Parva Disputatio: On the Subject of Exorcism In Fiction

[Epeolatrix]

Exorcism in popular culture covers a wide range of media. This topic is for discussions of all that sort of thing. What are your favorite books about exorcism? Favorite movies?

[Lisin]

Lets start this over.

This is a place to discuss Exorcism in pop-culture. It is not a place to debate whether the Catholic Rite of Exorcism is good/bad/abuse/BS/whatever. 

Things like "I really liked The Conjuring Part 2" = fine.

Things like "I think Exorcism is barbaric and should be outlawed, Catholics are terrible if they believe in this" = Going to get deleted/warned.

We're not going to debate religion here. We're going to talk about a TV show. 

[Epeolatrix]

One of my favorite takes on exorcism in pop culture is the novel "A Head Full of Ghosts" by Paul Tremblay. The premise is that Marjorie, the older of two daughters in a family, becomes mentally ill or possessed. To raise money for her medical care, the family agrees to take part in a reality show, and things go very very wrong. We see everything from the point of view of a now-adult Merry, the younger of the daughters, and she's not exactly the most reliable of narrators.

This all takes place in our modern world wherein the tropes of possession and exorcism are so well-known from the movies that we're encouraged to see all of this as the mentally ill older daughter acting out, even as we learn of deeply spooky incidents from the memory of the younger one. Because this is considered a genre book, we as readers can't be sure what's going on because either option is just as viable. I really enjoyed the intensely creepy parts, the uncertain reality, and Merry's self-awareness about living in such a peculiar situation.

[Lisin]

Well, you just convinced me of the book I'm reading next!

I love an exorcism story in anything and I really did just watch The Conjuring 2 and found it quite good! I liked it better than the first one actually. 

[Epeolatrix]

I like the two Conjuring movies, preferring the film Warrens to the real Warrens, but I couldn't get into The Conjuring 2 as much because I knew they didn't really have anything to do with the Enfield Poltergeist case. It's a dumb thing to get hung up on, I know.

Another one I like is The Last Exorcism. While I liked this on its own as a story, I'm unduly influenced by liking the documentary that inspired it, Marjoe. Marjoe Gortner was ordained as an evangelical preacher at the age of 4 and became a celebrity of the revival circuit. After his father disappeared with some $3 million of Marjoe's earnings, he grew disillusioned and took a break from preaching. When he came back, it was for the money and with rock-star-style performances. Having a crisis of conscience, he decided to allow a pair of documentary filmmakers to get a behind-the-scenes look at the whole operation.  This set-up inspired the initial structure of the movie and lead character, but then things start to go really weird. Especially the end, which almost seems to come from an entirely different film, but it works. Mostly.

[Epeolatrix]

Here are my favorite books specifically on The Exorcist: both making of the main film, and then critical analysis of the book and film series.

The Exorcist: BFI Modern Classics series by Mark Kermode. The author is an extreme fanboy of this film. He was instrumental in getting a restored version of the movie back to cinema screens, and his documentary "The Fear of God: 25 Years of The Exorcist" is awesome and you should watch it.

The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows by Bob McCabe. This is a straight-forward "making of" book, with added information about the other stories in Blatty's faith trilogy (The Ninth Configuration and Legion [filmed as The Exorcist III]).

The Exorcist: Studies in the Horror Film series edited by Danel Olson. This book is 516 pages of essays on all four of the Exorcist movies. It's out of print and stupidly expensive online, but if you can get a copy somehow, it's worth it.