SMNTY Classics: 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? Learn more in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. What coome stuff? I
never told you, but actuld buy Heart Radio now here
is a classic. We have to revisit, Samantha, because you
were not with me. You had COVID, and I recorded

(00:27):
this by myself, and I think you would have a
lot of thoughts about it. It is about what possession
movie tropes say about us. Oh yeah, who gets possessed?
Why did they get possessed? Yeah, all of those things.
And this was a Monday mini so I think there's
a lot of room too. Okay, you know what we're

(00:49):
putting it in here. It's going to be in our
October episodes. We're going to do this one. Yeah. I
think there's a lot to say. I have thought excellent.
Well until then, listeners, please enjoy this classic episode. Hey
this is Annie. I'm welcome to stefan Never Told You
production of iHeart Radio. Yes, I am still by myself.

(01:22):
Samantha is down for the count with COVID. Right now.
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

(01:42):
called from the Exorcist to talk to me Possession Films
teach Us to Fear the Wrong Things by j R. Farasteros.
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,

(02:07):
but I'm not religious. I am not religious at all,
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 Exorcisse. She wouldn't

(02:28):
let me have it in her house because she was
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

(02:48):
I love ghost movies, so I don't think that's necessarily strange,
but it is strange when a lot of Christian war
is wrapped up in it. One of my favorite movies
now is The X. 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

(03:12):
Me with some friends. There will be minor spoilers for
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?

(03:35):
What that says. 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's The Whaling can attest,
The Exiorcist is undeniably the grandfather of possession films as

(03:55):
a subgenre. Directed by William Friedkin, The Axiosist was really
at least 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, including Best Picture. Now, if

(04:21):
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 this job, I asked

(04:44):
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 a impact.
And I do think it's important to keep in mind
the time when this came out, and who was being possessed,

(05:07):
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, here's another quote to that point.

(05:28):
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, which gave women control over their reproductive

(05:50):
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 that the pill was released, divorce rates more than doubled,
are the percentage of adults over eighteen who are married
plummeted into this milieu, Laddie and Friedkin give us the
story of a broken home in which a young girl

(06:12):
is tormented by puberty demon and can only find solace
when a father comes into the house. As Jude Doyle
explains in Dead Blonds and Bad Mothers, Reagan's smooth baby's
skin erupts and scabs over into weeping, discolored mess. She
has outbursts of temper, insults, and resists authority figures, makes

(06:33):
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 plot point. Is like, oh, she's cursing. Now. Basically,

(06:57):
she goes from like you're very innocent and heavy quotes
young child, too, not messy, angry, somewhat violent. I don't know,
maybe I'm being too nice, fit violent, obsessed with sex, yeah,
obsessed with shocking people, like saying things to shock people.

(07:21):
And she she is like she set 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 horror icon and talk about nuns and horror. But yeah,

(07:43):
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 exiosist is family based on a
true story and exorcism perform in Saint Louis in nineteen
forty nine. The real child was a boy, not a girl,

(08:05):
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, that's I mean,
that's interesting that they thought this would hit more with

(08:25):
audiences that it was a young girl. And in a
lot of the extorcism 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 seen Monster Squad. But why did the virgin have
to be a woman? Why what? There is a lot

(08:47):
of male virgins about. But yeah, I mean, I think
that goes back to the ultimate corruption. In a lot
of our horror is young usually white girls, who are innocent.
But when it happens with men, I feel like it's
much more often usedes they kill their whole family or something,

(09:10):
are a very violence, whereas with women it's much more
like take their soul. That's just my experience. There's a
lot of movies without possession and extioucism. The quote continues.

(09:31):
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 exioroucism, but because the parent family isn't Catholic,
approval for the right must come from the Vatican, and

(09:53):
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 to joke again, I

(10:15):
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 Basheebah's ultimate sin
is that she's killing these children, and that's how they

(10:39):
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, you need to

(11:00):
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, a particularly millennial

(11:21):
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 look in how

(11:42):
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 cover up this

(12:03):
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. It's being spiritual.

(12:24):
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 in. 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 generalize
a bit. Boomers love church. Gen Z rebelled against church.

(12:48):
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
final quote. It's perhaps an unavoidable feature of Possession films

(13:09):
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,
communicate that a world without institutionalized faith is a world
where we're at the mercy of evil powers that wish

(13:31):
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
has talked to me, are conservative at their heart, but
maybe gen Z has the right of it. Perhaps those
institutions that have proven themselves so untrustworthy aren't worthy of conservation,

(13:54):
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
inherently makes religious people somehow wrong or something like that.

(14:15):
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
struck me who is targeted, who is possessed? Who does

(14:38):
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
being tempted that going through a few aka a demon?

(15:02):
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 any other thoughts about it, maybe you remember the
name of that movie I was talking about. I'm sure
it's gonna come to 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.

(15:23):
I bet we'll have to come back to it in
the meantime. You can email us at Sefida mom Stuff
at iHeartMedia dot com. You can find us on Twitter
at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at
Steffane Never told you. We have at public store and
a book that you can buy at Stuff you Should
read books dot Com. Thanks as always to our super
producer Christina, our executive producer Maya, and our Contrbutor Joey,

(15:44):
and thanks to you for listening. Stephan Never Told You
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast on my
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