There’s the germ of a provocative idea in “The Unholy” — namely, what if you took a religious-visitation movie like “The Song of Bernadette” or “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” and turned it into a horror movie? Had the film bothered, or dared, to pursue that notion to the fullest, “The Unholy” might be something other than the standard-issue, priests-versus-demonic-spirits thriller that it is.
You’ve seen this one before, countless times, with its superhero priests and seemingly omnipotent spirits who are somehow powerless against containment prayers and quick-thinking investigative journalists. On top of that, it’s a PG-13 horror movie, which takes excessive gore off the table, pushing the director (in this case, screenwriting-vet-turned-debut-director Evan Spiliotopolous) to replace it with lukewarm jump scares.