The Exorcist: Believer opened in theaters just a couple of weeks ago, reminding us that if you don’t want to get possessed, you should probably just stay in church forever (just kidding—that doesn’t help either, apparently!). The new film tries (and mostly fails, unfortunately) to push The Exorcist mythology beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church, bringing in everything from Pentecostalism to Voodoo to compel the demon that is tormenting two young girls.
The “Jesus Avengers” approach sounds like a terrific idea on paper but the new film bungles the execution. Possession films in the Catholic tradition are working from a particular set of themes, tropes, and assumptions about how spirits interact with humans. Those assumptions have shaped American cinema—they show up in everything from The Exorcism of Emily Rose to The Last Exorcist to The Conjuring-verse films… even Dr. Evil knows to call for an old priest and a young priest.
When the strange becomes familiar, it loses its ability to terrify (maybe that’s why repeating “The power of Christ compels you” over and over again drives the demon out?). Fortunately, the Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on demonic possession or on exorcism rites—let’s take a look at several possession films where both the spirits and the rites of exorcism exist outside of Christianity. With different rules and expectations, these films offer fresh scares, just in time for Halloween…
It Lives Inside (2023)
Originally titled The Pishach, this film explores an Indian American community that is infested by a spirit—the pishachi—that is drawn to negative energy. Indian American teens navigating the tensions between traditions and assimilation to majority culture prove to be a bountiful feeding ground. The film is buoyed by terrific performances by Mohana Krishan and Megan Suri who play (respectively) Tamira, who discovers the pishach, and Samidha, who must figure out how to battle the spirit.
Unlike a demon, which typically must be invited in and then torments its victim, the pishach seeks out a person who is already experiencing negative emotions. The pishach then isolates and torments that person before ultimately feeding on their spirit; It Lives Inside paints a particularly vivid picture of this process. Unlike a demon in Christian theology, the pishach cannot be destroyed or dispatched; it must be trapped and controlled either in a container—a mason jar in the film—or in the body of a particularly holy person.
Here the two cultures overlap somewhat—the Catholic exorcism rites in The Exorcist are clear and systematic. It Lives Inside introduces a Sanskrit prayer that gives the petitioner some degree of ability to resist and even control the pishach. The possibility to trap a pishach inside a holy person echoes the end of The Exorcist, when Father Karras allows the demon Pazuzu to possess him. But Karras immediately throws himself down those famous steps, dispatching the demon by ending his own life. Hindu spirituality is less binary than Christian theology, so a sufi who traps a pishach within themselves need not destroy themselves.
It Lives Inside is effective in large part because of how its central theme—the tension between tradition and assimilation—mirrors the film’s deployment of a distinctively Hindu spirit into classic American possession film tropes.
Blood Flower (2023)
This Malaysian film is an Islamic possession story. Iqbal’s mother is a powerful exorcist who dies in a battle with a malevolent entity. Iqbal has inherited her ability to see demons and other supernatural beings, which terrifies him. He asks his father, Norman, to bind his abilities, and his father does so. Of course the spirit itself isn’t finished with Iqbal, so the central conflict of the film becomes how both Iqbal and his father come to terms with Iqbal’s spiritual abilities.
Blood Flower might best be compared to the Insidious franchise, which centers around Dalton’s parents (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) working to keep him safe given the boy’s ability to astral project. Additionally, the spirit that possesses in Blood Flower is a ghost, not a demon, similar to Parker Crane in the Insidious films.
What sets Blood Flower apart from the majority of possession films is its Islamic perspective, which invests spiritual authority not in someone who is particularly spiritually potent—a psychic or clergyperson, for instance—but rather in the power found in submission to God’s path. As Norman and Iqbal uncover the ghost’s origins and goals, Iqbal realizes he must embrace his mystical abilities. But he can only do this by submitting to his father’s authority over him. Iqbal pleads with Norman to unbind his powers and Norman does so, leading his son in Qur’anic recitation to exorcise the spirit. Notably, Norman doesn’t have the same mystical powers as his wife and son; his ability to bind or release his son’s powers flows from his identity as Iqbal’s father and therefore spiritual authority.
The Vigil (2021)
The Vigil garnered some attention as a horror film that’s also a distinctively Jewish story, steeped in history, legend, and religious traditions. It centers on Yakov, a young Hasidic man who has forsaken many of the traditional ways of his community. He’s having trouble thriving in the outside world, however, so he takes a job as a shomer, who is paid to sit overnight with the body of a deceased person if no other close friends or relatives are available to do so. This particular corpse belongs to a survivor of Buchenwald, where he became haunted by a malevolent spirit called a mazzik (“destroyer”). The Talmud says little about the nature of mazzikim, which gave writer/director Keith Thomas room to explore trauma and horror from a specifically Jewish perspective.
The Vigil engages with antisemitism, both in the form of the horrors of the Holocaust and the ongoing real dangers Jews face today. It offers a meditation on the tension between faithfulness to tradition and being trapped in the past (the mazzik’s head is facing backwards, in case you didn’t catch the more subtle clues to this theme). Ultimately, the exorcism rite feels similar to what we see in The Exorcist, with tefillin replacing crucifixes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—not every exorcism has to be as gonzo as The Exorcism of Emily Rose or The Offering, a more recent (2023) Jewish horror film that’s more esoteric in scope than The Vigil.
The Wailing (2016)
This South Korean possession film is a sprawling, twisting conflict between traditional Korean religion and Christianity. Set in the village of Gokseong (a name which means “the wailing” or “the sound of crying” in Korean), the film centers on Jong-goo, a police officer whose daughter becomes possessed. He looks both to Christian and Shamanistic traditions to free his daughter, and the exorcism scenes are genuinely terrifying—all the more so for viewers like me who are so saturated in the familiar Catholic exorcism rites (on film only, I swear!) we think little can shock us.
The Wailing plays on stereotypes and expectations in order to keep Jong-goo (and the audience) continually off-balance. He’s never quite sure what the right decision is, and we’re not either. Between the mysterious woman in white called Moo-Myeong (“no name”) and a (possibly demonic?) Japanese stranger, between his Christian uncle and the Shaman, Jong-goo is a man torn and confused, and we, the viewers, have no idea who to trust. This ambiguity seems to offer a window into the generation of Koreans who were born between the war that divided their country and the period of economic prosperity and ever-increasing dominance of Western culture of recent years. No wonder the movie is so unsettled, and so unsure about both traditional Korean religion and the Christianity imported from the West.
When Evil Lurks (2023)
If you’re fortunate, you might be able to catch writer/director Demian Rugna’s latest film in theaters. If not, you’ll have to wait until the end of the month, when it arrives on Shudder as the streamer’s first Spanish-language original. Set in a small Argentine village, When Evil Lurks centers on two brothers who discover one of their neighbors is, per the subtitles, a “possessed one.” The Spanish word, embichado (from bicho, “bug”) is probably better rendered “infested.” In their attempt to deal with this demonic infestation, the brothers unleash the contagion, which spreads and soon becomes overwhelming.
Early in the film, one of the brothers suggests they find a priest; the other replies that “churches are dead.” It’s hard not to see echoes of the coronavirus pandemic in the way the demonic infestation spreads from person to person, with some precious few remaining mysteriously immune. And while religion is entirely absent from the film apart from that one line, I couldn’t help but remember how many churches enabled the spread of the pandemic, both through refusing, in the name of religious freedom, to close down, and in encouraging adherents to ignore safety protocols like mask mandates and social distancing. But again, that’s all far below the surface. When Evil Lurks is bleak in the way the Evil Dead movies are bleak, and shocking and brutal in the way of the best slasher films.
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What other possession films should be on this list? What sets them apart from more traditional possession films? Let’s discuss in the comments…
JR. Forasteros cut his teeth on Goosebumps books and Sword of Shannara. These days, he’s a pastor, author of Empathy for the Devil and scifi/fantasy junkie in Dallas, TX. Once he makes it through his to-read list, he plans to die historic on the Fury Road. Find him on Instagram or on the Fascinating Podcast where he is a co-host.
