Exorcism movies are everywhere. Why are we obsessed with them? (2024)

From the title alone, most viewers will have a fair idea of what to expect from the new horror movie The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe. Where cinema is concerned, the stock notion of what demonic possession looks like hasn’t much changed since William Friedkin’s landmark The Exorcist, which retains its shock value from the moment that the baby-faced Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) starts jerking her limbs, growling obscenities and glaring furiously at her aghast mother (Ellen Burstyn).

That’s before we get to the projectile vomiting, the unspeakable acts performed with a crucifix, and the other set-pieces that made the film, based on screenwriter William Peter Blatty’s novel, one of the major pop culture events of 1973.

Some of its success can be attributed to what was then in the zeitgeist, including increasing public interest in the occult (in the film, a ouija board is the apparent conduit that lets the demon in). As critics have noted since, it can also be seen as a conservative parable about 1970s youth rebellion, in which a young girl acts out against her elders in a manner both violent and explicitly sexual.

But half a century on, why do themes of demonic possession and exorcism continue to loom so large in horror cinema? Take, for instance, the enormously successful Conjuring series launched by Australian director James Wan in 2010, with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren, a real-life, devoutly Catholic couple who came to fame in the 1970s as self-styled paranormal investigators.

Last year brought us The Pope’s Exorcist, also starring Russell Crowe as the late Father Gabriele Amorth, a prominent Italian priest who claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms across his career. Playing alongside it in cinemas was The Exorcist: Believer, a direct sequel to Friedkin’s original with Burstyn reprising her role.

These are just a few examples of a larger trend, especially if we include all the recent films that posit the existence of a demonic realm without getting weighed down by dogma, like the Australian hit Talk To Me, in which a group of Adelaide teenagers experiment with getting themselves possessed for kicks.

And now we have The Exorcism, not a literal sequel to The Exorcist but certainly a spiritual follow-up. Writer-director Joshua John Miller is the son of Exorcist co-star Jason Miller, and was reportedly inspired by his youthful memories of hanging around Friedkin’s set. Oddly enough, Crowe is back, this time as Anthony Miller, an actor who takes on a lead role in an exorcism movie and soon fears that he’s in the grip of demonic forces for real.

As you might say, it’s enough to make your head spin. One thing that’s clear about this new wave of exorcism movies – and the original Exorcist, for that matter – is that they’re not aimed solely at an audience of true believers, any more than you need to believe literally in vampires or zombies to appreciate stories about them.

Just the same, it’s noteworthy that in nearly all these movies the demons are presented as unambiguously real within the fiction (an exception is last year’s locally-made Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism, inspired by the notorious Vollmer case of the early 1990s, in which a botched exorcism in rural Victoria led to a woman’s death).

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So what’s at the bottom of this cultural fixation? Sarah Ferber, a historian at the University of Wollongong, points to the recent “re-mainstreaming” of exorcism in Catholicism and other faiths, a development in which the popularity of Friedkin’s film has undoubtedly played a role.

Equally, she notes that exorcism as we know it in the West predates Christianity itself (Jesus, she says, was a Jewish exorcist) and that comparable practices can be found in many other cultures worldwide.

Sticking with Christianity, where her expertise lies, Ferber says that exorcism across the centuries has served as a public spectacle, requiring the exorcist to follow a set script. “First you do this, then you do that. Then you shake some water on. Then you do the sign of the cross. It is a ritual, and it is a performance.”

Cinematic exorcisms might be seen as extending this tradition of performance. Whether we literally believe or not, they give us a chance to confront the murky, irrational side of human experience -- as in the many horror movies like Talk to Me that let us understand the demonic as a metaphor for the effects of mental illness or drug use.

In movies, though, demons are never truly laid to rest, or not while there’s a market for another sequel. “My job is to explain why it’s complicated,” Ferber says of her work on exorcism as a scholar. “But a filmmaker’s job is generally not that. Their job is to make it palatable, and to resonate with an audience in a particular way.“

The Exorcism is in cinemas now.

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