Reading Heretic Through Mormon Rituals: A Conversation with Ryan M. Springer

What happens when a horror film mirrors the structure of Mormon ritual?

In this episode of Dialogue Out Loud, Ryan M. Springer joins Dialogue editor Margaret Olsen Hemming and podcast producer Daniel Foster Smith to explore his Winter 2025 Dialogue article, “Heretic and the Inversion of the Mormon Endowment.” Reading the film through the lens of Western esotericism, ritual studies, and Mormon history, Springer argues that Heretic presents not an ascent narrative—but a descent. As its sister missionaries move downward into increasingly confined spaces, the film inverts familiar ritual patterns and reframes questions of revelation, authority, and spiritual transformation.

In conversation, Springer unpacks how ritual functions as a kind of theological “technology,” how inversion becomes critique, and why the film’s engagement with Mormon imagery is more than aesthetic. Together, they explore what it means to see sacred forms reimagined on screen—and what that reframing reveals about faith, doubt, and the structures that shape religious experience.

Whether you’re interested in Mormon studies, film theory, ritual, or the intersections of religion and popular culture, this episode offers a provocative and timely conversation.