Introduction
In her incisive essay, Kit Whitfield explores the profound implications of William Friedkin’s documentary, Leap of Faith, which delves into the complex legacy of the iconic horror film The Exorcist. Whitfield navigates the delicate interplay between artistry and ethics, unpacking how Friedkin’s approach to demonic possession transcends mere cinematic horror to touch upon deeper societal issues.
Through an examination of the impact that The Exorcist and its portrayal of exorcism have had on real-life events, Whitfield raises crucial questions about the responsibilities of filmmakers when their work intersects with lived experiences of suffering and trauma. By situating Leap of Faith within a broader conversation about representation, belief, and the moral weight of storytelling, she invites readers to reconsider not only the film’s narrative but also its enduring consequences in the real world, ultimately asserting that true horror extends far beyond the screen.
Exorcisising The Exorcist, or why it’s hard to be fair
Leap Of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2020)
Warning: in this review I am going to describe awful, awful things being done to real-life people, including children. If that’s not something you’re up for reading about, I don’t blame you.
In Leap of Faith, William Friedkin says this to camera:
I’m not that attracted to ambiguity, but I do love it when an audience has their own interpretation of a film that I’ve made or that someone else had made. And I’ve always believed that what you bring to a film, especially like The Exorcist, what you bring to it is what you are going to take away from it.
We are going to bring some things to this discussion.
Leap of Faith
Alexandre O. Philippe is a documentary maker with an interest in pop culture, and from the way Leap of Faith turned out, a pretty good interviewer. We don’t see his face and seldom hear his voice, but it’s obvious that whatever questions he put to Friedkin set him at his ease, and the editing puts together a clear structure out of a discursive conversation, taking you through the film from beginning to end.
It concludes on a touching moment: Friedkin has talked previously about ‘grace notes’ in films, little moments that shine out to illumine the characters without having to contribute to the plot, and he finishes by talking about the ‘grace note’ of his own life, reflecting on human solitude in a Zen garden in Kyoto that he rather beautifully describes as ‘a garden of nothing but combed sand and stone.’ It’s a film of just one man talking, and it’s done well.
2017
Twenty-five-year-old Vilma Trujillo was taken to a remote cabin in her native Nicaragua, a place called Celestial Vision. She had been having some mental health problems. She also supposedly had relations with another man besides her partner, which might not have been consensual, but where she lived that didn’t stop the stigma. She’d recently joined a church, and they said they could cast out Vilma’s demons.
At some point she changed her mind and tried to fight free. They tied her to a pyre.
She survived her injuries long enough to try and comfort her five-year-old son. ‘The little pastors baptised me,’ she told him.
The burns that killed her covered 80% of her body. When asked why he did that to her, the pastor denied it: ‘The spirit lifted her up, she fell into the fire.’
The church that did this was the Assembly of God. It has millions of members worldwide, but it was founded in Arkansas, USA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/nicaragua_exorcism_vilma_trujillo_murder
Leap of Faith
Friedkin speaks as a passionate filmmaker: he had to be, because he wasn’t following any kind of template when he made The Exorcist. It’s a template now thanks to him – but at the time he was guided by his own artistic impulses, and by a taste infused with a love of the greats. He enthuses about Rembrandt and Caravaggio and Vermeer; he praises Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and cites in particular of the influence of the great Carl Theodor Dreyer. In particular he cites Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), a tale in which a woman dies and is resurrected in order to bring a man to faith.
I swear I’m not judging you
In this review I will be orrible righteous. I will very possibly make you feel judged, so to be clear, that is not what I’m trying to do. There’s a thing about exorcism movies that bothers me, but if you like The Exorcist and I don’t, it doesn’t make me morally superior. What you watch and who you are are different things, and plenty of its fans are probably better people than me.
As a token of good faith, here: if you want an unambiguously positive review of The Exorcist I recommend the excellent YouTube channel Acolytes of Horror for a fresh and perceptive take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpKzY1yBpXg&t=2s. The reviewer grew up in Evangelical Christianity and is not given to letting corrupt faith off the hook, but he has much to say in praise of The Exorcist and it’s all interesting.
Leap of Faith
In the interview Friedkin talks interestingly about the people he collaborated with: his complete faith in cameraman Ricky Bravo’s ability to capture documentary-style takes without needing Friedkin’s direction, his struggle to find a composer who could match the style he wanted, his close collaboration with William Blatty, author of the book The Exorcist was based on, ‘who I love and respect and love like a brother.’ Blatty is referenced as someone he consulted throughout, and Friedkin presents them as coming from the same emotional place: a deep identification with the exorcist himself, Father Karras (Jason Miller). ‘One of the things that bonded Blatty and me,’ Friedkin remarked, reflecting on Karras’s backstory, ‘was a love of our mothers.’
Karras is the hero of the film, and Friedkin is openly drawn to the character. He speaks with respect of other actors, but the tale of casting Miller is dwelled on, and it’s Karras’s pain, Karras’s faith, Karras’s sacrifice, that he returns to over and over. Finding the right actor to portray all that was ‘another gift from the movie god,’ Friedkin says.
He hasn’t mentioned God very much up till then.
Half an hour in is his first foray into the subject, and again, his attention isn’t really on religion itself: he talks of how Max von Sydow struggled to thunder the words of the exorcism, and when he pleaded with von Sydow to explain what he needed to get the performance, this is what happened:
‘“I guess what it is,”’ [von Sydow told him,] ‘“is that I just don’t believe in God.”
… I said, “But you played Jesus in the movie The Greatest Story Ever Told!”
He said, “Yes, I played him as a man, not as a god.”
…I said, “Well, play this guy as a man.”
…I don’t understand that … His reason for not being able to do it was so foreign to me, because what is an actor doing? Acting!”’
And having mulled it over, he concludes that von Sydow’s problem might have been stylistic rather than philosophical, because the lines called for a less understated performance than von Sydow’s usual register.
Was that von Sydow’s problem?
Because there might be another explanation: perhaps von Sydow was struggling to believe that the heroic priest is, in that moment, actually doing the right thing bellowing at a child tied to a bed?
Who can say? Nobody was in von Sydow’s head. But that it doesn’t occur to Friedkin at all is a little notable.
1949
The story of The Exorcist was based on the exorcism of Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. At the age of fourteen Ronald supposedly began to experience ‘poltergeist’ phenomena. He was subjected to more than twenty rituals over the course of three months.
After the story came out, although he wasn’t named until after his death, he was always afraid someone would identify and bother him. ‘He had a terrible life from worry, worry, worry,’ a friend of his told the press.
‘It was all concocted,’ he later told her. ‘I was just a bad boy.’
https://nypost.com/2021/12/20/is-the-exorcist-a-true-story-what-happened-to-ronald-hunkeler/
Leap of Faith
Including credits, Leap of Faith comes in just under an hour and forty-four minutes. It’s an hour and thirteen minutes before it chooses to address the question of whether Friedkin believed in the case or not.
‘I couldn’t be a film director if I was a sceptic,’ Friedkin says. ‘I did not approach The Exorcist as a non believer or a cynic. I approached it as a believer. And to direct the film like that I had to separate myself and my own emotions from the act itself … As I sit here now and talk about this film, probably in the mind’s eye of the people watching this, they’re wondering: Do I believe there is such a thing as demonic possession? I have no idea. It’s one of the mysteries.’
He refers to the original exorcist as ‘the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth’ – though elsewhere, as in the NY Post link above, he describes the original exorcists as Lutherans.
Amorth himself called The Exorcist ‘substantially exact’ if a bit exaggerated.
This was a man of strong opinions: he stood up against sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, saying ‘the Devil is at work inside the Vatican’; he also claimed that yoga was ‘satanic; it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter.’ (He was not standing up for trans rights when he said that.)
Amorth claimed, over the course of his lifetime, to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. That sounds like one of those exaggerated numbers: looking at his obituary I calculate that if he began at ordination and never retired he would have had to average nearly three a day including Sundays, and if he began when he was appointed Exorcist of the Diocese of Rome it would have had to be twice that number, so unless he did them in batches it’s probably the rhetoric of a man proud of his work rather than a literal estimate.
More realistically, though, he said that he thought only a hundred of those were genuine possessions.
A hundred people. Does anyone know how they are now?
2009
Interviewed in Time magazine that year, journalist Mark Baglio followed a Vatican-sponsored course on modern exorcisms. Strikingly, he reports that only those who don’t want an exorcism are exorcised:
‘They don’t come in and say, “Father, I’m being attacked by demons. You need to pray over me.” When someone says that to them, the priests immediately discounts that the problem is demonic.’
When it comes to the exorcism process he mentions ‘moaning and screaming,’ but patient consent does not interest him enough to discuss it in the interview.
Baglio wrote a book about his experiences called The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist. It was loosely adapted in 2011 to The Rite (Michael Hafstrom), in which a pregnant teenaged abuse survivor dies under the care of the exorcists and it proves that the exorcists are right to be doing what they’re doing.
https://time.com/archive/6914233/the-story-of-a-modern-day-exorcist
Leap of Faith
‘I filmed what purports to be an actual possession and exorcism by the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth,’ Friedkin tells Phillippe. ‘What I saw was extremely harrowing and convincing, but do I know what this was? No, I don’t. There are people who say, “I don’t buy into any this stuff…’ but they’re watching it.’
And of course, people are. It has, for instance, amazing special effects. ‘I came up with notion…’ Friedkin remarks, ‘that the makeup should be organic to something that Regan had done to herself, and it occurred to me that the makeup should grow out of that.’
Phillippe’s film is generally tasteful, but it lingers rather too long on a close-up of Linda Blair’s bloodied crotch after the infamous ‘crucifix’ scene in which she does things to herself. It wasn’t necessary to zoom in. She was, at the time of filming, fourteen years old.
‘Gangrenous self-inflicted wounds,’ Friedkin remarks, pleased with the coherent aesthetic this gave the film.
2000
Eight-year-old Victoria Climbié was tortured to death by her great-aunt and her great-aunt’s boyfriend in ways I honestly don’t want to describe. They claimed they were doing it because she was possessed by demons.
Victoria’s small body was covered with injuries, obvious well before her death. But Pastor Pascal Orombe, the preacher who was ‘too busy’ to report what he saw, told the inquiry that these wounds were proof that she was possessed.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/feb/04/1
Leap of Faith
It’s tough to be an exorcist in The Exorcist; Friedkin talks a lot about Karras’s anguish. Phillippe cuts in a shot from the film earlier too, priests discussing bringing in Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), who has exorcised before. ‘The exorcism supposedly lasted a month,’ one says. ‘Heard it damn near killed him.’
We do not hear how close it came to killing the victim.
1976
Anneliese Michel died in Germany. She was a devout Catholic girl who suffered from epileptic psychosis, and for years had been struggling because her condition resisted treatment. Her behaviour grew stranger and more disturbed; her beloved faith began to suffer as she hallucinated around churches and religious symbols; she felt separated from God by terrible visions. When she and her family appealed for an exorcism, the church eventually arranged one.
One exorcism turned into sixty-seven.
Annaliese stopped eating. She didn’t get enough water. She got pneumonia. She underwent so many genuflections that her knees ruptured. She was twenty-three years old when she died.
In 2005 Scott Derrickson directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which claimed to be based on the Michel case. The demons of Emily Rose are real, they cause the heroine’s death, and in the subsequent courtroom drama her priest is sentenced only to time served and her parents never even charged. The defence lawyer argues for acquittal because – was it demons? ‘I cannot deny,’ she says, ‘that it’s possible.’ The jury is swayed.
The priests and parents who broke Annaliese Michel’s body over ten agonising months were convicted of negligent homicide, and although the judge sentenced them leniently, he also put on record that if she’d been taken to a doctor even ten days earlier, she might have been saved.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=AcJdAAAAIBAJ&pg=5443%2C5231320
Leap of Faith
Friedkin’s identification with Father Karras is clear in the interview. He mentions Karras beating Regan at the end of the movie only briefly, dismissing it as ‘probably the demonic impulse’, but is more preoccupied with the question of whether Karras’s leap from the window can be considered the Catholic sin of suicide.
Here’s what he has to say about Regan’s perspective, the perspective of the exorcisee:
At one point he describes her as being ‘victimised by the separation of her parents.’
That’s it. That’s all he has to say about what it means to be the child tied to the bed.
Friedkin presents as agnostic towards possessions, but deeply prepared to enter into the idea of them imaginatively. It’s a story of ‘sacrifice’, he says. But whose sacrifice? ‘Father Karras gives up his life, in his mind, for the life of this child that he’s never known at all. He knew only the possessed girl.’
The real child isn’t present for Karras. Nothing she undergoes during the possession and exorcism make it into this long interview.
2023
Joseph and Jodi Wilson were arrested in North Carolina. Their adopted son Skyler had died from ‘hypoxic brain injury’, which is a way of saying his brain couldn’t get the oxygen it needed to stay alive. He was found face down and ‘swaddled’ with a blanket and duct tape, in a home where police found ankle and wrist restraints.
The Wilsons were ‘exorcising’ Skyler. On the day of his death he was four years old.
That was two years ago.
It’s just one example. Google ‘children died during exorcism’ and you’ll find examples all over the world. It doesn’t go away.
https://people.com/crime/parents-charged-murder-4-year-old-son-dies-exorcisms/
‘Karras is the target of the demon,’ Friedkin explains with conviction. ‘Not the little girl … The demon moves right in and is trying to show Karras that his faith is worthless, useless, ineffective. That’s the purpose of the entire possession.’
And yes. Yes it is. Regan isn’t a victim, not really. She’s a mutilated telephone through which the real characters speak to each other.
It’s a rare genre in which the people doing the dehumanizing are spiritual heroes.
Carl Theodor Dreyer made other films about faith, films acknowledged as masterpieces. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), for instance, depicts the woman burned alive as an innocent martyr. Day of Wrath (1943) depicts a world in which accused ‘witches’ may have feelings of malice, and even perhaps supernatural power, but are driven to it by the abuse of their communities; evil in their world begins with the witch-hunters. But it’s Ordet that inspired The Exorcist: the story where a woman dies and revives to bring a man to God.
Regan is tormented to test Karras’s faith.
The Rite supports priests under whose care a pregnant kid dies.
In The Exorcism of Emily Rose the priest is portrayed as a martyr for facing trial.
Women and children suffer physically; men suffer spiritually, and it’s the latter that’s the real story. The screaming victim tied to a bed is just a body; what it undergoes doesn’t matter.
The film is called The Exorcist, after all. It isn’t called Regan.
Look: I want to be clear here.
I’m not saying The Exorcist is responsible for every person tormented, injured and killed by exorcists. That would be extremely naive. To trace how much influence the film had on the real world would be beyond my means and outside a reviewer’s scope, and even if they weren’t, things are never that simplistic.
But what I can do is respond as a viewer and say that knowing what I know, watching a film in which exorcists are the heroes – especially when purporting to be based on a true story – leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
If it doesn’t in yours that’s fine, and you’ll probably enjoy this documentary. It’s a decent softball interview. But if it does, Phillippe finds nothing to wash that taste away. It doesn’t even seem to have occurred to him to ask the questions that might have. Ronald Hunkeler’s repudiation of his ‘concocted’ possession came out in 2021 and Leap of Faith in 2020, but journalistic about it were not new. Here, for instance, is journalist Mark Opsasnick doing some thorough investigative journalism for Strange Magazine and finding people who knew the ‘possessed’ boy saying they thought he was faking; the article is copyrighted 1999-2000:
http://www.strangemag.com/exorcistpage1.html
Had he seen it as relevant, Phillippe could have brought up decades’ worth of investigation into the ‘real’ case. And if he read the news he could have found and brought up any number of comparable ones; you can see the dates of real deaths I’ve included here. But he didn’t. The only person whose opinion he cared to ask about was Friedkin’s, and Friedkin wanted to talk about how much he loved Blatty and identified with Father Karras. It’s all very comfortable and friendly.
Children die of exorcisms. So do adults. People who don’t have power are set upon by people who do, and they die terrible deaths.
At the opening of Leap of Faith, Friedkin describes how he pretty much invented the genre out of sheer film-making talent. ‘I don’t think there’s any conscious meaning behind my choices,’ he says. ‘…I was just following my instinct and I believe that’s what happened throughout the entire film.’
Artistically, those instincts were outstanding. There are so many films trying to do what he did.
So many heroic male exorcists sacrificing themselves over the disputed territory of women and children’s mangled bodies.
There is a horror in the world, and it’s almost entirely absent from film.
I can think of three examples to set against the entire genre of demon movies: The Devils (1971, Ken Russell), Requiem (2006, Hans-Christian Schmid), and Beyond The Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu). Of those, only The Devils is in English; Requiem is German and Beyond The Hills Romanian, and even The Devils was an English-American co-production. If you can think of a Hollywood example please tell me. Hollywood seems to love its demons.
Here’s what they have in common: they were not inspired by The Exorcist. They were all based on real events where somebody died, and they take that responsibility seriously.
All three films are excellent, though this being a horror page I should note that none are strictly horror; they tend more towards the arthouse.
The Devils is the most openly horrific: it’s a stylised depiction of a 17th-century judicial murder that took place in the French town of Loudun, where a controversial priest called Urbain Grandier was tortured and executed for ‘possessing’ a convent of nuns – though even at the time it was clearly an excuse for getting rid of a man who’d made powerful political enemies.
It’s Ken Russell in the 70s, so you should prepare yourself for wild extremes and less-than-PC depictions of female characters; the nuns’ performances, even star Vanessa Redgrave’s, are riotously physical with little interest in anything about them except their repressed sexuality. But it’s a stunning work with astonishing sets by Derek Jarman and a rabid score by Peter Maxwell Davies and it knows exactly what it wants to say, and even today you can’t get an uncut version in the UK because it caused so much shock. Mary Whitehouse wanted it banned, which is pretty much always a badge of honour. Brace yourself and watch it.
It is emphatic that the ‘possession’ was induced by the ‘exorcists’, who were ruthless, self-advancing torturers.
Requiem is another portrait of Annaliese Michel, the young German woman exorcised to death whose ‘true story’ was told in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. But where Emily Rose boasts of being based on a true story, Requiem has the respect to state in its title cards that the events are fictionalised. And where Emily Rose is loud and splashy, Requiem is saturated with regret.
It doesn’t pretend to be accurate, but it takes the story seriously. We see a sincere young woman exhausted by years of illness and family tensions. Her faith is deep but not narrow: she’s a fan of her favourite saint in the same way other clever, passionate young women make heroes of Charlotte Brontë or Marie Curie.
She loves God and the world with equal candour, and she loves her neighbour. There’s a particularly touching scene where her best friend Hanna is prepared to write off her own academic potential, and Michaela (as she’s called here) produces a book on the life of her much-admired Saint Katharina.
The more worldly Hanna isn’t eager to be preached at – but no, Michaela has another point: don’t give up, look how much you can do when you use the time you have. And lo and behold, Hanna does use her time, and she succeeds. It’s a pure kind of witness, giving genuinely uplifting advice while meeting someone on their own terms.
Michaela is a good Christian – and she’s a Christian at her best when she’s well. She doesn’t need to do anything dramatic or martyr herself; her life holds its own light.
The priests who enter into the belief that she’s possessed aren’t sadists – but the film is clear that in exorcising her, they’re not being heroes. They’re being selfish. One is old and weak-willed and uncomfortable supporting so challenging a parishioner; the other is young and trying to shore up his own faith, looking for meaning in an uncertain world and succumbing to the temptation of finding it in her delusions.
Michaela’s illness is brutal and heartbreaking, and they haven’t the fortitude to accept that there isn’t an easy answer. To hold steady while a beautiful innocent struggles and suffers would involve facing a dark night of the soul – and faced with that test, their moral courage fails.
Where it counts, they don’t have the faith. That’s why they exorcise her.
Requiem isn’t interested in screams and vomiting: it ends at the moment when she decides she’s going to submit to martyrdom, because at that moment she’s a dead girl walking and we don’t need to watch her die. It’s a moving and thoughtful film that lives up to its title, putting real heart into giving an unhappy young woman dignity and understanding.
Beyond the Hills, 2012
Beyond The Hills is a tragedy, the tale of a world that can’t deal with its own damage. Two young Romanian women, Voichița and Alina, grew up together in an orphanage. (‘Voichița’ is pronounced ‘Voy-keet-sa.’) Alina went to work abroad; now she’s back and wants Voichița to come with her – but Voichița’s become a nun. And Alina’s in no state to cope with rejection.
Beyond The Hills was made in 2012 and it’s based on the Tanacu exorcism of 2005, which the film follows with, as far as I can tell, artistic license but reasonable faithfulness. By now you don’t need me to tell you that the real young woman, Maricica Irina Cornici, died at the hands of people who should have helped her.
Some say it was the exorcists who killed her; the autopsy at the time put it down to dehydration, exhaustion and a lack of oxygen. Some defenders blame her death on too much adrenaline in the ambulance; this is what coroner Dan Gheorghiu said in 2014. But even if that’s the true story, it was the exorcism that put in her that ambulance so deeply unconscious that the paramedics felt she needed six shots of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanacu_exorcism
So we start with Voichița and Alina. Even if you aren’t Romanian, if you’re over a certain age then hearing that they’re orphanage girls will tell you enough to break your heart. Ceaucescu’s dictatorship fell in 1989 and the conditions in Romanian orphanages appalled the world.
What has life been for these girls? They’re twenty-four or twenty-five and Alina, at least, was abandoned when she was six, so we know they were there when things were bad. And even after Ceaucescu’s fall, such things don’t mend overnight: I consulted with a Romanian friend of mine who has family in the Tanacu area, and her comment was that it’s only fairly recently things in orphanages really improved.
So we don’t need to be told the girls must have faced emotional neglect.
Sexual exploitation was also a fact of life back there, we hear, and it’s very obvious that the only person in the world either of them could count on was the other. They used to be lovers; they used to be each others’ real family.
Because for girls like them the world is one orphanage after another: it’s made up of places that don’t have enough resources to help. Ask the children’s home to keep sheltering you and they haven’t got room. Ask your foster family and they’ve already taken in another girl – foster kids are there to work more than to be loved. Ask the hospital for treatment and they’ll bounce you out as quickly as possible: they need the beds. Even at the end when the police arrest people, they’re already worrying about their next case before they’ve so much as dropped their detainees off at the station.
The world does not have a place for these girls.
So you can see why Voichița has settled into the convent and plans to stay there. Other orphanage girls want in too: the convent is as broke as everywhere else and it’s an insular life – the priest boasts of having lived entirely in Romania and all the nuns nod complacently as he lambasts the decadence of a West they’ve never seen – but it’s a home. Voichița has faith, but more than that she’s obviously institutionalised: a place that gives her rules is what she’s used to, and at least the convent presents itself as a family of sorts. Everybody wants you to be somebody else’s problem, but God will never abandon you.
Alina, though, is still in love with Voichița with the desperate love of a girl who has nobody else in the world, and she becomes frantic with pain at the thought of being left alone. She also seems to have some degree of schizophrenia – this was the case with Irina, the real victim, and we do see the doctor prescribe Alina some antipsychotics. He just spends as little time on it as anyone does on Alina: he writes out a scrip for the pills without any further medical advice and tells the convent to take her away.
But the convent doesn’t know what to do with a girl this sick, and their religion is hardline: the priest insists it’s a sin even to go into a non-Orthodox church, never mind anything more drastic. My Romanian friend remarks that while everyone in Tanacu knows what happened to Irina, exorcisms aren’t unknown in the neighbourhood and many people, especially the older generations, take possessions seriously.
‘This story came to light because she died,’ she told me, ‘but I’m sure there’s many other things like this happening behind closed doors.’
Alina is more than the convent can handle and she has needs they don’t feel called upon to meet. It’s easier to blame the Devil. It’s winter and she has a chest infection and she can’t regulate her behaviour. And without help from anyone who knows what they’re doing, it’s terrifying how easily somebody can die on you.
It’s a heartbreaking tale of people living under chronic deprivation who don’t have any solution for those who can’t bear it. It’s extremely good and very sad and, as with the other two, you should seek it out.
Oh, and in 2017 Xavier Gens directed another film supposedly based on Irina’s death called The Crucifixion in which the demons are real and the exorcist is a hero, because of course someone did.
I don’t have a happy ending for this review.
It’s hard to make a horror film about demonic possession and put the blame where it lies. Friedkin made a film so incredibly accomplished that it casts an endless shadow, and it’s so tempting to allow the supernatural to add some extra drama. As Friedkin describes himself, instinct and imagination guided him: ‘more interested in spontaneity than perfection,’ he made good artistic choice after good artistic choice, and he interviews in Leap of Faith with the contented satisfaction of a man with no doubts over whether he did good work.
You know, they used to believe witches could possess people too. The ‘possessions’ could be every bit as dramatic as ‘demon’ ones; thrashings and screams and exhortations. But high and low culture are in agreement on something: when Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible or Michael Reeves directed Witchfinder General they were clear a witchfinder is a villain.
Enjoy The Exorcist. Admire The Exorcist. It’s the skilled work of a highly talented and dedicated filmmaker. And if you’re a Friedkin fan you’ll probably enjoy Leap of Faith. Just . . . seek out some other perspectives as well, okay?
Kit Whitfield’s “What’s On Shudder” articles are a must-read for any horror enthusiast looking to enhance their streaming experience. These articles offer a comprehensive guide to the latest and most exciting horror films available on Shudder TV, diving deep into the genre’s rich tapestry. One of the standout features of Whitfield’s work is her unwavering passion for horror, which resonates throughout her writing. She not only highlights key films but also provides insightful commentary on themes, directors, and the evolution of horror as a genre.
Additionally, her articles often include hidden gems and lesser-known films that might be overlooked in the crowded streaming landscape. This can lead to discovering unique stories and innovative filmmaking that challenge conventional horror tropes. Whitfield’s expertise ensures that readers gain a better understanding of the films’ cultural significance and artistic merits.
For both die-hard horror fans and newcomers alike, checking out “What’s On Shudder” is an invaluable resource for finding thought-provoking content that goes beyond mere scares. Her engaging style and knowledgeable perspectives make the horror genre accessible to everyone. Whether you’re in search of a terrifying thrill or a deeper exploration of cinematic horror, Whitfield’s articles are the perfect companion for your Shudder journey.
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