'Conjuring' belief in demons

Forty years after The Exorcist made $441 million and lodged itself in the American imagination, the latest cast-out-demons based-on-a-true-story film hit theaters this weekend. The writers and director are hoping the $20 million production called The Conjuring makes some money -- and gets some viewers seriously considering demonic realities. 

"People should never be ignorant of demonic forces and think it can't happen to them," said Chad Hayes, one of the screenwriters. 

Chad and his twin brother and co-writer Carey Hayes have been adamant about the connection between their faith and this horror film, a connection which has pretty seamlessly blended with some of the studios' promotional efforts. The film's distributor, New Line Cinema, has subcontracted with Grace Hill Media for a specific faith-market campaign. The company arranged advance screenings for faith groups, including groups of priests, and has made the writer-brothers and the real-life exorcists available to the religious press.

The people behind this film hope those who believe in demons go to theaters and watch. Chad Hayes, for example, said, "Men and women of faith should see this film because they will see the power that only God holds to overcome evil. They can be witnesses to that moment of darkness that only the power of God can defeat."

The people behind the film don't only want believers to go and see it, but one way to market it to believers it to talk about how the product will be powerful and especially spiritually useful for those who don't believe. This is part of why there's all this talk about the reality of demonic forces. It's aimed at those who like their scary narratives to teeter on the question, "is it real?," and also at those who think it is real and want to believe that such a film could transform the beliefs of others.

That evangelical message is clear enough that some reviewers are reacting to it. At Salon, the film has been dubbed "one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years," which is not framed as a compliment.

At a recent screening, the director reportedly spent some time trying to persuade incredulous critics of the film's serious intent. The final words on the screen, too, from one of the real-life exorcists involved in the real-life version of the film's fictionalized events, emphasize this point:

Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.

Whether or not they believe in The Conjuring, marketing a movie to people who believe in demons isn't a bad idea.

For one thing, there's a good number of them. There's not a lot of really solid information on exactly how many, but one poll reported that 41 percent of Americans agreed with the the idea that demons exist, and another, which just looked at self-identified Christians, put the number at 64 percent of Christians, which is about 48 percent of the general population. That works out to more than 150 million Americans as the potential market for this marketing campaign of this movie, plus, presumably, the people they know and think might be somewhere on the edge of possible belief.

For another thing, appealing to religious audiences has paid off in recent years. There are success stories inspiring this marketing drive: The Passion of the Christ, The Blind Side, Fireproof, and others. Add the successes of faith-"infused" TV shows that have fared so well lately, Duck Dynasty, The Bible, etc., and the people who decide what movies get made are going to pay attention. And they are: At this year's Annual Faith and Values Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry, a Hollywood affair celebrating films pitched as faith-friendly and making lots and lots of money for it, marketing strategists were saying they could sell anything that is faith friendly. It was reported that in the last 21 years the number of films classified as having "at least some Christian, redemptive content" has grown from about 10 percent of the movies produced to nearly 57 percent, but there is still demand for more.

It turns out religious right's efforts to demonstrate the economic strength of conservative Christians actually worked. If not with boycotts, then with theater tickets and big buckets of popcorn.

According to Carey Hayes, "the essence of this movie is, God wins."

One could say the same of The Exorcist, of course. That's what these movies do: God wins, demons are dramatized, some segment of the audience wonders if maybe that fictionally depicted reality is really real, and others say yes, yes!, and a bunch of money is made and more such stories are put into production.

The Conjuring continued that tradition this weekend, pulling in box office receipts worth $41.5 million,  earning more than twice what it cost with just it's North American debut.

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Coming soon

First official artwork for Left Behind (the remake), which is reportedly on schedule to start production this spring. 

The original book addresses the possibility of the story of the rapture being made into a movie, and is very skeptical of that possibility: "If somebody tried to sell a screenplay about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off."

The question now is: what if they did sell it, twice?

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The postmodern technique of the most-sold Christian novel of 2012

The Harbinger begins by addressing its own problem of unbelievability.

It opens by directly dealing with the readers' likely problem of suspending disbelief for this novel. The subtitle is The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future. The first page begins with that same phrase spoken as dialogue -- a bit of dialogue that could be between the author and the reader, or the author imagining that conversation, acting it out, playing both parts, his and the reader who's going to read this. And it starts by repeating that line:

'An ancient mystery that holds the secret of America's future.'
'Yes.'
'What would I think?'
'Yes, what would you think?'
'I'd think it was a plot for a movie. Is that it? Is that what you're presenting ... a movie manuscript?'
'No.'
'A plot for a novel?'
'No.'
'Then what?'
He was silent.
'Then what?' she repeated.

It is the plot for a novel, actually, though within the fiction-world of the narrative the "ancient mystery" isn't fiction, as the character named Nouriel Kaplan insists twice on page two. And as the author Jonathan Cahn has also said in multiple interviews outside the fiction-world of The Harbinger.

On a Christian, apocalypse-oriented radio program, he said "the form is a narrative" but "90 percent of it is non-fiction." On a Charismatic TV show, he repeated the message of the book without any reference to narrative or a novel or fictions of any sort, but only to the "prophetic message known as The Harbinger." The host represented the work as revelation from the Holy Spirit, a characterization Cahn didn't dispute. In an e-mail interview with a Charismatic podcast, Cahn said,

[The Harbinger] reveals things that believers have felt in their hearts but without the evidence to back it up. It reveals a biblical mystery of specific template of judgment that is now playing out in America, before our eyes, lying behind everything from 9/11 to the crash of Wall Street, biblical harbingers of judgment appearing in New York City, Washington, D.C., involving some of the highest of American leaders, the replaying of an ancient drama of judgment, even giving exact dates.

This is also all presented in the dialogue in the first few pages of the novel, meaning the author, a messianic Jewish minister from New Jersey, contends that he is presenting non-ficiton as fiction, but within the fiction, the main character is arguing that the story seems like fiction but "it's not fiction -- it's real."

It's a fascinating bit of metafictionality, I think.

A similar thing happened in Left Behind, where criticisms of the book, specifically that it was badly written and unbelievable, were written into the book. Left Behind briefly calls attention to its own status as fiction, predicts the readers' response, and makes that response a part of the narrative, thus re-framing its own problem of plausibility as the readers' struggle with belief. The problem of believing that God is directing the apparently chaotic events of history, and that the Bible is relevant to todays world and to an individuals life, is collapsed into the problem of suspending disbelief to read a novel.

The Harbinger does the same thing, but more so, and more directly. Here the very postmodern technique of self-reflexivity is used, and used aggressively, but to a very different end.

This has caused some deal of controversy among those who, actually, are open to the idea of the imminent return of Christ at Armageddon to reign for 1,000 years.

I wouldn't want to say that this is at all related to that, but that novel, The Harbinger, is the only Christian fiction to make it onto Amazon.com's list of 100 most-sold books of 2012. It comes in at number 23 for the year -- ahead of J.K. Rowling's foray into adult fiction, the Steve Jobs biography, and John Grisham's latest.

Many would likely scoff at that news, a response that's expected by the text and anticipated, written into the story. "I don't expect you to believe me yet," the main character says. "But hear me out!"

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The exorcist in the American imagination

What does an exorcist look like?

A Roman Catholic priest, if you believe the movies.

There are exceptions. The very recent Sam Raimi film Possession makes the unusual move of having the demons and exorcists be Jewish. In The Last Exorcism, from 2010, the exorcist was a white-suit wearing Southern evangelical. There are also demon films like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine and the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen where the hero isn't a cleric at all.

For the most part, though, exorcist movies depict exorcists as what sociologist Michael W. Cuneo calls "hero priests."

Pretty much the entire list of "best exorcism films" has Catholic exorcists. From The Exorcist and it's sequels and prequels to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, from The Amityville Horror to [Rec]2 and The Rite, the exorcists of the American imagination are Roman priests.

But why?

Max von Sydow, as the priest in The Exorcist.

It's not because there are, as a matter of fact, more Catholic exorcists than Protestant. A recent study of the practices of Christian exorcists surveyed 170 who are active, of which only 2.3 percent were Catholic.

Though the sample of the study may not be representative, it still offers evidence of wide variety of Christian traditions involved in what's sometimes called "deliverance ministry." The study found a wide array of Protestants involved in this activity that, when it's on film, is almost exclusively Catholic. There were various sorts of pentecostals and charismatics, but also evangelicals, and representatives from the Reformed churches, the anabaptist tradition, and even the normally liberal Mainline churches. That's not even taking into consideration the various non-orthodox and non-Christian sorts of exorcists.

As Cuneo writes in American Exorcism, there seems to be an across-the-board media bias in favor of Catholic exorcists. Protestant clergy engaged in spiritual combat with demons just, for some reason, doesn't do it for the American imagination. Speaking of the 1980s, Cuneo writes,

"While evangelicals and cahrismatics were expelling demons by the busload without attracting much more than passing notice, the slightest mention of an officially sanctioned Roman Catholic exorcism was all it took to bring the media scrambling to full attention. By almost universal consensus this was the genuine article, the truly epic struggle between the supernatural good and evil. Everything else was pale imitation."

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer as to why this is so. Four possible answers:

1) Catholic imagery is inherently cinematic. 
The material objects of the Catholic faith and the Catholic liturgy simply film well. Crucifixes and icons of saints and the Virgin Mary, chalices and wafers, collars and stoles: these objects immediately convey certain ideas. A concept of "righteous," "religious," or "holy" can be communicated without dialogue, merely by showing one of these objects in a scene.

Contrast a crucifix with a child in a nightgown and grotesque or creepy make-up, and one has, in a single frame, the entire possession-exorcism story.

By contrast, Protestant exorcists are less likely to use religious paraphernalia. There could, perhaps, be a big floppy Bible, or a bit of oil, but the "tools" of exorcism aren't, for the most part, visual but verbal. Kenneth D. Royal found, in his study, that most Christian exorcists use "the name of Jesus" as their primary tool, which would make sense given that 97.7 percent of them were Protestant. A man dressed in normal clothes, juxtaposed with a demonic-looking child, giving commands "in the name of Jesus," is not as cinematically powerful.

There's a point of comparison that can be made here to zombie movies. Garlic, which doesn't give one a power image on the screen, is much less likely to be significant to a zombie film than, say, sunlight, which involves an essential ingredient of film and lends itself to dramatic images.

One bit of evidence to support this interpretation of the predominance of Catholics among the exorcists of movies: in the one notable exception, The Last Exorcism, where the exorcist is an evangelical, there is prominent use of a crucifix in the trailer.

2) Catholicism appears pre- or anti-modern. 
As much as these movies are about battles between good and evil, they are also about a struggle between the modern and the pre- or anti-modern. The struggle between materialist culture (in both senses of "materialist") and the inherent distrust of materialism internal to that culture. Exorcism films specifically speak to the conflict within American culture between science and it's undergirding assumption that this is "all there is," consumer capitalism and its billboard proclamations of everything being for sale, and the enduring suspicion that there's something missing, something lacking, something, as it were, lurking underneath.

Catholicism, with its connection to the Middle Ages, serve as representative symbols of the anti-materialist position. Contemporary evangelicals, being linked more strongly in the American imagination to very recent history and being apparently much more at home with the logic of markets, and much more comfortable with an anthropology that imagines humans as most essentially consumers, don't mark as strong of a contrast with the contemporary cultural order.

Priests, on film, in the American imagination, are something like living dinosaurs, lumbering along in testament to the continued existence of a former, spiritual age.

Seeming in this way foreign, the Catholic priest may also carry the necessary exoticism for a believable exorcist. As religious studies professor John-Charles Duffy wrote, the

"problem with making a 'true story' movie based on exorcism among charismatic evangelicals is that it would be a movie about charismatic evangelicals. It would be a movie about people like those you see in televangelism. It wouldn't be about sophisticated Northeasterners or Europeans. For that reason, I hypothesize, producers would worry that they couldn't sell the story to audiences: audiences wouldn't be able to ... achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to immerse themselves enjoyably in the story. The premise would just seem absurd, as televangelism seems absurd."

The contrast offered here is between a phrase uttered in Latin and one uttered in a Texas accent.

The fact that the Jewish exorcists in Raimi's film seem from the trailer to be Ultra-Orthodox Jews would lend support to this idea that exorcists must, to seem right to us, have some air of pre- or anti-modernism to them, to seem to be hold outs from another world against the movie-goers own familiar reality.

3) Catholicism carries an authoritative weight.
A Protestant -- and, particularly, evangelical -- exorcist would appear to be acting without institutional backing. Fundamentally individualistic, the exorcist would seem to be "out there," and essentially alone. He wouldn't have credentials, wouldn't be taken as having undergone extensive training or have inherited thousands of years of secret tradition.

He would have to vouch for his authority on his own authority.

The way many of the exorcist movies not only involve a priest but also make key references to "the Vatican" points to this. The Devil Inside, for example, is set in Rome. The Rite begins with a seminary student traveling to Italy to take a course on exorcism. They are, then, presented as part of a larger, deeper, broader thing, and thus markedly different from the standard paranoiac.

This relates, in a number of ways, to 2). The Catholic exorcist appears as a participant in an alternative way of life, and thus as offering an alternative to contemporary life, and so when he is also attuned of an alternative reality, he's seen as this representative of another lebenswelt, rather than just as himself mentally ill.

But where 2) could also be achieved in other ways -- a mysterious, Illuminati-like order of exorcists, say -- the institutional backing of a Catholic exorcists does other things as well. The institutional nature of the priesthood means that, importantly, in some sense, Catholic clergy have been vetted.

Whether one is a journalist or a movie-goer, this relieves a bit of the burden of credulity.

4) There's a tradition of Catholic exorcists in cinema.
It is possible that there's a very, very simple explanation for the Catholicism of our movie exorcists. Simple lack of creativity shouldn't be discounted as a real possibility, here. In Hollywood, the tradition of exorcist movies goes back to The Exorcist, in which the exorcist happened to be Catholic.

It's also the case that that movie borrowed a visual style from the Gothic horror genre, which extensively made use of Catholic imagery and visual references.

So maybe exorcists were imagined as Catholic because just exorcists had been imagined as Catholic.

But maybe there's a better, clearer answer? It seems that this is a fixed thing in the American imagination, where exorcists are almost always specifically Catholic exorcists. It's clearly not related to the reality of exorcism, or the experience of exorcisms, but to the cinematic and popular imagination. An answer, for that reason, would tell us little about exorcisms per se, but something that could be quite interesting about the relative cultural positions of Catholics and various Protestant groups, and about how Americans commonly imagine "religion," and what how they imagine an alternative, non-materialist reality would look, if it were possible.

Even in films with evangelical exorcists, such as The Last Exorcist, Catholic imagery is prominent. 

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