If what gripped you in The Exorcist was Father Damien Karras wrestling with doubt as he faces Pazuzu over Regan MacNeil’s bed, this earlier classic will hit the same nerve. A bishop and a young priest, Father Sargent, confront the possible possession of Susan Garth, and their heated debates over sin, psychology, and the Church’s responsibility echo Karras and Merrin’s moral struggle. The rite itself has that same chilling solemnity, and the novel’s sharp theological sparring gives you the same sense of spiritual stakes that made Chris MacNeil’s desperate pleas so haunting.

You were drawn to the way The Exorcist peers into Karras’s guilt and Chris’s terror as Regan’s condition worsens. In A Head Full of Ghosts, the Barrett family endures their daughter Marjorie’s disturbing transformation while a TV crew films a reality show called “The Possession.” Young Merry narrates years later, and her shifting memories create the same intimate, unsettling portrait of unraveling faith and family you felt during Regan’s tests and nocturnal outbursts. The presence of Father Wanderley raises the same agonizing questions Karras faced: illness or demon, and what does belief demand?

If the Georgetown townhouse’s locked rooms and bedside vigils kept you breathless in The Exorcist, Matheson’s Belasco House will box you in just as tightly. A tiny team—physicist Lionel Barrett, his wife Edith, spiritualist Florence Tanner, and survivor Ben Fischer—are sealed inside one mansion to confront its malevolent presence. Like the nights Chris endures before Father Merrin arrives, the tension builds through confined corridors, invasive phenomena, and psychological pressure that never leaves the house’s walls.

If you were hooked by the early investigative stretch of The Exorcist—the doctors, the tests, the desperate search for a rational cause before turning to Father Merrin—Ring channels that same momentum. Reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa and his friend Ryuji trace a chain of deaths back to a cursed videotape and the tragic figure of Sadako Yamamura. The procedural chase, like Chris MacNeil’s medical odyssey, leads from skepticism to the stark recognition that something beyond science is at work.

If the raw, profane shocks of Regan’s possession—the bedroom stench, the self-mutilation, the blasphemies that rattle Karras—left you rattled, The Troop delivers that same unflinching intensity. Scoutmaster Tim Riggs and five boys are stranded on an island with a ravenous, engineered parasite, and the body horror escalates with the relentless cruelty you felt in the worst nights before the exorcism. It’s grim, physical, and impossible to look away.