Old Priests, Young Priests, and Something Beyond Truth
By T.J. Tranchell
The best joke in the 2023 Russell Crowe vehicle The Pope’s Exorcist has Crowe as Father Gabriele Amorth telling a variety of people that his books are good. If he was using social media, the joke would be a humble brag. Within the context of the film, the line humanizes Amorth and reminds us that what we are watching is a version of the truth. “Inspired by the case files of Father Gabriele Amorth,” according to the title card. It’s not a rarity. Exorcism and possession films often come with a claim on the truth. What is it about this subgenre that requires filmmakers to hang onto a nugget of reality so regularly? Are we so distant from matters of faith that exorcism movies are a lone place where horror audiences choose to encounter (the usually Christian and more often Catholic) God? Without the possibility that such events really happened, would we stop supporting such films?
Among fans of The Exorcist (1973), it is no secret that novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty was inspired by a case of possession and exorcism he heard about while he was a student at Georgetown University. The legend is that Blatty heard about the 1949 exorcism of a 14-year-old boy named Robbie. After some cursory research, Blatty knocked out the bestselling novel which became a worldwide box-office phenomenon a short time later. Numerous documentaries have tackled the “true story” and even one film, 2000’s Possessed, starring Timothy Dalton and Henry Czerny. As a made-for-tv movie, Possessed lacks the gravitas of The Exorcist and the intensity. The Exorcist was not the last to lay a claim to truth.
While films such as The Entity, The Amityville Horror (that is a whole other bag of truth and lies), and The Conjuring franchise touch on exorcism and possession, they are more closely related to haunted house films, and each has their own version of “based on a true story.” Two films from director Scott Derrickson, however, put the “real” events right up front and are classic examples of exorcism films.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us from Evil explore the necessity of exorcisms from different perspectives. The earlier film puts a priest (played wonderfully by Tom Wilkinson) on trial for the death of a young woman following his attempted exorcism. While the setting was moved to the United States, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based on the German case of Anneliese Michel who allegedly underwent an exorcism in 1975 and died the following year. The film feels a bit more realistic because half of it takes place in the courtroom and follows the priest’s lawyer on her own faith journey of sorts. This would lead Derrickson into the exorcism/police procedural Deliver Us from Evil, which is based on the experiences and writings of NYPD police officer-turned-demonologist Ralph Sarchie. Taken together, the two films work to bring exorcism out of the shadows and into a more realized “real world” where secrets are harder to keep. Deliver Us from Evil even put its exorcism scene in a police station interrogation room complete with two-way mirrors and security cameras. These scenes, however, are still Hollywood embellishments.
Other “true stories” such as The Rite (starring Anthony Hopkins) and the not-based-on-anything Prey for the Devil, add touches of realism but continue to push the bounds of believability. That brings us right back to The Exorcist and Amorth.
Before he died in 2016, Father Amorth allowed William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, to visit him in the Vatican and film an exorcism. The hour-ish documentary The Devil and Father Amorth is not a Hollywood embellishment at all. Friedkin doesn’t argue for the “truth” of what he witnesses but rather lets his handheld DSLR camera do the work. Is the gruff, otherworldly voice actually coming from the woman purported to be possessed or is it a sound effect? Without being in the room, it’s hard not to think of it as an element of post-production. Friedkin notes that the woman had had several Amorth-performed exorcisms before and was still not fully dispossessed after Amorth’s final try.
I do not doubt the intensity of the real Father Gabriele Amorth’s convictions. We have his own writings, as well as books and other documentaries about him, available to us. For all the secrecy of the Catholic church and the medieval trappings of exorcism rituals, Amorth always appears as someone with nothing to hide. The banality of evil is a frequent topic and is often couched with discussions of the theatricality of Satan (but not the performance-like nature of the Church). And that’s where I feel an opportunity was missed with The Pope’s Exorcist.
As previously mentioned, the film is based on case files from Amorth’s long career as the Vatican’s chief exorcist. But the case in the film is not one of them. It’s made up. They quite literally made up a fake story about a real man for reasons we can only guess at. Instead of giving us the “truth,” which is oddly what we want from these movies more than anything, we were shown a fiction with a Monty Python twist and left with the setup for an action franchise. I still liked the movie, but by giving audiences a Hollywood truth, we were robbed of the chance to see one man’s faith truly in action. Derrickson doesn’t do this. On Earth, sometimes evil wins. In most Hollywood-sanitized horror films, evil rarely comes out on top, even if it finds a way to survive until the sequel. That’s also the power of Friedkin’s short documentary: not only does evil sometimes win, it’s also somewhat boring to watch.
Despite gravitating to many “based on a true story” horror films — exorcisms, hauntings, serial killers — we don’t actually want the truth. We want the truth to be embellished so much that it becomes impossible to believe. Because, really, what would we do if these stories were true? 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on Twitter @TJ_Tranchell.
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