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Thomas Hibbs Compares the Exorcist to TPOTC

...The Exorcist, [is] a film that juxtaposes, on the one hand, a modern, enlightenment faith in the ability of science to explain and treat human afflictions, even evil, and, on the other, a primitive, religious world in which mysterious and super-human cosmic powers are at odds. Gibson has raised the eyebrows of many, including Diane Sawyer, for suggesting, "There are these realms colliding," a statement that is an affront to our comfortable Enlightenment confidence that we have transcended religion as a comprehensive conception of reality. The Exorcist and in its own way The Passion stand at the very center of the modern tradition of horror, a tradition that arises as a reaction to the excessive claims of the Enlightenment. Against the Enlightenment's faith in progress and scientific explanation, horror reasserts the primacy of primordial guilt and expiation. The horror genre not only insists on the limits to the modern project of mastering nature, but it also suggests that an overweening desire to know and control may give rise to terrors never imagined by modern rationalists...The deeply divided opinions of the film may have something to do with a gap between those who, in Jeffersonian fashion, see a set of Enlightenment teachings as the core of what's worth preserving in the Gospel and those who see the bloody sacrifice of the God-man as its core.