Monday Mini: What Possession Movie Tropes Say About Us

A lot of movies about possession have been in the news lately, from The Exorcist to Talk To Me. But who gets possessed and why? Are these movies inherently conservative? 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie. I'm welcome to Stuff One Never
Told You production of iHeartRadio. Yes, I'm still by myself.
Samantha is down for the count with COVID right now.

(00:26):
We've got a lot of travel coming up, so trying
to get ahead. And I will say for this episode,
I am largely quoting one article from tour dot com
called from the Exorcist to talk to me. Possession Films
teach us to Fear the Wrong Things by j R. Farasteros.

(00:47):
I hope I got that someone correct. That my good
friend Barry sent to me because he knows I love
all things possession, which is funny. I thought it was
kind of appropriate because we're wrapping up our religious miniseries Promise.
But I'm not religious. I am not religious at all,

(01:08):
but I do find myself drawn to these stories and
we're really focusing on Western Christian ideas of possession for this.
My mom wouldn't let me watch The Exorcist. She wouldn't
let me have it in her house because she was

(01:28):
so afraid of it. And I have just found myself
gravitating to a lot of these stories sometimes and sometimes
that gives me pause. I'm like, why am I being
drawn to this when I'm not religious, and I think
that's you know, I don't believe in ghosts either, but
I love ghost movies, so I don't think that's necessarily strange,

(01:52):
but it is strange when a lot of Christian law
is wrapped up in it. One of my favorite movies
now is The Exorcist, And another reason this was on
my mind is because William Friedkin has died recently, and
I also happened to see the new movie Talk to
Me with some friends. There will be minor spoilers for

(02:14):
that in here, but not that many. But when I
was watching it, it just occurred to me a lot
of the stuff in this article, a lot from these
quotes we're going to read that I was kind of like, huh,
it's interesting who gets possessed in a lot of these movies?

Speaker 2 (02:33):
What that says.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
So that being said, let us start with our first quote.
Possession films are inescapably religious. What that means changes from
generation to generation and from culture to culture. As fans
of South Korea as the Whaling can attest, The Exorcist
is undeniably the grandfather of possession films as a subgenre.

(02:55):
Directed by William Friedkin. The Axiosist was released in nineteen
seventy three, and it's based on a book of the
same name written by William Peter Blattie that was released
in nineteen seventy one. The Exorcist was a box office juggernaut,
becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, a title
it held for forty years, and receiving ten Oscar nominations,

(03:15):
including Best Picture. Now, if you haven't read about this
movie and the reactions people had when it came out,
they're quite dramatic. People were getting sick, they were passing
out like it was a very intense and for some people,
very formative experience. I remember when I first started at

(03:38):
this job, I asked my coworkers what was the scariest
movie they'd ever seen. I'd say over half of them
said The Exorcist. Then I would not describe them as religious.
And it's just fascinating to me that it had that
much of an impact. And I do think it's important

(04:00):
to keep in mind the time when this came out,
and who was being possessed, what was the story going
on behind it in terms of You've got your single
mother who is a career woman and her sweet daughter
is the one that gets possessed. So that being said,

(04:22):
here's another quote to that point. The Exorcist is a
baby boomer horror movie. Through and through the good guys
here are the institutional church embodied by the two priests.
Both the book and film were released in a time
of cultural anxiety, particularly with regard to religion. The FDA
authorized the birth control pill a decade later in nineteen sixty,

(04:45):
which gave women control over their reprojective system for the
first time in history, with predictable outcomes. Not just the
free love movement of the sixties, but a massive change
in marriage habits and the twenty years after the pill
was released, divorce rates more than doubled, are the percentage
of adults over eighteen who are married. Plummeted into this milieu,

(05:06):
Laddie and Friedkin give us the story of a broken
home in which a young girl is tormented by puberty
demon and can only find solace when a father comes
into the house. As Jude Doyle explains in Dead Blondes
and Bad Mothers, Reagan's smooth baby skin erupts and scabs
over into weeping, discolored mess. She has outbursts of temper,

(05:29):
insults and resists authority figures, makes display of sheer pointless defiance.
She talks obsessively about sex, mostly to shock people. She masturbates,
she bleeds from her vagina. In other words, Reagan becomes
a teenager. Her demon is puberty. And yeah, I would
also add she curses a lot. That's kind of a

(05:49):
plot point. Is like, oh, she's cursing now. Basically she
goes from like your very innocent and heavy quotes young child,
too not messy, angry, somewhat violent. I don't know, maybe
I'm being too nice, violent, obsessed with sex, yeah, obsessed

(06:14):
with shocking people, like saying things to shock people. And
she she is like, she's at the right age for
puberty for sure, and she does. I thought that was
interesting pointing out like the father has to come into
the house. I hadn't really thought about that. And I
also want to come back and do a follow up
episode about nuns now that the nun has become this

(06:35):
horror icon and talk about nuns and horror. But yeah,
that's how she's saved. As a father comes into this
house with where her biological father is notably accent, she
gets the church father is the one that saves her.
The quote continues. The Exorcist is family based on a

(06:56):
true story and exorcism performed in Saint Louis in nineteen
forty nine. The real child was a boy, not a girl,
and he came from a two parent home. The framework
that resonated so strongly with moviegoers in nineteen seventy three
was entirely artifice, a reflection not of the true story,
but of white American anxieties. So yeah, I mean, that's

(07:18):
interesting that they thought this would hit more with audiences
that it was a young girl. And in a lot
of the exorcism movies I've seen, it is often a
young girl or young woman. I had a friend say
to me recently, why is I think he was talking
about Monster Squad. It's been a long time since I've

(07:38):
seen Monster Squad. But why did the virgin have to
be a woman? Why? What? There is a lot of
male virgins about? But yeah, I mean, I think that
goes back to the ultimate corruption, And a lot of
our horror is young, usually white girls who are innocent.

(08:00):
But when it happens with men, I feel like it's
much more often uses they kill their whole family or
something are a very violence, whereas with women it's much
more like take their soul. That's just my experience.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
There's a lot of movies about possession and extorcism.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
The quote continues. Compare that to James Wand's twenty thirteen
The Conjuring, also based on a true story, though set
in the early nineteen seventies, the Conjuring embodies the anxieties
of millennials rather than their boomer parents. The Warrens contact
the Catholic Church to obtain an exorcism, but because the
parent family isn't Catholic, approval for the right must come

(08:50):
from the Vatican, and the Warrens are convinced the family
won't survive long enough for that approval to come. In
the reality, the child of another family did die in
Bashida's care, and she was tried for murder, with rumors
swirling that she had sacrificed the child in an act
of witchcraft. The court found her innocent, however, But yeah,
that movie is very much my friends and I like

(09:12):
to joke again, I enjoy this movie, but we like
to joke that it's sort of like superhero Christians like
swooping in and it is that the first one is
very much about motherhood, and that's sort of how it's
like Bashievah's ultimate sin is that she's killing these children,

(09:35):
and that's how they save the main woman, the mother
of the family, is they remind her of like how
important her children are to her, which is not necessarily
a bad storyline. It's just worth examining why that is.
There's also a lot of messaging about the dangers of
not following God. There's a whole warning about you, you know,

(09:58):
you need to get your children baptized or else, sort
of almost blaming them like this wouldn't have happened if
you had followed God. The quote continues ed Warren is
successful not because of the church, but despite the Church.
What matters in the conjuring is not religious affiliation but belief,

(10:18):
a particularly millennial attitude embodied by the phrase spiritual but
not religious. Nearly a third Millennials claim no religious affiliation,
compared with just thirteen percent of boomers and twenty percent
of Gen X, whose defining possession film might be the
middle finger to the American dream that is Beetlejuice. And
I think that's really fascinating. I think that's interesting to

(10:39):
look in how it's shifted with generations, because I would agree.
When I read that the whole spiritual but not religious,
I was like, yeah, that describes a lot of my friends.
I even I remember having a very long conversation with
a big group of my friends about this movie that
was pretty much about like the Vatican was trying to

(10:59):
cover up this lost I don't know part of the Bible,
and the lost part of the Bible was just saying,
like the religion is, it's not the church, it's not
the stone, it's not the building that is spiritual or
religious or is going to save you. It's within you.

(11:20):
It's being spiritual. And it was funny to me because
I can't even remember the day. If I just tried
to some of you, I bet some of you do know, right,
But it wasn't like a really well known movie, but
a lot of us have seen it and had heard
that part like yeah, resonated, But the quote continues to

(11:41):
generalize a bit. Boomers love church. Gen Z rebelled against church.
Millennials look for spirituality outside of church. Gen Z doesn't
think about church much at all, which there has been
a lot of headlines about that recently. I've I've seen
quite a few, and we have been talking about that
in our religious mini series. Okay, and then here is

(12:02):
final quote. It's perhaps an unavoidable feature of possession films
that they teach us to be afraid of the wrong things.
Often what's implicitly demonized is equality and dignity, single parents,
female sexuality, grief. We didn't even cover how insidious chapter
two demonizes transgender people. Possession films, whether intentionally or not,

(12:23):
communicate that a world without institutionalized faith is a world
where we're at the mercy of evil powers that wish
to do as harm. But when the institutions we're told
should protect us prey upon us instead, maybe it's time
to take our chances. Possession films, even those as groundbreaking
as talked to me, are conservative at their heart, But
maybe gen Z has the right of it. Perhaps those

(12:45):
institutions that have proven themselves so untrustworthy aren't worthy of conservation,
which I think relates back to what we've been talking
about in this religious mini series, that we have so
many examples of harm that these institutions have done, and
that's not to say they haven't done good, and that

(13:08):
that inherently makes religious people somehow wrong or something like that.
Not at all. I think it's just questioning, as always,
these messages that are being communicated to us through entertainment
that we enjoy, which I enjoy. Like I said, the
Exorcist is one of my favorite horror movies of all time.
I really love the conjuring it, but it has always

(13:31):
struck me who is targeted, who is possessed? Who does
the saving? And that sort of message is still there,
and I think a lot of us recognize that. I
think a lot of us recognize that it's often very
conservative in nature of like, oh, why does it have
to be a virginal girl who gets possessed and is

(13:54):
being tempted that going through puberty aka a demon? I
think a lot of us know that. But I just
wanted to bring that up because I have been thinking
about it recently, and in case anyone else has any
other thoughts about it, maybe you remember the name of
that movie I was talking about. I'm sure it's gonna

(14:14):
count of you right after this is over, or if
you have any suggestions, Samantha and I would love them.
I'm really sad she wasn't here for this one, but
we'll have to come back to it in the meantime.
You can email us at Stefida moms Stuff at iHeartMedia
dot com. You can find us on Twitter at mom
Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff One.
Never Told You we have at public store and a
book that you can buy at stuff You Should Read

(14:37):
books dot com. Thanks as always to our super producer Christina,
our executive producer Maya, and our contributor Joey, and thanks
to you for listening. Stephan Never Told You is production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcast on my heart Radio, you
can check out the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye