And this brings us to our final story for this conversation, the very gothic fall of the House of Usher.

I will just start – I will leave it to Steve to talk all things literary.

This is his world.

I love teaching the story.

I love it for a host of reasons because, again, my students seldom make heads or tails of it.

A lot of them have read it in high school.

Now I get them three or four years later, and they – They come in with these weird, accreted ideas of what the story is supposed to be about, but drawing them more deeply into it, and I foreground the poem.

Steve,

So what do you look for when you're watching as a Catholic priest?

I became a Jesuit because I wanted to be a missionary.

and realized early on i'm kind of an indoor jesuit i really don't do well with the sun and i wasn't extraordinarily gifted with picking up languages but i decided at an early stage getting to know my students when i was teaching in detroit that i could be a missionary of the imagination And that meant that I could find the terrains that my students enjoyed and were interested in, and I could venture into those places in a way that allowed me to preach and unpack the message of the gospel for them in a way that they saw as credible, as liberating and empowering.

So when I watch a horror movie, I'm looking for films, particularly that are going to capture a wide audience's imagination, that are going to have cultural salience and relevance that will enter the conversation.

If you wear a green and red sweater, a good number of children of the 80s will know, oh, that's Freddy Krueger.

If you walk around with a hockey mask, no one thinks you're Wayne Gretzky.

They think you're Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers.

The book, The Exorcist, that the movie is based off of.

[laughs]

You know, this is the...

You, when, when you think the, the...

One of the more philosophically interesting things about this movie is that it, the importance of language and symbol.

It is...

An animal, no animal could ever have, other than humans, could have put together the radio report and the experiences that the person is having to say, "Oh my goodness, I'm putting the evidence together now that these people are k- maniacal cannibals." Humans are...

Part of what makes us distinct, what makes us distinct, is we are linguistic animals.

[laughs]