Earlier this week, William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, passed away at 87. It was just a few short weeks after the release of Talk to Me, a possession film that, though different in many ways, owes a lot to Friedkin’s landmark horror. Later this year, David Gordon Green’s lega-sequel The Exorcist: Believer will do for Pazuzu’s possessions what Green’s recent Halloween trilogy did for John Carpenter’s iconic slasher. Possession stories have a long history in horror and they don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
That’s great news for me, because there’s nothing I find scarier than demons causing distress. The movies that get me pulling the blanket up to cover my goosebumped arms always involve ghosts, demons, evil spirits, etc. Anything that can possess a person or haunt a house has the potential to send chills down my spine. The movies that have had that effect on me are few and far between, but they almost all involve ghostly terrorists wreaking havoc on the living: The Exorcist, The Conjuring, Saint Maud, Host. There are some outliers — the Sunken Place scene in Get Out, the funhouse mirror bit in Us — but, by and large, if something gets me scared, spirits are involved.
Of course, horror is a matter of taste and everyone is afraid of different things. I love slasher movies, but they don’t scare me. I enjoyed Nope last year, but was surprised to hear people say they found it scary, because I found it the least spooky of Jordan Peele's three features. I'm often thinking about what other people find scary because my wife doesn’t like horror at all (or even really anything tense), so I typically have to run a mental check for movies before I recommend we watch them. I’m inoculated against most horror, so sometimes it’s hard to tell. But I’m not inoculated against demons. That’s still the scariest shit out there.
I don't know what the root of this fear is, but I think it has a lot to do with growing up in an Evangelical Christian household with the belief that demons were very real and seeking to harm the faithful. I was taught that a demon couldn't possess a committed Christian, but they could still definitely mess with one. So, during my more religious years, it was very rational to believe that a demon might be in my room, hiding in the dark. A masked guy with a huge knife would have to find a way to get in. For all I knew, demons could just appear anytime they wanted out of thin air. And we didn't have stats on how many demons there were hanging out in the bad place either. Could be, like, ten. Could be eight billion. How deep is the devil’s bench? And if there were more demons than people why wouldn't they be messing with me?
This was the headspace I occupied during my high school and college years, and it's a scary place to live. I did a paper on possession movies in college and one of my friends said, "Be careful with that stuff, okay?" I was careful, by my definition of careful, but that didn't mean I wasn't imagining demons lying in wait for me every time I turned out the lights. I don’t feel that fear anymore, but watching a good possession flick is how I get to visit that headspace again and spend a little time with the person I was. But, unlike the inhabitants of a haunted house, I can just leave when I’m ready.