This month ABC premieres the first four episodes of the much-anticipated V, a remake of the popular 80s sci-fi miniseries that now stars Elizabeth Mitchell as an FBI agent and Scott Wolf as a vain TV anchorman seducing and seduced by an alien.

V joins a large cadre of paranormal entertainment: Topping the current box office returns is "The Fourth Kind," the faux-documentary that purports to chronicle alien abductions in remote Nome, Alaska.  November also offers generous helpings of ghosts (see the surprise blockbuster "Paranormal Activity" or SyFy Network's new Ghost Hunters Academy), vampires and shape-shifters (which you'll see only by elbowing your way through the OMG crowd wherever "New Moon," the second installment in the Twilight saga, is screening) and even a comic chronicle of the U.S. Army's attempts to harness psychic powers ("The Men Who Stare at Goats").

Religion's not the main reason for our interest in paranormal, but it's often found in the background—watch for abandoned church buildings, ineffectual rituals, religious authority figures and purgatory-like mythologies. So why are stories about haunting, vamping, invasions and conspiracies so popular right now?  One response to that question is that these stories reflect a post-9/11 shift in how we see ourselves and our relationship to knowledge and power.
 
Take V. The Chicago Tribune's Glenn Garvin says it's a comment on Obamamania. I think the show's significance is even broader than that. Yes, it's about our desire to trust leaders and to invest them with superhuman qualities. But it's also about the American tendency to trust gut reactions over a careful parsing of the evidence, and in that sense it's also a comment on the Bush legacy and the appeal of by-the-seat-of-your-pants pundits like Bill O'Reilly. 

The populist expression of this collective characteristic plays out in V as a suspicion of any kind of well-meaning authority, as what seems like placid kindness can turn out to be sinister.  That wariness-tending-toward-paranoia is a consequence of the failure of religious and other institutions to help us: Instead of employing religious rituals in the charge against evil (see "The Exorcist"), Father Jack (Joel Gretch) follows the FBI agent's lead: "Don't trust anyone," the FBI agent tells the priest. 

V also says that even our enchantment with science and technology —so much a part of both the ghost-hunting and conspiracy genres—can turn out to be a problem, for we no longer have a corner on those resources: the bad guys can harness science and technology too, and use them to devour us.

It would be easy for journalists to write about the popularity of the paranormal as a simple horse-race to win ratings and box office returns.  But a more interesting story is how myths of the paranormal and supernatural have shifted—from a fear of being consumed (think Bram Stoker's Dracula) to the fear that we're being duped misguided, un-gifted or otherwise rendered inferior. At its heart, our interest in the paranormal is about coming to terms with the fact that we have less control over things than we thought we did.  This also means we need to be extra suspicious of anyone who jumps a little too quickly at the chance to define reality for the rest of us.  It's post-9/11 paranoia, but it recognizes that the source of our problems might be not be "out there" but right here in our midst.

Lynn Schofield Clark is Associate Professor and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She is author of From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2005) and has written on Lost fandom in Small Screen, Big Picture (Baylor University Press, 2009).