The (Ratings) Triumph of Evil

Evil has appeal. The CBS/Paramount series, despite setbacks due to the Writers’ Guild of America strike in May of 2023, went ahead with a shooting a fourth season (Abdulbaki 2023), scheduled to be released in May of 2024 (Singh 2024). Raters on the Rotten Tomatoes website mention its skilled straddling of the horror and comedy genres while also functioning as a procedural as the main sources of enjoyment. Critics also cite the investigations and the “faith-versus-science” dichotomy as some of the intellectual pleasures of the show (Rotten Tomatoes 2022). The success of the series makes it an excellent object of consideration of how the (apparently) competing claims of religion and science regarding unexplained phenomena are portrayed in popular culture.

The differing perspectives and personalities in the series are fundamental to its tensions and humor. Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist; David Acosta, an ex-journalist training to be a priest; and Ben Shakir, a self-taught science and technology expert, are hired by the Catholic Church to assess reported paranormal phenomena, often of an apparently religious nature.

The definition of “paranormal” that religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal (2010) provides will be helpful here: “The sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or ‘science mysticism’ register.” For Kripal, the sacred is not a religious category—or at least not an exclusively religious category; instead, he takes the definition of the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto: “A particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment” (Kripal 2010). The distinction between the religious and the paranormal is, by this definition, merely one of conventions, of attempted explanations for unexplained phenomena, the first explaining such phenomena as manifestations of divine beings, the second explaining them without involving any concept of divinity. For Kripal (and for my argument), both the religious and the paranormal are part of the larger category Rudolf Otto defines as “palpable energy,” as a kind of “sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object … the mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” the mystical that is both terrifying and fascinating (Kripal 2022, 9).

The three investigators in Evil, however, are largely trapped within either religious or materialist explanations of reality, even if they find themselves torn between them at times. Their respective faith backgrounds—a former Catholic turned agnostic, a previously lapsed Catholic turned seminarian, and a Muslim turned atheist—inform their responses to the phenomena they investigate and serve as fodder for conflicts among themselves and with the representatives of the Catholic Church. The series, because of the demands of the genre and the limits of popular understandings of what science and religion are, circles the question of how to responsibly face these phenomena while at the same time implying the possibility of a more courageous, undogmatic, and responsible approach to the paranormal through its minor characters.

Evil Plots (or Plotlines)

Evil provides a tour through the principal categories of paranormal phenomena that have been reported on or talked about popularly over the last seventy or so years, such as miracles associated with religious figures or practices, unidentified aerial phenomena, and phenomena associated with dreaming. The show, despite its moments of humor, most clearly fits with the horror genre. One dictionary of literary terms defines the horror story—originally defined only as a literary genre, but which can be extended to visual genres as well—as “a fictional narrative … which shocks or even frightens the reader, and/or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing” (Cuddon 1991). The show’s animated interludes and introductions, such as pop-up books that purport to explain the different types of demons, are colorful and designed to engage with both humor and fear. Additionally, all three characters suffer from vivid and usually traumatic dreams, visions, and/or hallucinations, with the characters and the spectator both struggling to decide whether what is being perceived is “real.” The characters try different strategies and techniques to deal with these traumatic experiences, revealing their individual parameters of belief. These experiences are either not shared with anyone or done so only reluctantly, and the characters often resort to material or medical explanations for them, even though their actions do not neatly fit into a purely materialist logic.

Starting in the first episode, Kristen, the psychologist, notices signs of demonic infestation in her life. Throughout the series, she continually clings to material explanations for what she sees and hears, making emergency appointments with her therapist because the antipsychotic medications he prescribes seem to be making the “hallucinations” worse. At the same time, her instincts make her less than a dogmatic materialist. In the third season (season 3, episode 3, “The Demon of Sex”), the monsignor orders an investigation into whether Sister Andrea, a nun who is an experienced warrior in dealing with demons, is mentally ill. Kristen is asked by the monsignor if she has ever seen Sister Andrea talking to people who are not there or referring to them. Kristen lies and says no, even though she does not put her faith in the nun’s ability to resolve the problems Kristen tries to resolve through the application of psychology (in this case, counseling a newly married couple with sexual problems). In a sense, Kristen is more objective and rational about Sister Andrea than she is about herself; she recognizes that just because someone claims to witness phenomena others do not does not mean that they have a distorted relationship to reality or that they are unable to contribute to society. Kristen also demonstrates her own less than dogmatic relationship to her profession when she violates her code of professional ethics to save a teenage boy from being tried for his crime as an adult. She gets Leland, a clearly creepy and evil man with demonic ties, to admit he is providing expert testimony to get the boy into the prison system so that he will become a hardened criminal and commit more evil acts (season 1, episode 3, “3 Stars”). She records this conversation, but then finds that the critical part of the recording is mysteriously comprised of static. She gets Ben to create a deepfake of the recording, using Leland’s voice to put Leland’s actual words into his mouth. She then uses this recording to disqualify his expert testimony in a pretrial hearing. Both Ben and Kristen do this in clear violation of the ethics that guide their professional lives, while also not affirming that Leland benefits from demonic powers. At the least, they do not accept the ramifications of that idea, although they both instinctively accept that he is evil, and incorrigibly so, and so must be stopped by any means necessary.

The phenomena the team investigates, and the responses of characters to their individual experiences, are often inspired by historical investigations and techniques taught by real-life practitioners. In season 3, episode 1 (“The Demon of Death”), the team observes as a well-funded group of researchers unconnected to the church attempts to reproduce a 1907 experiment (although this experiment is not mentioned) by Dr. Duncan McDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, which attempted to determine the weight of the soul. This experiment led to the popular notion, further popularized by the 2003 feature film 21 Grams, that the soul’s weight can be detected by comparing the weight of a live human body with its weight immediately after death.

An attempt to reproduce this experiment was done in 2001 by L. E. Hollander, with results published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration; criticisms and countercriticisms followed, showing that it seems difficult to demonstrate conclusively whether any particular experiment was sloppy in its methodology or technical execution, even if “proof” of the soul as measured by a scale remains elusive (Masayoshi 2009). The researchers in the show, whose funding is not discussed, possess a gleaming lab inside a warehouse, full of cameras and sensors, with a highly sensitive electronic scale, and a lipped bed to contain any fluids released for a moribund human subject to lie on. This is a clearly idealized version of the original experiment, both in terms of resources and because it uses human subjects rather than animals.

Other phenomena investigated in the show have more recent origins. In season 2, episode 8 (“B is for Brain”), the team visits the lab of a researcher who has invented a magnetic-wave helmet that produces spiritual visions in human subjects. This appears inspired by the so-called “God Helmet,” a device invented by Stanley Koren and the trained neurologist and self-described researcher in “neurotheology” Michael Persinger in the late 1990s. The device produces a very weak magnetic field around the user’s head. Persinger, who has put forth the theory that geographical areas of high electromagnetism, such as Fátima in Portugal, produce higher numbers of paranormal and religious experiences, has claimed that this helmet can produce spiritual and even out of body experiences in human subjects. It received considerable press when the scientist and self-declared atheist Richard Dawkins agreed to use it as part of the BBC documentary series “Horizon” in April of 2014 (British Broadcasting Corporation 2014); Dr. Dawkins claimed to have no experience out of the ordinary during his session.

While the team investigations provide drama principally because of the interactions among the characters, most of the drama comes from the attempts by characters to deal with their individual experiences. Tension results as the viewer waits to see whether any dissolution of the fear, or at least further knowledge about the characters’ extraordinary experiences, is possible. The characters’ attempts to deal with frightening dreams or visions often draw on modified and/or simplified knowledge or techniques from real-life research. Kristen, when tormented at night by a demon who calls himself George, draws on her knowledge of the brain. She writes the phrase “Are You Dreaming?” on a piece of paper and tapes it to the ceiling above her bed (season 1, episode 1). During these nighttime visions, she is paralyzed, save for the ability to move her eyes or speak, a condition mostly consistent with the natural state of sleep paralysis. She notes that during sleep, there is less activity in Wernicke’s area, a region of the brain apparently associated with written language. When George returns the next night, she looks at the piece of paper, which appears distorted and illegible, cueing her that she is dreaming and enabling her to banish George, at least temporarily.

Several episodes later (season 1, episode 6, “Let x = 9”), Kristen gets a further suggestion from her psychiatrist, Dr. Boggs, about how to deal with these “nightmares.” He tells her to put a blue thread around her wrist and set an hourly alarm on her phone during the day. When the alarm goes off, she is to look at her wrist for the thread. This will train her mind to look at her wrist during dreams, and if she does not see the thread, she will then know she is dreaming and can take control of the dream, banishing any threatening figures. Similar techniques to these can be found in books by lucid dreaming practitioners, such as Robert Waggoner’s Lucid Dreaming, and in lucid dreaming workshops given by Steven LaBerge. Later, Kristen passes somewhat similar suggestions on to Ben, who manages to dispatch a demon named Abby from his dreams (again, at least temporarily).

The material the team is called upon to investigate varies in its real-life inspirations. Some, like those already given, spring from real-life research; others come from hagiography, such as the body of a monk that has inexplicably not decayed, and reported miracles done by a deceased nun being considered for sainthood. Others are clearly more popular in origin, like dares adolescents might follow, such as pressing the numbers in an elevator in a sequence said to take the elevator car to hell (season 2 episode 4, “E is for Elevator”), an online video that provokes demonic possession in those who view it (season 3, episode 6, “The Demon of Algorithms”), and a stock purchase tip that both enriches and curses those who follow it (season 3, episode 9, “The Demon of Money”). A demonic presence in a multiplayer virtual reality game serves as a kind of twenty-first century updating to legends of spirits appearing in mirrors (season 1, episode 4, “Rose390”). These popular or folkloric practices provide to the team, at least for a time, the potential for replication, something the investigations of one-time phenomena do not allow. From the standpoint of a viewer who might wish for more explanations of these phenomena, however, the lack of follow-up in the investigations can be frustrating, something the series appears to recognize and attempts to work into the plot.

“Cultural Derealization” and Explaining (Away) Anomalous Experiences

It is not only the often-frightening nature of the phenomena the team encounters, such as apparent threats to their physical wellbeing or that of their loved ones, that shakes them. At least as frightening to them is that these phenomena have no place within their worldviews. In season 3, episode 3 (“The Demon of Sex”), Ben has been acting depressed. Kristen’s four school-age daughters say among themselves that Ben is “culturally derealized.”

Putting aside the question of schoolchildren using this term, we can see that there may be something to “derealization.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR), in the part referring to derealization, as a patient’s environment being perceived as “dreamlike, empty, lifeless, or visually distorted” (Murphy 2023). The qualifier “cultural” suggests that Ben suffers not from a mental illness per se but rather a dissonance between his experience and his cultural worldview. Moreover, continuing with the definition Rachel Murphy (2023) provides, patients with this disorder are “acutely aware of their problem. One stated, ‘I was not crazy because I knew that something was not right from the very moment that it became not right.’” Ben certainly has this awareness; Kristen’s daughters define “cultural derealization” for the viewer by saying that Ben has seen so many weird things that he cannot accept how strange reality really is.

Ben’s response to this derealization will be to cling to his materialist worldview. Indeed, he shows an especially strong tendency towards explanations of some of the phenomena the team has experienced that seem designed to end discussion rather than provide a deep or accurate understanding of these phenomena. One example is paranormal in nature, and the other involves potential alien spacecraft; both require some background.

Explaining (Away) Paranormal Phenomena

First, the paranormal incident: one morning (in season 2, episode 1, “N is for Night Terrors”), Kristen takes a rosary with crucifix on it out of a bathroom drawer, holding it by the beads. She hesitates a moment, then sets the crucifix in her hand. After nothing unusual happens, she breathes a sigh of relief, but an instant later, the crucifix causes a burn on the palm of her hand. She applies aloe vera to the burn and wraps a bandage around it. She then puts the rosary and crucifix in a plastic sandwich bag and takes it to work.

At a team meeting later that morning, Ben sees the bandage on her hand. He asks her about it, and she calls it a “rash.” She asks for his help to figure out the cause and gives him the sandwich bag with the crucifix for him to analyze, but when he asks to see her hand, she says no. He asks her about the blood he saw on her leg the day before, and about the fact that Orson LeRoux, a serial killer who was released on a technicality, turned up dead that same day. Ben wonders aloud if there is anything he needs to be concerned about, and she says no.

In fact, Kristen was responsible for LeRoux’s death. After she conducted a psychological evaluation of LeRoux, he told her he would kill her school-age daughters. LeRoux seems under demonic influence, in part because he correctly tells Kristen she is being tormented by dreams of the demon, George. Later, LeRoux is released on a technicality. Believing she has no other option, and seized by fear and rage, Kristen walks the short distance to his home carrying a serrated ice pick for mountain climbing that she owns. She warns LeRoux to stay away from her family or she will kill him. He replies that he is going to call the police, and when they pick her up, he will go to her house and kill her daughters. He turns his back to go to the phone and she strikes him repeatedly with the ice axe, killing him and leaving some drops of blood on her leg, which Ben notices later after she returns home.

That the murder weapon was so unusual makes her worry that analysis of the wounds will lead the police to her. She goes to her psychiatrist, and after double-checking with him about confidentiality, confesses this murder to him. She tells Dr. Boggs that before she went to LeRoux’s, she made sure LeRoux’s wife would have an alibi, so that his wife would not be blamed for his death. She further says she does not feel remorse for the murder. Boggs then asks why she is revealing it, and she mentions the effect of the crucifix, which she again calls a “rash.” Boggs suggests that even though Kristen claims not to be bothered by what she has done, her body is reacting, expressing her guilt psychosomatically at this religious symbol associated with her Catholic upbringing.

Later, Ben shows up at Kristen’s house with an explanation: the crucifix is cobalt. He says cobalt can cause a rash, but more importantly, it is a great conductor; if it heats up only a few degrees, it can cause a burn. She shows him the bathroom drawer. Ben says one of Kristen’s daughters must have used the curling iron there, that it had been cooling down in the drawer and that must have caused the burn, saying “cobalt doesn’t cause a rash on its own,” contradicting what he said earlier. He pushes this explanation hard, and she appears to accept it.

Both Ben and Kristen have resistances to the different explanations for the burn. Kristen does not want to accept the guilt she feels at causing LeRoux’s death. There are obvious objections to Ben’s theory she could raise: the crucifix only began to burn her after being in her hand painlessly for several seconds, and the crucifix, which was apparently hot enough to burn her skin, had no effect on a flimsy plastic sandwich bag just seconds later. For his part, Ben settles on an explanation that both discounts any paranormal cause and also casts no suspicion on Kristen, with whom he enjoys a friendship and to whose daughters he has become a sort of an honorary uncle. His explanation lets him keep his materialist worldview and his regard for his friend, undermining any notion of him as a disinterested “scientific” observer. The explanation of the psychiatrist, who would be considered the most objective observer of the three, seems the most fitting, although Boggs believes Kristen’s hand has a rash, not a burn, and he is unaware of the details about the delay in the burn starting and the lack of any effect on the plastic bags, which none of the characters mentioned aloud.

Explaining (Away) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Ben’s skepticism of religious or spiritually related phenomena fit with his position as an atheist, but his selective “rational” and “scientific” explanations extend to other phenomena as well. Atheism by itself should prove no obstacle to belief in UFOs, specifically the acceptance of the existence of air or spacecraft that demonstrate capabilities far beyond current human technology, but Ben seems averse to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for these phenomena; when the team is asked to investigate a Navy pilot’s report of a UFO encounter (or unidentified aerial phenomena, in preferred parlance), Ben proves the easiest to satisfy with a facile explanation.

In “U is for UFO” (season 2, episode 9), the three investigate a UFO sighting by a Navy pilot, Captain Sampson. She says the object was a bright light and then reached speeds five times faster than her F-16 fighter jet, that is, approximately ten times the speed of sound, but without a sonic boom. Then, it seemed to go through her, and she felt calm and peaceful, like an experience of God. After she reports this, the Navy grounds her, pending an investigation.

A Navy captain tells Kristen that three F-16s, including the one whose pilot reported the UAP, were launched out of a base near Atlantic City and that a civilian corporation nearby launched an informational broadband satellite around the same time. Since these “facts” contradict what Captain Sampson reported, Sampson is grounded. However, Ben finds a person online at a nearby university who also saw a UAP at the same time. The student, Asha, describes an object that went from standing still to a speed of Mach 5 straight up almost instantaneously. Ben notes that the acceleration would crush any pilot inside, and Asha remarks that if the craft had figured out a way to counteract the g-forces, then no.

Asha, like Captain Sampson, says the light went through her, making her feel calm and peaceful. However, she also volunteers that she had smoked a lot of marijuana that night before seeing it. This, along with the fact that she is seventeen years old, causes the team to discount what she said. Kristen then investigates the civilian corporation supposedly responsible for the satellite launch and finds out there was no such launch the day of the sighting.

The Navy sends the other two pilots to talk to the team, and they deny seeing anything. Ben notices that one of the pilots is particularly quiet and slips his email address to him after the meeting, saying that his own father was an Air Force mechanic and that he “understands.” Shortly thereafter, Ben receives an anonymous email with a video of the encounter. The video shows that the UAP changes its appearance, looking sometimes like a sort of black cartoon fruit or insect and then a shimmering globe with a bright “X” in it.

This episode seems to draw on three United States Navy videos of UAP that pilots recorded during training flights in 2004 and 2015, two of which were published by The New York Times in 2017. The videos circulated because of leaks in 2007 and 2017; in 2020, the Pentagon officially released the three videos, stating that they were authentic and that the phenomena observed were classified as UAP (Strauss 2020). The objects in the released videos appear as outlines, with considerably less detail than the object in Evil, while the audio records the amazement of the pilots; one of the videos registers the clear satisfaction of the pilot when he successfully places an auto trace on the mysterious, fast-moving object so that his camera keeps it in view. In the case of the UAP in Evil, the “X” can be interpreted as the unknown, the mysterious “variable” upon whose value people cannot agree.

After Ben, Kristen, and David have begun investigating, a team from the church in Rome comes to question Captain Sampson. They have seen the video and have more questions, which they ask in front of the three American investigators. They ask about the moment the object seemed to go through her, and if she felt a tingling feeling in her hands or feet; she says no. They ask if she felt calm, peaceful; she says yes. They ask if there was anything about this feeling that was quantified; she says that her routine medical exam post-flight showed her blood pressure as low, and her hypertension was permanently cured. They ask if she smelled anything when the object went through her; she says she might have. They have a device that gives off odors, and they want her to pick the one that most closely matches the smell. She picks one, and the team’s supervisor and the head investigator from Rome exchange meaningful looks.

The next day, Kristen is approached outside her home on her way to work by a Mr. Edgar Loudermilk. He tells her that the object the pilots saw is an example of Russian drone technology and asks the team to kindly stand down because the United States wants the Russians to believe these drones have not yet been detected.

Asha is at the church when Kristen, Ben, and David arrive. She waits outside while the three go into a meeting with a visitor, a Vincent LeConte from the Vatican, who says he is familiar with Loudermilk and knows he is lying. LeConte says he has arranged for Captain Sampson and Asha to go to Rome to testify about the incident, and he wants the three investigators to come too. The next day, however, LeConte says that both Sampson and Asha abruptly changed their minds, and without eyewitness testimony, there is no point to the trip. Kristen goes to speak to Captain Sampson, who says she lied about the sighting, has been reinstated as a pilot, and has nothing more to say. Ben goes to speak to Asha and learns she has been admitted to her dream school, MIT, as the apparent reward for staying quiet about what she experienced.

The three investigators discuss the events, considering Loudermilk’s explanation of the object being an example of drone technology. Ben accepts this explanation, citing Occam’s razor, and expresses disappointment at the more conventional explanation, saying “I kind of wanted it to be true.”

Here, we see another example of Ben initially seeming to be positioned as an investigator willing to keep an open mind before he accepts weak explanations that end discussion. Ben’s father was an Air Force mechanic, a fact he mentions to the reticent pilot to suggest he understands the pressure to keep silent about UAPs, which seems to work to get the video leaked to him. Ben sees the video with the object’s strange, shifting appearance and knows this object performed maneuvers and demonstrated speeds far exceeding any known capability of human-made craft, with or without a crew, and without producing a sonic boom. Nevertheless, when a mysterious figure appears with a one-line explanation and a request to investigate no further, Ben seems uncurious about the nature of such technology or why this “drone” appeared in plain sight of three F-16s and at least one observer on the ground with no apparent worries about detection, or how and why the object could cure Captain Sampson’s hypertension.

A brief discussion of the relationship between religious beliefs and the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) hypothesis is warranted here. Some psychological studies suggest that ETI beliefs may serve a function like religious beliefs for some atheists and agnostics as part of a search for meaning (Routledge 2017). However, even this study, which did find an effect between a psychological need for meaning and belief in ETI, found these effect sizes were relatively small and concluded that “ETI beliefs are likely not a major source of meaning for most nonreligious individuals” (Routledge 2017, 144). This statement seems to apply to Ben. I submit that Ben’s acceptance of an explanation that ignores significant parts of the eyewitnesses’ reports suggests Ben is aware of the suggested link between religious beliefs and the ETI hypothesis; he therefore rejects the latter because of its association with the former. The pilot’s description of the UAP passing through her and leaving her with a calm sensation “of God” makes a link between anomalies of a strict religious nature and UAPs, a link that witnesses of UAP and experiencers of encounters with apparently extraterrestrial beings also often report, a link that would increase Ben’s resistance to any nonconventional explanation of these phenomena.

I further suggest that it is not actually Ben’s atheism that proves to be his stumbling block but a cultural resistance to belief in any intelligent beings superior (or, more accurately, that could be argued to be superior) to human beings. To him, I suggest, belief in beings like this is essentially equivalent to belief in fairies, angels, or djinn.

Not that belief in djinn has not gotten unconscious approval from Ben in the past. Ben, the Muslim turned atheist, found himself taking sides in a religious dispute. When the team investigates a series of mysterious fires happening around an adolescent girl, the church orders an exorcism be performed (season 2, episode 3, “F is for Fire”). Ben points out that the descriptions the girl gives of the supernatural figure she sees correspond more closely to that of a djinn, an ambivalent supernatural entity from Islamic tradition. The girl’s parents are in an interfaith marriage between a Catholic and a Muslim. Ben finds himself arguing in favor of a Muslim exorcism over a Catholic one, a position at odds with his atheism; he later admits to Kristen and David that this argument came from “religious nationalism.” Despite Ben’s declared faith in science, with all its asserted objectivity, his thinking process is subject to distortion from unexamined beliefs.

The unexamined beliefs that order Ben’s world and keep the strangeness of reality at bay begin to fall apart, leading to his informal diagnosis of “cultural derealization” by Kristen’s school-age daughters at the start of season 3. His depression catches the attention of his sister Karima who, like her brother, is a young professional, but, unlike him, maintains the Islamic faith of their Pakistani parents. She wears a hijab and is extremely knowledgeable about science. The lack of complete explanations for what the team has seen has gotten to Ben (and, perhaps, the writing team of Evil). Ben complains to her that he has faced numerous phenomena the team cannot explain, like a ghostly image resembling a recently deceased person on a hospital camera (season 1, episode 2), “and then we just move on.”

These are just some of the unexplained happenings Ben has seen; there are others he does not know about. Lexis, one of Kristen’s daughters, born after Kristen worked with a fertility clinic she later learns has strange, potentially demonic connections, starts to show two extra extremely sharp canine teeth growing out of her gums (season 2, episode 1). When she is put under general anesthesia to have them removed, she bites down on the oral surgeon’s finger, nearly severing it. Lexis has no memory of this. Kristen tells her the surgery went fine, and the plot point is never mentioned again. The tail Lexis starts to grow in episode 10 of season 2 is similarly brought up and then never returned to.

I suggest that Ben’s comment about seeing strange things and then “just mov[ing] on” comes partly from a need of the writers of Evil to address, however incompletely, this tendency in the show. However, there are deeper reasons for his comment and, more importantly, temptation to “move on” from discussions about the paranormal that the presence of his sister will highlight.

Derealization and Unrealized Hope: The “Super Secret Science League”

By way of cheering Ben up and indirectly proposing a solution to his “derealization,” Karima takes him to a meeting of the “Super Secret Science League,” a sort of social and hobby group of young people from all different branches of science. The meeting provides a space for an apparent coming together between science and religion, represented in a dialogue between the Islamic scientist and the Muslim-turned-atheist. Karima tells Ben she believes Allah created all things and wants to understand how creation works through science. She points out that science faces mysteries all the time, saying scientists should be honest about when they face things beyond their understanding. Karima promises to help her brother, saying that anything his “Catholic friends” cannot explain, she will take to the Super Secret Science League for them to solve. This is a promise neither Karima nor the series ever keeps. I suggest the reason the series cannot keep this promise lies in current limitations of popular discussions of the paranormal. I further suggest that some scholars and popular writers have pointed to a way out of these limitations.

First, these limitations and their history. I see two major identifications for the character of Karima and the Super Secret Science League. The league would be a sort of London Society for Psychical Research and New York Society for Psychical Research. Professor of Religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal argues convincingly throughout several books that these two societies, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented science without the taboo of materialism. Their well-known members (William James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, etc.) went to seances and published research about the capabilities of mediums and psychics and the presence of psychic abilities among the general population. Kripal shows that the clear open-mindedness of these major scientific figures (including Sigmund Freud, who contributed writing to the society’s Proceedings) to paranormal phenomena has been almost willfully forgotten and that science has often been transformed from a method of approaching reality into a dogma that better bears the label of Scientism (Kripal 2010, 54).

Under Scientism, reality is considered to described accurately and completely through classical (Newtonian) physics and the Cartesian separation of the body and the mind. It is important to note that Scientism is not the same as the scientific method. Instead, Scientism applies, usually in an unconscious manner, the mind/body split to scientific matters, even though scientists from neurologists to physicists (especially quantum physicists) have questioned this duality for over a century (Novick and Ross 2020). Scientism effectively erases results of scientific experiments that do not fit materialism, even though science itself has demonstrated that any separation between the observer of phenomena and the phenomena itself is not absolute. This blurring of subject and object is most well known through the famous double-slit experiment, the results of which the physicist Richard Feynman noted in 1965 were impossible to explain in any classical way and contained the heart of quantum physics (Greene 1999, 97–98).

We need not look to the beginning of the twentieth century to find the inspiration for the Super Secret Science League. There are and have been contemporary institutions doing similar not-so-secret research projects. These include but are not limited to SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), which was linked to the development of techniques and research into remote viewing to aid the United States government, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (offering US$1 million in grants for projects to begin in August of 2023), the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University (now the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina), and the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona, whose director, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, has published books about his experiments with mediums and psychic phenomena. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh and the California Institute for Human Science are further examples of active research and education centers in parapsychology. The Parapsychological Association, which has been accepted as an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1969, has held yearly conventions since 1958 in sixteen different countries. It should also be recalled that much of the research conducted by American institutions and the military was spurred in part from reports of successful research into remote viewing and psychokinesis being done in the Soviet Union (May et al. 2015).

Finally, it should be noted that Brazilian universities have shown themselves more open to the scientific study of phenomena explicitly tied to religious belief, such as spirit writing. Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida, an associate professor of psychiatry in Brazil and a former postdoctoral fellow in religion and health at Duke University, has studied, among other things, the commonalities and differences in the experience of hearing voices among those diagnosed with psychosis and Brazilian mediums as they transcribe messages from spirits. One of his key findings is that it is not the experiences of hearing voices (categorized as anomalous experiences) per se that can lead to distress in the experiencer but how the individual and their community interpret these experiences. Those people who interpreted their experiences as compatible with some established religious practice, who had the insight that the experience was theirs and might not be everyone else’s, and for whom the experience did not interfere with the person’s relationships and activities, showed the least signs of having any mental disorder or distress (Machado and Moreira-Almeida 2021). Among the three main characters of Evil, only David, as a seminarian, would be immersed in a cultural context somewhat supportive of the notion of anomalous experiences, and even he struggles with doubts about his own mental health and whether the origin of his experiences is divine or demonic. He discusses some of his experiences with Sister Andrea; Kristen talks about them only with her psychiatrist, while Ben discusses the experiences reluctantly or not at all.

Back to the “Secret College”

All these real-life researchers and centers of research might be considered more public manifestations of the “Invisible College” founded by Jacques Vallee, a former astronomer and computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the early predecessor of the internet and has written widely about the centuries-long history of UAP worldwide. Vallee’s interest in UAP’s began when he was a young professional astronomer in his native France. During his nighttime work as a government employee on the artificial-satellite service of the Paris Observatory, he and his colleagues observed occasional aerial phenomena that could not be identified; when this happened on July 11, 1961, his supervisor destroyed the tape (Vallee 2014, 54). Vallee later founded his “Invisible College,” an informal group of researchers who wanted to study the phenomena without taboos, restrictions, or any dogma about what these phenomena were or were not (Vallee [1975] 2014). This group was itself the intellectual descendant of the original secret society of scientists that existed in seventeenth-century England; its members exchanged ideas and support and kept each other’s secrets in a society inclined to look upon their activities as witchcraft, until the formation of the Royal Society for Improving Natural knowledge, founded in London by royal decree in 1660. Vallee’s publishing of his book The Invisible College in 1975 was an attempt to make such a community public from the beginning.

I interpret the Super Secret Science League as evidence for the desire for science to take religious claims and paranormal events seriously; the league is made up (apparently) of young, nerdy/hip people who do their research purely for the love of it and who harbor no scientific taboos about what a “serious” topic of research is. Similarly, I view the team at the center of Evil as a kind of compromise between the desire for a purely scientific research group, with abundant resources and no taboos, and the reality of the popular religious/scientific split present in our current era. The team in Evil is funded by the church. As such, its actions and choice of investigations are always under scrutiny, including by its three investigators.

The backgrounds of the three investigators lead them to question, at different moments, whether the church’s choice of investigations and proposed solutions are perhaps fatally biased. There are continual references to the institutional weaknesses and faults of the church; Kristen is a lapsed Catholic in part because of the child abuse scandal. David, a Black man seeking to become a priest, sees and is troubled by the church’s history of racism, and is sensitive to suggestions that he, as one of a handful of Black men seeking ordination, is being used as a token. Racial attitudes even enter their investigations of phenomena; in season 3, episode 5 (“The Angel of Warning”), the church orders the team to interview survivors of a disaster. These survivors, who exited an apartment building just seconds before its collapse, report that a woman holding a lamb appeared to them and guided them out. The church wants the team to see if these could have been miracles performed by the apparition of a deceased Sicilian nun being considered for canonization who was known for raising sheep. One Black survivor of the collapse reports that the woman who appeared was Black, while the rest of the witnesses say she was white. This question of the racial appearance of a divine entity ends up being part of the reason for the church’s dropping of the investigation and its apparent giving up on declaring these actions as miracles done by a saint.

The Experience of Evil: Trapped in Dualities

With the episode of the haunted fire-starter girl, Ben demonstrated a duality of thinking between Islam and Christianity, even admitting to “religious nationalism.” I suggest that these two episodes show Ben and David, despite their differing beliefs about religion, to be trapped in a similar kind of duality of thought. In David’s case, he correctly points out the church’s history of “whitewashing” the appearance of Jesus and the saints in Catholic iconography. In particular, the episode notes this practice in images of Saint Monica, mother of the North African Saint Augustine; she is classically depicted as white, although no historical knowledge about her supports this depiction. Nevertheless, in David’s worldview (which corresponds with popular conceptions), the saints seem to need to maintain a clear racial identity even in death, making impossible the notion that witnesses could differ in their descriptions of the same figure (such as eyewitnesses of physical events often do) or the notion that a nonphysical being could, by choice or by perception, appear differently to human eyewitnesses. David is uncomfortable with a less fixed view of divine beings—just like Ben. For Ben, the fire-starter girl is being haunted by either an Islamic djinn or a Christian demon. We never hear him, or any other character, suggest less, non-dual interpretations of the phenomenon, such as that the figure is real, but its non-material nature makes its appearance and origin subject to human cultural and historical filters.

Research into the imagery of near-death experiences suggests the existence of these filters. Moreover, the psychological and life changes that often follow a near-death experience suggest that these experiences have aspects that are almost universal, even if they manifest in different culturally influenced imagery and memories of their experiencers. P. M. H. Atwater’s (2007) Big Book of Near-Death Experiences has documented many of these similarities and differences, including cultural differences. For example, Todd Murphy, a Buddhist theologian who has studied near-death experiences in Thailand, notes that Thai near-death experiencers are more likely to report encounters with Lord Yama, a divinity who assigns souls to appropriate rebirths after death, and his messengers, Yamatoots, whereas Westerners are more likely to report seeing Christian divine figures or deceased friends and relatives (Murphy 2001, 176–77). Dr. Allan Kellehear specializes in researching near death experiences in non-Western cultures, covering cases from Asia, the Pacific region, Native Americans, and various preliterate hunter–gatherer peoples. He finds that near-death experiencers from non-Western cultures are less likely than Westerners to report moving through a tunnel and more likely to report things like moving through subterranean caves or emerging through the throat of a lotus flower (Kellehear 1996, 34). He also finds that within cultures with nonlinear beliefs about time, such as Aboriginal peoples of Australia, near-death experiencers tend not experience the phenomenon of life reviews often reported by Western experiencers (Kellehear 1996, 33). Perhaps we need not follow Ben and David in their conventional, unconsciously materialist thinking, which demands that if such experiences are indeed “real,” there must be either a cave or a tunnel in the equivalent of a physical place where we “go” after death, just as there is or is not a cave or a tunnel on our commute to work.

I further suggest that the choice of an Islamic character to represent a potential nondogmatic approach to paranormal phenomena has historical roots, whether the writers of Evil are aware of them or not. Medieval Islamic intellectuals, such as the Persians Ghazzali (1058–1111) and Suhrawardi (1170–1208), attempted to integrate rational thinking derived from Greek sources with mystical states of consciousness of God’s unity. Medhi Amin Razavi argues that Suhrawardi’s School of Illumination was central to Islamic philosophy for centuries. Razavi notes that Suhrawardi’s emphasis on light, both as a representation of a universal essence that pervades all of existence and as an empirical phenomenon to be studied, is an attempt to transcend distinctions between the imaginal and the empirical (Kripal 2022, 125–26).

Suhrawardi’s metaphysics establishes a parallel between light as a source of both spiritual reality and matter. In his system, the Light of Lights is the origin of everything, material and immaterial, and its proximity or distance from the Light of Lights, as well as its interactions with other existent lights derived from the Light of Lights, determines its ontological status. The greater the distance from its origin, the less its degree of awareness; unconscious matter is dimly lit, while human souls are brighter than matter and yearn to be closer to those sources of light that are more immediately derived from the Light of Lights. Thus, illumination for Suhrawardi is both a physical and spiritual phenomenon; the Light of Lights is both the source of all that is and possesses the highest degree of self-awareness of anything in the cosmos (Marcotte 2019).

I suggest that Karima functions as an intellectual and spiritual descendant of Ghazzali, Suhrawardi, and the later thinkers they influenced. In this way, Karima would have company in Western philosophy as well. Henry Corbin, the twentieth-century philosopher who first translated Heidegger in France and who was the first to introduce Iranian Islamic philosophy to his country, translated the work of Suhrawardi and made the study of Suhrawardi’s brand of Sufiism his life’s work. Many of his professors and colleagues viewed this attempt to integrate continental philosophy with Islamic philosophy as unworkable—in other words, he attempted to bridge a divide in philosophy, similar to those who view the current divide between scientific and spiritual worldviews as unbridgeable (Corbin 1978). Karima’s presence in the series serves as an invitation to Ben, and to the viewer, to bridge the divide between empirical materialism and mysticism. Like the double-slit experiment, which reveals that light’s nature is not reducible to either a particle or a wave, Karima’s brief appearance invites us to think of ourselves and reality in a non-dual manner.

What is being bridged here besides empirical materialism and mysticism can perhaps be more simply expressed as the divide between the subject and the object. As Kripal (2022, 124) points out in his book Superhumanities, for the last few centuries, religion has overprivileged the transcendent, while the humanities and sciences have privileged the immanent. Kripal calls on scholars of the “superhumanities” to focus on subject and object representation simultaneously. Serious scientists know there is no hard line between the observed and the observer. Why, then, should humanists make the humanities a poor cousin not even of the sciences but of unscientific concepts and conclusions?

Conclusion: Dualities and Unconscious Repetition in Evil

The limitations of Evil are explained by two main causes. The first is its incomplete attempts to engage fully with the phenomena that are central to its stories. This is mostly due to the dualities its protagonists are trapped in. They are unable to step outside of these dualities, which can be reduced to the main duality of subject/object, and so the promise of research free from taboos and preconceived notions can only be hinted at through the minor character of Karima and her colleagues at the Super Secret Science League. The three investigators’ inability to consider non-dual solutions is not due to individual quirks in character; instead, they represent the current limitations of most of society in thinking about anomalous events. The characters’ individual backgrounds, with a variety of stances regarding religion and science, demonstrate the dominant tendencies of religious and scientific thought as they are popularly portrayed in most media.

The second cause is the function of the horror genre. In her discussion of horror stories in general, Victoria Nelson (2001) notes that, in genres whose readers are often described as “addicts”—horror stories, murder mysteries, and romance—readers are typically “moved not to reread it,” as readers of literature often are, “but to read another of exactly the same kind, new content cast in the same unchanging form.” She compares this to Sigmund Freud’s definition of the Wiederholungsdrang, a repetition compulsion he identified as being a component of certain neuroses. Ben’s complaint in Evil about the group encountering so many unexplained events and then just “mov[ing] on” should be viewed as a slight crack in the fourth wall, a nod to the viewer that, as Nelson points out about horror stories, there is no movement “toward resolution” or any movement “deeper into self-awareness” (Nelson 2001, 132–33).

Evil holds up a mirror—a mirror distorted by the demands of commerce and genre—to our current unwillingness to separate transcendent experience from the history of religions or science from classical materialism. Evil also hesitatingly points a new way forward out of dualism, in the character of Karima and the Super Secret Science League, before those demands finally prevail. In this sense, the reflection the show provides paradoxically has value in that it reveals the divisions in our thinking. Whatever faults we might find with the show, it should be recognized that the academy has largely abandoned serious treatment of the transcendent and that the subject has instead moved to where it will enjoy large budgets and the rapt attention of millions: popular culture.