By Brad Miner
Frankly, I’ve had enough. I’m almost completely sure that there has never been an exorcism movie that has Christ at its center. Thanks to the Catholic writer William Peter Blatty, the original movie The Exorcist was good. The director William Friedkin deserves credit for an excellent collaboration. He came close, but failed. It lacked reverence.
I asked Grok3 to list all exorcism movies. The program hesitated a bit:
“While it is impossible to enumerate all exorcism movies due to the vast number of obscure, international, and low-budget productions worldwide (including many released directly to video), below is a comprehensive compilation based on film databases, critic ratings, and horror genre sources.”
It’s almost comforting to see an artificial intelligence bot use the word “impossible.” In five seconds, it produced a 1,200-word list with descriptions of 51 movies. Despite what sometimes seems to me, that demonstrated that I haven’t seen them all. The Grokster ended with this helpful offer: “If you want expansions on eras, countries, or specific subthemes (for example, non-Christian exorcisms), let me know!”
Oh, no! I don’t want that. I’m just here to say ave atque vale to the Conjuring franchise, which somehow set as high a standard as low.
There are nine movies in what is now called the Conjuring Universe. Why do producers add “Universe” to their sequels? To make majestic what is repetitive and often banal? Maybe they don’t like the real universe they live in.
This franchise consists of four main movies: The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025). In addition, there is Annabelle Comes Home (2019), which also features the main protagonists of the universe, Ed and Lorraine Warren. That means four of the movies do not include the Warrens. At the time, I briefly commented on the first two.
The fact is this: Patrick Wilson (Ed) and Vera Farmiga (Lorraine) are excellent performers. (Both, by the way, know how to sing, especially Mr. Wilson). It’s rare the actor who doesn’t accept some project just for the check. For Last Rites, Wilson and Farmiga have been doing a kind of farewell tour, with even an interview in The New York Times (“Horror’s Mom and Dad Say Goodbye to the ‘Conjuring’ Movies”), but I suspect they are relieved, checks aside. And I am too, because it’s a shame to see talent wasted.
Anyway, let’s move on to The Conjuring: Last Rites, which is the (light) weight I carry today. It cost 55 million dollars and has already grossed more than 400 million worldwide. (The current number one movie is a Chinese animation, Ne Zha 2. I didn’t know Ne Zha 1 existed, but the second has grossed about 2 billion, though only 23 million in the United States. There are a lot of people in China. Still, those Chinese communists know how to empty our American pockets).
The Warrens were real people. I don’t know if they were completely sane or sincere (possibly sane if not honest), but they gained fame in 1975 with the case known as the Amityville Horror (books, movies, sequels, and so on), and they were just getting started.
However, it must be mentioned that the whole Amityville affair was a complete invention, as we know because the lawyer who represented the “haunted” family from Long Island—and who got them hundreds of thousands of dollars for book and movie rights—later admitted that it was all invented with a writer and a couple of bottles of wine. But the Warrens—he died in 2006, she in 2019—always maintained that everything was true.
The Warrens were Catholics. People in Connecticut, where they lived, have testified that they regularly attended Mass. The esteemed Jimmy Akin has suggested that, as paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine may have consulted with exorcists. Perhaps they were good people. But neither of them was a priest, so they were not and could not be Catholic Church exorcists.
As for the new movie, the first sentence of the The Hollywood Reporter review probably hits the mark:
“Not only do the floorboards creak in the ninth installment of the veteran horror franchise The Conjuring.”
I must be honest: I haven’t seen this movie. As we used to say as kids about things we came to hate: if I never see another exorcism movie again, it will be too soon. And this is the first time I’ve written about a movie without seeing it.
I’m sure that if I were to see The Conjuring: Last Rites, there would be the requisite eerie music, horrified faces, sudden scares, and all the other sound, image, direction, and editing tricks that might even make me drop my popcorn.
But I won’t go.
What I will do—solitary voice crying in the wilderness—is beg some young Catholic filmmaker to delve deeper than Blatty or Friedkin, and depict the anguish of possession… and the joy of liberation from its satanic torments, and, for the love of God, show God’s love!
It must be a Church-verified exorcism. Can’t anyone do justice to the work of Fr. Gabriele Amorth? These special effects-dominated exorcism movies threaten to reduce this holy rite to a ridiculous and implausible subgenre of horror cinema, and not even one of the important ones. When that happens (if it hasn’t already), the rite of exorcism and the office of the exorcist may become a joke. The line between horror and humor is thin.
Jesus cast out demons (Matthew 8; Mark 1 and 5; Luke 4 and 8). But he also gave that power to his Apostles, who exercised it (Matthew 10:1, 8; Mark 6:7, 13; Luke 9:1-2, 6 and 10:17-20; Acts 5:16, 16:16-18 and 19:11-12). Surely we have modern apostles like that! If not, Hollywood, please tell those biblical stories.
About the author
Brad Miner, husband and father, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and a member of the Faith & Reason Institute. He was literary editor of National Review and had a long career in the publishing industry. His latest book is Sons of St. Patrickhttps://amzn.to/2U9iHDn, written with George J. Marlin. His bestselling work The Compleat Gentleman is available in a third revised edition and Audible version Audible. He has been a member of the board of Aid to the Church In Need USA and of the recruitment board of the Selective Service System in Westchester County, New York.