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Religious Vomit: Scott Derrickson's The Exorcism of Emily Rose

 Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Jennifer Carpenter, Colm Feore. Dir. Scott Derrickson, Screen Gems, 2005

I spent eight months being a caregiver for a friend's three young daughters (9, 6, & 4.) The time I spent with them rates as some of the best of my life. Children have a unique ability to help me understand I'm not worthless and useless, as I often feel about myself. When th 4 year-old took my hand and looked up at me and said, "Russell, you are very kind," I felt blessed to be offered such love. 

My friend and I were both involved in one of the 12 Step fellowships. When I started smoking pot again, my friend banned me from seeing the girls, saying, "You're surrounded by dark forces. You've been darksided." She truly believed she could see a black aura around me. I know another guy here in my town who claims he can see demons surrounding me, eating my soul.

If you've never had such an encounter and if, like me, you're a rationalist, I have to say it's extremely upsetting. Let us be clear: demons are not real. There is no Satan and there is no Hell. To have children I love taken from me, to be denied friendships by people who don't understand that their beliefs are psychosis at worst, superstion at best, is maddening. I contributed to those girls' lives. I was good for them. To lose that to their mother's pseudospirituality is a loss I have never stopped grieving.

The relevance, if you're wondering, to Scott Derrickson's '05 THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, is that Laura Linney plays a criminal defense attorney hired to defend a Catholic priest charged with negligent homicide as the result of a botched exorcism. Father Richard Moore, played with great restraint and subtlety by the always-ace Tom Wilkinson, claims to see black-robed figures stalking him and Emily Rose, the young woman he inadvertently kills. He believes he can see the forces of evil surrounding people. He rejects Emily's diagnosis of epileptic psychosis, her family agrees with him, and Laura Linney defends him.

I cannot fully quantify how enraged I felt watching this movie. Legitimizing the mentally ill's delusions in the name of religious faith strikes me as cynicism of the first stripe. I've been a victim of their illness. Those little girls are victims of that illness. Defending a man like Father Moore on the grounds that his superstion ought to supercede science is toxic hubris.

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE works well as a courtroom drama, not particularly well as a horror picture. I submit that trying to ground the story in real-life kills its effectiveness as a horror film. Horror works as well as it does, or can, because it makes the utterly nonsensical believable enough to entertain and engage. As soon as a filmmaker tries to cross out of the unreal, horror movies start to suffer. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, for example, is based on a real guy, Ed Gein, but never purports to be anything like reality-based, which is its strength. EMILY ROSE sets itself firmly in reality in its attempt to vindicate a man who, in my opinion, should have spent at least a decade in prison, and that kills it as a good horror feature.

Thing is, while it makes a decent courtroom drama, the world is full of courtroom dramas not mired in pseudoscientific and pseudospiritual twaddle, and which don't posit a religious sadist as heroic. See one of those. Don't see this piece of trash. Please don't feed into people's susperstition. Innocents get hurt by people who take this sort of movie seriously. Don't be part of that.

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