User blog comment:AustinDR/The Witch (2016) Review/@comment-26884760-20160221160222

horror will never again gain its old status of delivering true shocks, society has become way to desensitized.. until horror stops trying to be ever more edgey and shocking it will continue to fall flat as a genre.. people just don't care anymore as they've seen it all.. they barely blink at scares or gore and find psychological stuff "boring" to sit through.

We're almost as bad as the 80s when it took exploitation-level films to make anyone cringe, history repeats itself and with things like Walking Dead available on live TV the trend of 80s desensitization will continue for several more generations.

Back when Exorcist was around people were not really exposed to the stuff they are today, as I mentioned above we're like the 80s and have grown so used to horror that it takes insane over-the-top things to raise an eyebrow and those things tend to just be grotesque rather than scary (Human Centipede etc)

Give it a few generations and a decline in horror media and maybe people will return to the less desensitized mindset but it will take a while for society to ever get back to the way they were when Exorcist was first released.