I hand't really thought of this, but it is really true.
I am willing to bet that more people are scared of evangelical christian cults more than satanic cults

I don’t find the occult or satanism scary. But the people involved can be. A lot of the secret societies are fascist adjacent or sympathetic.

I mean you say that but once I wore socks with a ouija board patrern to work and several of my coworkers had legit panic. I had two anonymous complaints go through HR. My socks weren't even fully visible and they're socks. They were still saying things like "don't come around me with that evil devil shit."

One coworker held up her crucifix and everything. Americans are like this.

How is a pentagram scary?

It's super pointy and could poke you good

Traditional Satan depictions aren't scary because nobody is scared of a middle-aged red guy with a goatee anymore. That's stuff that might have worked on my grandmother in her remote Italian village 80 years ago but, not anymore.

THESE WITCHES ARE GOING TO SUMMON SATAN TO DESTROY THE CHRISTIAN WOOORRLLLDDDD

I never really understood why they shove it in either. It isn’t scary and kills the horror because at times the movie was pretty believable until the satanic stuff came out. Seeing little girls with superpowers immediately takes me out of whatever immersion had been built up.

Putting me with an average evangelical would scare me way harder than a Satanist. I've met a few and they're pretty chill, it seems like a fashion statement more than a religion.

It's honestly true.

Evangelicals? Probably.

But everyone else?

Not so much.

(Also, I protest that this isn't a bad post; it's just not.)

I thought the Exorcist really suffered from this. Most of the fear comes from the symbols and satanic themes being taboo. If you don't really care about it then it becomes much less scary. I still think that creepy satanic cults can be scary though, the VVitch, Hereditary, and Anthrum all used the tropes successfully. I don't like the found footage gimmick in Anthrum but you gotta admit that hillbillies with a rusty, decrepit Baphomet figure burning a child alive in a satanic bronze-bull-esque contraption is pretty scary.

I think demon-possession stuff can be scary, or at least upsetting. Not so much when horror comes from a possessed person like in The Exorcist, but more like when demons are toying with the minds of mortals, making them unable to trust their own senses. There's a pretty-good movie no one saw called The Dark and the Wicked (not the greatest title imo) that does this pretty well. Is this person you just met real or was it actually the demon? Was it really them when you first met, and the demon the second time you met? Was it them or was it the demon when you spoke to them on the phone? Or did the demon make you think you were speaking to that person while you were actually speaking to someone else entirely? Were the words coming out of your mouth the same words you heard yourself say? Were you even speaking to anyone at all? It works because the horror comes less from a spooky monster who will kill you, and more from an inability to distinguish reality from illusion.

In a similar vein, one thing I liked about Hereditary was how the demonic forces were establishing "rules" for the protagonist just to fuck with her. I love the bit when she tries to burn the journal and is set on fire herself. So later on when she tries to get her husband to burn the journal, expecting to burn to death along with it, you're like "it's going to turn out that whoever burns the journal also burns, so the husband is going to die." But when he won't do it she throws the journal in the fire in frustration and the husband goes up in flames anyway. There are no rules to this. There were never any rules. The demon was just playing with its food.

So yeah, it's my opinion that if satanic stuff can tap into fears about losing control and losing your mind, it can be pretty scary.

My brain kinda shuts off when I see any religious storytelling. When I enjoy something where the root of the problem is "demons" or whatever, I enjoy it in spite of that. Midnight Mass was good, for example. I mean I know there weren't actual demons in that, but they spend a lot of time discussing theology and usually that stuff bores me and just makes me kinda uncomfortable.

That specific group would find the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Netflix series to be the scariest thing in the world, I imagine.

I mean it is scary when they're physically manifesting and killing people or turning into physical projections of their sins or something, and the aesthetic sets a certain mood

Like I heard the new Hellraiser sucks ass but I have seen clips of the fucked up guy with the glasses auditing people's sins on a weird typewriter machine and it's kinda cool

something tells me you don't actually speak for most people