want to be a Christian if that is the outcome?

Turek answered with a challenge: What if the very problem of evil that seems to disprove God actually points toward him?

His argument came in two parts.

First, before we can say evil disproves God, we have to know what evil is. And to know what evil is, we need some account of the good. Invoking Augustine, Turek described evil as a corruption or privation of something good. Augustine’s formulation is simple: Evil depends on the good it damages.

Students are often confident that they can define the good until the examples get difficult. Happiness seems like an obvious candidate, but people can be happy about wicked things. Happiness alone therefore cannot tell us what is good.

That is where students often retreat into relativism: What is good for you is good for you, and what is good for me is good for me.

Turek’s answer was that human beings share a common human nature. If something is genuinely good for a human being as such, it cannot become bad merely because another person prefers something else.

Then he pushed the argument into explicitly Christian territory. If Christianity is true, what could be better than knowing God? He cited John 17:3, where eternal life is described as knowing God and Jesus Christ.

That brought him back to Kirk. Kirk’s murder was evil; Turek did not pretend otherwise. But he argued that God can bring good from evil. Turek says he still hears from people who encountered the gospel because of Kirk’s life and death. In his language, the ripple was not merely a ripple but a tsunami.

RELATED: What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets

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That was Turek’s first point: The objection from evil assumes that some things are objectively wrong. His argument is that objective moral law requires a standard beyond individual preference and that the ultimate ground of that standard is God. The problem of evil therefore borrows the very moral categories it tries to use against him.

Turek then moved from philosopher to pastor.

In a philosophy class, people will debate the logical problem of evil. In the middle of intense suffering, nobody wants a philosopher to arrive with a chalkboard and draw syllogisms. They want to know why this happened: Why this child? Why this cancer? Why this death?

Turek answers with what he calls the ripple effect. We know very little of the past, only fragments of the present, and nothing of the future except what has been revealed to us. We cannot trace all the consequences flowing from a single event.

God, in the Christian account, is not only powerful and good but wise. He knows the whole of history and can order events toward ends we cannot see. Turek appealed to Romans 8:28: God works all things together for the good of those who love him.

That reminded me of an old pastoral illustration. A couple had grown cold in their faith. Their child died, and they asked their pastor why. He told them to imagine a shepherd trying to lead two stubborn sheep across a river from danger to safety. They refuse. So the shepherd picks up their lamb and carries it across. The sheep follow.

Was that for their good?

The point is not that suffering itself becomes good. It is that suffering can force us to confront questions comfort lets us avoid. It exposes our finitude and can make us consider our own sin. When we recognize how little we know and how much God would have to know, Paul’s question in Romans 9:20 becomes harder to brush aside: Who are we to correct God?

RELATED: Christians are missing the opportunity next door

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With those two claims — objective goodness and divine wisdom — Turek took questions.

One student asked why God creates people who will be damned to hell. Turek answered that people who finally reject God receive what they insist upon: separation from Him. If that is what they choose, he asked, on what grounds do they complain about receiving it?

Another asked about animal suffering that no human being ever sees. How could that possibly help us?

Turek’s answer was essentially: How do you know it does not? Human knowledge is extraordinarily limited. The fact that we cannot identify a good purpose for some instance of suffering does not prove that no such purpose exists. He also noted that in the Christian account, the whole creation is affected by human sin.

So is Turek right? Does the problem of evil point toward God rather than away from him? Are atheists borrowing from an objective moral framework they cannot ultimately ground without God?

The audience was clearly intrigued. Skeptics had something substantial to push against, and Christians had to think more carefully about what they claim the Bible teaches concerning good, evil, suffering, and God’s wisdom.

As a philosophy professor deep in the heart of Sun Devil territory, I count that as a good thing.

​Charlie kirk, God, Frank turek, Asu, Arizona, Christians, Atheism, Evil, Jesus christ, Gospel, Philosophy, Saint paul, Bible, Opinion & analysis 

Emma Waters is a proud, Christ-centered patriot. The 28-year-old bioethics researcher at the Heritage Foundation lives by a strict six-word mantra: “Love God, get married, have babies.”

She married young and recently welcomed her third daughter while working from home in Pennsylvania. When she’s not raising her kids, Waters devotes her time to exposing what happens when human reproduction stops being a natural byproduct of family life and becomes a high-tech engineering project.

The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

Waters has made it her mission to expose one of the most seismic shifts in modern medicine. Doctors have moved beyond merely helping desperate couples conceive; now clinics try to control which children are (and aren’t) born, who carries them, and what traits they possess. Waters consistently raises alarms about commercial surrogacy, embryo selection, and a fertility business that treats parenthood like a shady concierge service. Her concern is justified.

The most fascinating fight over this issue isn’t between traditionalists and the iconoclastic, often idiotic left. The real battle line lies squarely on the political right, dividing old-school social conservatives from Silicon Valley’s tech-driven pronatalists. And the battle is growing increasingly ferocious.

Can babies be solved?

Both sides agree that falling birth rates pose an existential threat to America. But while traditionalists want more babies born into married homes, tech titans want to manufacture them using IVF, surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, and artificial wombs. Essentially, Silicon Valley wants to code a way out of demographic winter. Traditionalists think the answer lies in simple, un-automated human commitment.

Silicon Valley wants to solve the fertility crisis in the lab. Traditionalists want to solve it with marriage. And in truth, the traditionalist approach makes far more sense. If young people stop getting married, inventing ever more sophisticated ways to make babies only treats the symptom while leaving the family crisis untouched.

Technology itself isn’t inherently evil, nor is every fertility treatment misguided. Modern medicine performs genuine miracles by healing broken minds and bodies. The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

The pitch of the modern fertility industry is pure, unadulterated control. If a couple can’t conceive, technology intervenes. If a woman wants to delay motherhood, she freezes her eggs. If parents want to select specific embryos, technicians run tests. If adults want someone else to carry the burden, they hire a surrogate.

RELATED: They met top tech experts behind closed doors. Now these religious leaders are urging Congress to act.

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The cultural message has shifted dramatically over two generations. Society used to tell young people that the biological clock actually ticks and that building a life with a special someone matters early on. Modern culture now tells them not to worry because science will grant extra decades. That promise sells a dangerous illusion. It tricks people into believing they can outrun the human body’s limits forever. And once people believe technology can overcome every natural limit, the next question becomes obvious.

Why stop at conception?

When parents screen, rank, and discard embryos based on calculated disease risk, physical attributes, or predicted intelligence, parental love starts looking like a trip to an online retail shop. Historically, a child arrived as a gift to be welcomed and cherished unconditionally. The tech-enabled model treats a child like a product customized before checkout.

For 50 years, Western society systematically dismantled the traditional family structure. Contraception severed physical intimacy from reproduction. Abortion severed pregnancy from parenthood. IVF severed conception from marriage. Donor eggs and surrogacy severed genetics from motherhood.

Now society is facing the consequences of that perverse experiment. Reproduction is becoming an expensive, institutionalized service completely independent of marriage and even pregnancy.

The demographic crisis facing the United States and the West is, in many ways, the logical result of modern incentives. Long-term commitment is treated as an unnecessary drag on personal mobility; marriage is now delayed until every career milestone is unlocked; and having children is viewed as something between a hindrance and a hazard. Silicon Valley can build all the productivity tools it wants, but innovation can’t offset a society increasingly uninterested in its own continuation.

Eugenics on demand

The tech industry naturally focuses on the paying customer, including the adults writing six-figure checks for surrogates and genetic testing. Nobody asks what the child wants. An infant doesn’t choose anonymous genetic donors, years spent in a cryo-preservation freezer, or half-siblings scattered across three continents. The fertility lobby endlessly preaches reproductive freedom for adults, completely ignoring the basic rights of the person being created.

No Nazi uniform is required to revive eugenics. Simply give parents enough data, enough options, enough cash, and a well-stocked dish of embryos, and biological selection quickly becomes good parenting.

Eventually, this dynamic introduces a brand-new form of inequality, far more consequential than the type blue-haired liberals whine about. Wealthy urban couples will screen hundreds of embryos to secure cognitive and physical advantages for their offspring, while working-class families struggle to afford baby formula. The political left spent half a century agonizing over income gaps, but conservatives ought to ask what happens when the stinking rich can literally buy superior genetics at a boutique clinic.

It’s a question occupying Waters’ mind, and the answer should concern anyone who cares about the future of America.

​Tech, Biotech, Ivf, Designer babies, Fertility, Family, Marriage 

From integration and national identity to the challenges posed by competing values and worldviews, BlazeTV host Nick Freitas and Konstantin Kisin examine whether Western nations have ignored the cultural consequences of mass immigration.

“This is fundamentally about cultural compatibility,” Freitas tells Kisin. “Some cultures merge well together, they work well together, they enhance one another, and some do not, because they’re openly hostile, because they want very different things.

“If we accept that as a premise,” he says, “and I certainly do, what should immigration policy look like? What should it look like in the U.K.?”

Despite believing Freitas framed it “exactly correctly,” Kisin wants to add some “nuance.”

“The big concern, obviously, and the thing people are always alluding to in Europe and also in the U.S. about the situation in Europe is Islam,” he explains.

“It’s become kind of very — not extreme, but very black and white on both sides of that debate. You know the left will say everyone’s equal, Muslims are wonderful … and increasingly, people on the right have a black and white view of it as well, which is the opposite of that,” he continues.

“Which is, you know, Muslims are terrible, they can’t be trusted,” he adds.

While it’s not always true that immigration is a negative, “importing a large number of people from a different culture is naturally disruptive, and Islam is particularly difficult because of it being a political ideology and a theology at the same time.”

“And that meshing together creates real tensions and problems,” he adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off subscriptions.

​Konstantin kisin, Nick freitas, Immigration, Islam, Muslims, Blazetv show 

Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

RELATED: America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government

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Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

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When the Walter Reed scandal erupted in 2007, the officers under fire were more than names in a newspaper to me. I knew many of them. I saw their frustration and outrage as they scrambled to address failures some were only then discovering.

My wife, Gracie, and I were at Walter Reed frequently. A bilateral amputee herself, she had been invited to sing and spend time with wounded warriors, particularly women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputations. The military was struggling to care for troops with devastating injuries, many caused by improvised explosive devices.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Knowing people working there helped me understand the strain. Knowing more wounded were coming helped me understand why the failures could not wait.

The Washington Post exposed serious problems in outpatient conditions and care, including mold, vermin, bureaucratic delays, and wounded soldiers falling through administrative cracks. The reporting was painful for people I knew. It was also necessary.

I discussed the scandal with my father, a retired Navy captain. The military, he explained, survives by folding painful lessons into its policies, procedures, and institutional memory so others do not have to learn them at the same cost.

That is what an after-action review is for: What happened? Why did it happen? What changes now?

The lesson must outlive the embarrassment.

When our leaders and the media lie, conceal, or confidently tell us something that later proves false, they do the heavy lifting for our enemies. How do we defend the country together when we cannot trust the people describing the danger?

Consider the assurances about President Biden’s capacity. In February 2024, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “He is sharp. He is on top of things.” In March, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough went much further, calling the sitting president “the best Biden ever” intellectually and analytically.

Then came the June debate and Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July.

The debate did not establish a medical diagnosis. It did demand an explanation from people who had spent months assuring the public that concerns about Biden’s capacity were misplaced.

In May 2025, Scarborough finally said, “I was obviously wrong.” He explained that his confidence came from extended personal encounters with Biden. Then he added that he was not sure what lesson to take from the episode.

That’s precisely the problem.

What evidence did he discount? What did he see that persuaded him? What did others see that contradicted it? What will he do differently next time?

RELATED: Gavin Newsom invoked Nietzsche. I thought of ‘Blazing Saddles.’

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Those questions belong not only to Scarborough but to every politician, aide, reporter, editor, broadcaster, and institution that gave the public confident assurances. An after-action review cannot end with “I was wrong” any more than it can end with “I meant well.”

The next people relying on you need to know what changed.

The border demands the same accounting. In September 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “The border is secure.” In October 2023, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified that more than 600,000 known “gotaways” had evaded apprehension during that fiscal year.

What did “secure” mean? More important, what evidence would have caused the administration to abandon that description sooner?

An honest accounting must distinguish between what officials got wrong and what they knowingly concealed. That requires records, testimony, names, timelines, and decisions. Citizens should not have to settle for whichever explanation best protects a party, an administration, or a network.

We may expect politicians to lie. That does not excuse them. Nor does it relieve journalists of the obligation to test what politicians say rather than repeat it.

Over 40 years of caregiving, I have had plenty of doctors get things wrong. I understand the reluctance to offer a mea culpa. But I take their advice home and live with the consequences. If we are going to continue together, I need to know how the next decision will be better.

RELATED: The fourth bus of the Apocalypse

Miguel Perfectti/Getty Images

That was the obligation at Walter Reed. The next wounded soldier needed the previous failure corrected whether anyone responsible felt sorry or not.

“Mistakes were made” leaves the authors conveniently absent. “Turn the page” asks the public to move on while the questions remain unanswered.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Our enemies benefit from failures we refuse to examine. If those responsible will not come clean, voters should elect people willing to use lawful investigations, public hearings, compelled testimony, and the release of records to establish what happened. Where evidence establishes crimes, pursue prosecution.

But a hearing cannot become the place where accountability goes to die.

The Constitution provides authority. The law provides tools. Voters must supply people willing to use them.

This election, ask candidates whose records they will demand, which decisions they will examine, and whether their own allies will have to answer questions under oath. Anyone can promise to investigate an opponent. The test comes when the evidence reaches a friend.

I owe my preferred candidates and broadcasters that same scrutiny. Excusing them would preserve the very failure I want corrected.

We can disagree on policy and still defend this country shoulder to shoulder. But we cannot make truth optional. Calls for unity ring hollow when the people asking for trust refuse to account for how they broke it.

Our children will inherit whatever we excuse.

​Walter reed medical center, Hospitals, Trust, Washington post, Msnbc, Joe biden, Kamala harris, Wounded warriors, Doctors, Constitution, Opinion & analysis 

Philadelphia is full of must-see locations on sightseeing trips: Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Art Museum, to name a few.

But in a city known for its cheesesteaks as well as for its nation-shaping historical landmarks, one eatery stands tall: Pat’s King of Steaks.

‘This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!’

Pat’s has been around for almost 100 years, according to the colorful sign sitting above the South Philly establishment on East Passyunk Avenue. You might also recall it was a filming location for the 1976 Oscar-winning movie “Rocky.”

And while Pat’s certainly contends with plenty of competition around town these days, and the ongoing who-has-the-best-cheesesteak argument certainly opens the door for many opinions, one unhappy customer took things too far Wednesday.

General manager Tom Francano — who has worked at Pat’s for nearly 50 years — told KYW-TV the customer walked up to the window and ordered a cheesesteak.

Then about 10 minutes later, the customer returned with the opened cheesesteak and said, “This steak’s garbage,” Francano recalled to KYW.

Francano added to the station that he and the customer had a back-and-forth over the sandwich’s quality, and then Francano took an informal poll, asking other customers about their cheesesteaks — after which the patrons replied that they were satisfied.

“That’s when he got a little pissed off. He got mad, and he picked the steak up and threw it at me,” Francano told KYW, adding that he thought the customer might be a social media influencer. “He had this phone on, you know, on a pole, taking pictures outside and everything.”

RELATED: Armed South Philly residents guard Columbus statue from vandalism — and leftist mayor, district attorney call them vigilantes, ‘criminal bullies’

“I was pretty pissed off, you know. I’m not used to getting a steak thrown in my face, you know. I mean, if you don’t like the steak, be a little nicer about it,” Francano added to the station in the aftermath.

Shop owner Frank Olivieri told the station he reviewed video showing the customer ripping the cheesesteak apart by hand before approaching the window.

“The guy picked the sandwich up, threw it in his face, and ran away — the coward,” Oliveri told KYW.

“He assaulted my employee, so we’ll see how many of his friends that he has online are really his friends, see who’s going to turn him in first,” Olivieri added to the station. “The power of the camera, AI, we’ll find him. We’ll find him. $5,000, we’ll pull him out of whatever rock he’s living under right now.”

Yes, Pat’s offered a pretty penny for information leading to an arrest and charges in the incident, the station said.

But it appears the cash may not have been necessary.

A Philadelphia police spokesperson told KYW that a man turned himself in Thursday and was charged with harassment.

“This whole Streaming for Clout thing is getting out of hand … stuff like this needs to be stopped,” one commenter under the above video stated. “This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!”

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​Cheesesteak, Philadelphia, Pat’s king of steaks, Physical attack, Harassment, Arrest, Social media, Crime 

We live in a day when a teenager with a smartphone can perform tasks governments couldn’t fathom just three decades ago, says Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck is already disturbed by this strange reality, but he knows the technology in the pipeline will make our current capabilities seem like child’s play. “Something’s now being built that will hand every one of us abilities that we have not earned, we have not personally developed, and we were not formed to carry,” he warns.

He is referring, of course, to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which many experts and developers have warned could spiral out of control and turn on humanity.

It seems like a new problem, but it’s actually as old as time itself, says Glenn.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he connects Genesis, the book of Enoch, the Tower of Babel, and one of the Old Testament’s final warnings to ask a question we may soon be forced to reckon with: What happens when technological capabilities develop faster than our ability to handle them?

Glenn, citing both Genesis and the book of Enoch, recounts the story of how he believes the giant human-demon hybrids called Nephilim came to be.

“200 [Watchers] come down on a mountain [Mount Hermon] … and they bind themselves by an oath because each one knows the other is going to lose the nerve. So what do they do? Among other things, they open a school,” he says.

“One of them teaches metalworking: swords, knives, armor. Along with it, how to grind minerals into paint for the face and dye for the cloth. Others teach reading the stars and the property of roots and plants and cutting of spells,” he continues. “And the account doesn’t say they taught lies. It says they taught things that were true and the earth was ruined by it.”

Glenn says the fact that true things ushered in destruction, including the great flood, is the “weirdest part of the story” for him.

“The crime was the calendar. It arrived early. It arrived unearned from a source with no interest in what it would do to the people who received it. The giants in the story are simply the result — something enormous born of that union with an appetite that the earth couldn’t feed,” he says.

The Tower of Babel followed the same trajectory and was also thwarted by God, he notes.

But Enoch, according to Latter-day Saint scripture, converted a people who became so unified — “of one heart and one mind,” with “no poor among them” — that God named them Zion and took their city into heaven, Glenn explains.

“Same architecture, opposite foundation. One is built out of what people became, and the other is built out of what some people could engineer,” he says.

He wonders if artificial intelligence is a modern-day Mount Hermon or Babel.

“We’re being sold the Tower of Babel — a merged intelligence, a unified mind, every problem solved by consolidation. It’s Enoch’s city offered without the price that Enoch had to pay,” he says.

If the world of the Nephilim and the city of Babel were both destroyed for grabbing power before they had the character to hold it, what’s to stop it from happening a third time, he wonders.

To answer that question, Glenn looks at God’s warning to mankind in Malachi 4:5-6: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

“He’s threatening a repeat,” says Glenn.

The verse names only one stay of judgment: the hearts of fathers and children — not rulers, walls, laws, or restricted knowledge.

“The [Watcher] school on that mountain was teaching knowledge, and it was unearned. … Fatherhood without fatherhood, capability handed down by beings with no stake in the children receiving it — no relationship, no formation, nothing owed, just given — give a child a blade and no reason to sheath it, and you have manufactured a giant,” says Glenn.

He points out how human flight and nuclear fission were discovered at the same time by people with no connection to each other. That’s not coincidence but divine timing, Glenn argues. “We earned [that knowledge]. We controlled it. We’ve been responsible with it.”

But artificial intelligence, he says, is not following that same trajectory. It’s ushering in knowledge at a rate strikingly similar to the empires built by the ancient Watchers and the builders of Babel.

Enoch and Elijah, Glenn notes, are the only two men in the Bible who do not die — and that’s not a coincidence in his opinion. Enoch is “the man sent to deliver the verdict on the first bad transfer of knowledge,” he says, and Elijah is the man who will be “sent back before the last day to repair fathers and children, which may be now — another time of bad transfer of knowledge.”

“The danger in new technology is almost never the technology; it’s the interval between when a capability arrives and when the character to hold it arrives,” he says.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Glenn wonders if the technology was “received or seized.”

While he has no hopes that AI development will slow down before it reaches dystopian potential, he does have hope in people.

“Turn your heart to the Father and to the children,” he pleads.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Artificial intelligence, Book of enoch, Glenn beck, Modern technology, Nephilim, Blazetv show 

Horror has always had a respectability problem. But filmmakers eventually discovered a useful trick for getting around it: Make the monster a metaphor.

The creature in “The Babadook” isn’t merely a boogeyman under the bed; it’s grief and depression. “It Follows” has been read as everything from an allegory for sexually transmitted disease to a story about sexual trauma and mortality. Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” turned body-snatching horror into an examination of race and liberal paternalism. Even “Hereditary,” which gives us actual demons, comes wrapped in grief, mental illness, and inherited trauma.

Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie.

Nothing wrong with that. Horror works best when it gives physical form to intangible fears.

But the metaphor also provides a convenient escape hatch. Whatever battles of principalities and powers we see on screen, we know the real horror lurks in our minds — best addressed with modern, morally neutral techniques like therapy.

Asking us to believe in monsters that stand for nothing more than themselves — real monsters, in other words — takes us uncomfortably close to an idea Christianity has maintained for 2,000 years: Supernatural evil actually exists.

It’s no wonder filmmakers who want their commercial success with a side of art-house respectability don’t often go there.

But there might be another reason as well. When filmmakers do attempt to depict the devil, he has a curious way of making himself known through strange disruptions to the production: fires, equipment failures, injuries, even death.

Almost as if he would prefer to be dismissed as a fairy tale.

Here are six movies that took supernatural evil seriously — and the strange things that happened while people were making them.

1. ‘The Exorcist’

If any movie were ever cursed, surely it was “The Exorcist.” William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel has plenty to say about a broken family, psychiatric medicine, and a priest suffering a crisis of faith.

But when Regan MacNeil starts speaking in strange voices and contorting her body, “The Exorcist” is blunt about the cause: demonic possession. Friedkin brings an almost documentary realism to material that might otherwise have been safely dismissed as gothic fantasy. Audiences fainted, vomited, and fled theaters. The movie became a cultural phenomenon.

And if the stories that emerged from the production are to be believed, audiences weren’t the only ones disturbed by its unflinching treatment of evil. The trouble started before Friedkin had even begun shooting in Iraq. A statue of Pazuzu, the demon who possesses Regan, had been built in Burbank and shipped to Mosul for the movie’s opening sequence. It never arrived.

Somehow, Pazuzu ended up in Denmark. “It was lost,” Friedkin recalled years later. Shooting in Iraq was delayed for weeks while somebody presumably worked out how to get the demon to the right country.

Things got worse back in New York. In the early hours of the morning, a fire tore through the set of the MacNeil house at 20th Century Fox’s studio on West 54th Street.

“The production manager called me at 4 a.m. and said, ‘Don’t bother to come to work today,’” Friedkin later recalled.

“I said, ‘Why? Am I fired?’”

No. The set had burned to the ground. Well, most of it had. Regan’s bedroom — the room where Friedkin was filming the exorcism — survived. Investigators never established what caused the fire. Friedkin later blamed a pigeon that had flown into a light box.

Production shut down for six weeks while the set was rebuilt. Then Ellen Burstyn hurt her back. During the scene in which Regan strikes her mother, a stuntman attached to a wire was supposed to yank Burstyn backward. After several takes, Burstyn told Friedkin that the stuntman was pulling too hard.

“Well, it has to look real,” she remembered him replying.

On the next take, she landed hard on her coccyx and screamed in genuine pain. Friedkin kept the camera rolling. Burstyn later summed up her relationship with the director rather neatly: “He was always great with me. Except when he permanently injured my spine.”

Burstyn went on to do many more films. Others in the cast weren’t so lucky. Jack MacGowran, who plays director Burke Dennings — murdered by the possessed Regan in the movie — finished his work and died of influenza at 54. Vasiliki Maliaros, who played Father Karras’ mother, also died during production.

In the 1998 BBC documentary “The Fear of God: 25 Years of ‘The Exorcist,'” Burstyn remembers others connected with the production dying as well: the newborn child of an assistant cameraman, the man responsible for refrigerating the bedroom set, and a night watchman.

None died in accidents while shooting the movie. But there were enough deaths, injuries, delays, and other mishaps that people began talking about a curse.

The actor playing the conflicted priest and trained psychiatrist who attempts to save Regan got a more explicit warning. In “The Fear of God,” Jason Miller recalls eating and studying his lines at the Jesuit residence while filming at Georgetown. One day, an elderly priest handed him a medal of the Blessed Virgin and asked whether Miller had ever heard of “intervention.”

“If you do anything on the devil, anything at all on the devil to reveal him as the trickster that he is,” Miller remembered the priest telling him, “he will seek retribution against you, or he will even try to stop what you’re trying to do to unmask him.”

The priest told Miller the medal would protect him.

About three days later, Miller was walking through the Jesuit residence on his way to dinner when something caught his eye in one of the side rooms. He went back and looked, only to see the old priest lying there in a casket.

By 1974, Castle of Frankenstein magazine was running an article with the wonderfully unsubtle headline The Curse That Hangs Over “The Exorcist.”

Eventually, Friedkin called the Rev. Thomas Bermingham, the Jesuit priest serving as a technical adviser to the movie.

“Would you come down and exorcise the set?” Bermingham recalled Friedkin asking in “The Fear of God.”

Bermingham refused. “I don’t want to increase anxiety or anything like that,” he told him. But Bermingham wasn’t laughing off the possibility that they had gotten themselves into something strange.

“There was definitely a feeling that it could happen,” he says in the documentary. “We were playing around with something. I even felt it. I felt we were playing around with something I shouldn’t be playing around with.”

He blessed the production instead, just in case.

2. ‘The Passion of the Christ’

Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ” isn’t a horror movie, although anyone who has sat through the scourging scene might dispute the point.

But neither is it the kind of “faith-based” film that confines the battle between sin and redemption to the dialogue. Gibson keeps the personification of evil in the frame.

Satan stalks Jesus through Gethsemane. He moves through the crowd as Christ suffers. During the scourging, he carries a grotesque child. After Christ’s death, Gibson cuts away from Calvary to show Satan defeated. On screen, Satan can only howl in rage. What happened off screen suggests a more active opposition.

Jim Caviezel, the man playing Jesus, was struck by lightning. Producer Steve McEveety recalled seeing the bolt hit him from roughly 100 feet away. Assistant director Jan Michelini was struck too.

Which would already make for a pretty good story, except Michelini had reportedly been struck by lightning once before during the same production.

Caviezel later joked that the strike lit him up “like a Christmas tree.” Contemporary reports said neither man was seriously injured.

Caviezel had previously turned down three opportunities to play Jesus. He accepted Gibson’s offer because, he later said, he sensed the director’s commitment to telling the Passion story “without restraint.”

Be careful what you pray for.

The lightning strike was far from the only hardship. Caviezel separated his shoulder carrying the cross. He developed hypothermia while hanging nearly naked in bitter winds during the crucifixion scenes, followed by pneumonia and a lung infection. The elaborate makeup left his skin raw. During the scourging, one of the actors missed the protective board behind Caviezel and struck him across the back hard enough to tear the skin.

At one particularly miserable point, hanging on the cross in the cold, Caviezel remembered crying out to God:

“So you don’t want this movie to be made?”

Caviezel kept making it anyway; appropriately enough, the suffering itself began to serve the movie. He received Communion daily, prayed the rosary during the long hours in makeup, and went to confession during production.

Caviezel also came to see his suffering as part of what made the performance work. Recreating the crucifixion on a comfortable soundstage, he later said, would have lost some of its “effect and reality.” The cold, the injuries, the exhaustion — things that might have stopped another production — became part of the movie Gibson and Caviezel had set out to make.

3. ‘The Omen’

If “The Exorcist” created the cursed-movie template, “The Omen” perfected it.

The 1976 movie is even less interested in metaphor. The little boy at the center of the story really is the Antichrist, and the people who figure this out have a nasty habit of dying before they can do much about it.

Bob Munger, the advertising executive who helped originate the premise, later recalled warning producer Harvey Bernhard about making the movie in the first place.

“If the devil’s greatest single weapon is to be invisible,” Munger told him, “and you’re going to do something which takes away his invisibility to millions of people, he won’t want that to happen.”

Bernhard eventually became convinced Munger was right. “The devil was at work,” he said years later.

The stories began before audiences had even seen the movie. In April 1976, New York magazine was already reporting that Gregory Peck’s plane had been struck by lightning while he was traveling to London to make “The Omen.” The magazine named screenwriter David Seltzer and director Richard Donner in connection with troubled flights as well. Executive producer Mace Neufeld later recalled a lightning strike on his own flight. The surviving accounts make it difficult to say exactly how many people were struck by lightning, which is not ordinarily a problem a movie production has.

The close calls continued once Neufeld reached London. He later recalled walking out of his London hotel with his wife when a bomb exploded about a block and a half away. The couple also had reservations at Scott’s, the Mayfair restaurant bombed by the IRA in November 1975. Both bombings are real; Neufeld recounted his brushes with them in the 2020 documentary series “Cursed Films.”

For one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Damien visits a safari park and the baboons go berserk at the sight of him. The sequence was filmed at Windsor Safari Park. During the production period, 22-year-old keeper Sidney Bamford was killed there by a tiger. Later curse accounts claimed the keeper died immediately after the filmmakers shot the sequence. Contemporary reports establish the tiger attack, but not that timing or that Bamford personally worked with the movie.

And then there was the airplane the filmmakers didn’t take. Donner later recalled that the production had intended to use an aircraft for aerial filming, only to lose it at the last minute when it was reassigned to Chinese customers. According to the story, the plane subsequently crashed.

There was a remarkably similar accident during production. On November 20, 1975, a Hawker Siddeley executive jet carrying a Chinese delegation took off from Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, flew into a flock of lapwings, lost power in both engines, overran the runway, and struck a passing car.

All nine people aboard the aircraft survived. All six people in the car died.

The timing and the Chinese passengers make it a plausible match for the crash Donner remembered. What the investigation doesn’t establish is that “The Omen” crew had ever booked that particular plane.

The strangest story came after “The Omen” was finished.

Special-effects designer John Richardson had helped create one of the movie’s most gruesome deaths. Photographer Keith Jennings is standing by the side of a road when a sheet of glass slides from a truck and takes off his head. Richardson’s effects team accomplished it with a rigged dummy and replica of actor David Warner’s head.

In August 1976, Richardson was in the Netherlands working on “A Bridge Too Far” when he was involved in a car crash. Richardson survived. Sculptor Liz Moore, traveling with him, did not. Biographical accounts date her death to August 13.

Over the years, the accident acquired two details that made it irresistible to anyone writing about the curse of “The Omen.” Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie. And Richardson was said to have emerged from the wreck near a road sign reading:

Ommen — 66.6 km.

The crash and Moore’s death are well attested. Those two grisly details are not. No contemporary report or official record located in our research establishes that Moore was decapitated. Richardson did later recall a roadside marker involving sixes and a road leading toward Ommen, but the famous “Ommen — 66.6 km” sign has never been independently verified.

By then it hardly mattered. “The Omen” had acquired a curse almost as elaborate as its screenplay.

Fox eventually made the legend part of the product. By 2000, the DVD included a featurette called “Curse or Coincidence?”

4. ‘The Possession’

The 2012 movie “The Possession” had something most demon movies don’t: a supposedly genuine haunted object behind it.

The “dybbuk box” was an old wine cabinet whose strange history had first attracted widespread attention on eBay. Kevin Mannis supplied a terrifying history involving a Holocaust survivor and a malicious Jewish spirit. Owners supposedly experienced nightmares, illnesses, and other misfortunes.

The story spread online, made its way into newspapers, and eventually became the inspiration for a Hollywood movie.

Then odd things started happening on the movie.

Director Ole Bornedal recalled production lights exploding even though they weren’t switched on. About a week after filming ended, he said, a warehouse containing props from the movie burned; Bornedal said he never learned what caused the fire.

Years later came a fairly devastating blow to the legend: Mannis admitted that he had invented the box’s elaborate backstory. So much for the haunted box.

Except Mannis inventing a story about a wine cabinet doesn’t explain why Bornedal said lights exploded. It doesn’t explain the warehouse fire either.

Bornedal himself offered the best skeptical argument. “Would we have noticed if this had been a ‘Love Story’? Perhaps not.”

RELATED: Inside the mind of a Catholic exorcist: Fr. Chad Ripperger talks shop with Shawn Ryan

Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT/AFP via Getty Images

5. ‘The Omen’ (2006)

Thirty years after the original “Omen,” Fox decided to make it again, if only to take advantage of a uniquely demonic release date: June 6, 2006, or 6/6/06.

Director John Moore had been raised Catholic, and maybe that’s why he found the strange happenings that befell him so unnerving.

Two days of footage involving the discovery of Damien’s 666 birthmark were destroyed. Moore received an airfare costing exactly $666. And a promotional videotape apparently wound up overwritten with ESPN footage even though, Moore said, the machine wasn’t capable of recording.

Moore was disturbed enough to wonder whether making the movie might offend God. Eventually, he reasoned that a movie acknowledging the existence of evil necessarily acknowledged the existence of good.

As for Fox, the curse was great publicity. Although perhaps even the box-office bean counters were a little shaken by the movie’s first-day box office:

$12,633,666.

What were the odds? Pretty good, as it turned out. Fox distribution executive Bruce Snyder admitted that the studio had adjusted the reported estimate to give it the demonic final digits.

“We were having a little fun,” he said.

6. ‘The Deliverance’

By the time Lee Daniels made “The Deliverance” in 2024, the old stories had become part of Hollywood folklore.

Daniels had read about what supposedly happened during the making of “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist.” His Episcopalian mother warned him about making a movie dealing with demonic evil.

“She was just like, ‘You are a portal. You work from a place of groundedness, and your soul is open, and I don’t want anything bad happening to you,’” Daniels recalled.

He took precautions. The production brought in an ordained Christian who conducted deliverances on set. Daniels also instituted daily prayer circles.

“We prayed every day,” he said.

Netflix HR reminded him that Christian prayer couldn’t be mandatory. Daniels told anyone who didn’t want to participate that they were free to leave.

“There were a few that left, but for the most part, most of them wanted to be covered by the blood of Jesus,” he recalled. “They knew what was up.”

The precautions didn’t prevent “The Deliverance” from acquiring a curse story of its own.

Daniels’ sister had appeared in every movie he made as his “good luck charm.” For “The Deliverance,” she appeared in a scene with Glenn Close involving chemotherapy.

Two days later, Daniels said, his sister was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“My dog died on set,” he added.

Mo’Nique had a more explicable brush with the supposed curse. While filming an outdoor scene involving a demon, Mo’Nique said material being blown around the set made it difficult for her to breathe. Afterward, she was hospitalized with an enlarged thyroid.

“It was a lot of things happening with ‘The Deliverance,’” she recalled.

None of this proves that anything supernatural was happening. Mo’Nique herself described a perfectly physical reason for becoming ill. Cancer diagnoses and dead dogs require no demonic explanation.

But half a century after “The Exorcist,” Daniels went into another movie about demonic possession worried enough about the old curse stories to pray over his set every day and bring in someone to perform deliverances.

Then his sister got cancer, his dog died, and one of his stars wound up in the hospital.

​Entertainment, Cursed films, Movies, The exorcist, The passion of the christ, Jim caviezel, Mel gibson, The omen, Culture, Satan, Evil, Christianity, Faith