The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is available on Premium VOD platforms now and will be haunting 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on August 24. The home release is packed with special features, including a spotlight on the terrifying Occultist. Ahead of the home release, Bloody Disgusting chatted with Occultist actress Eugenie Bondurant to dig into what makes the character such a formidable foe.
The Occultist marks a first for the Conjuring universe in that she’s a human antagonist, not a demon. In many ways, she’s the perfect opposite to Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), making her one of the most dangerous villains yet. Bondurant’s approach to her character was thorough. “I’m a Meisner trained actor, and I break down a script a certain way and then look for facts in the script. Facts that affect my character, and there are a lot of them in the script. She’s the reason for everything. So, I get one of those dollar store books; I scribble everything down and try to figure out which ones are pertinent to the creation or the development of this character. And then, I go back and look at my scenes and see the overall arc of the work. Where she is going, and what is she attempting to do, and why that’s the most important?”
While the character remains enigmatic for much of the narrative, one of the essential elements to the Occultist’s development is her upbringing. That contributed, in part, to making the Occultist scary. Bondurant elaborates, “Well, a few things are going on, I think, for me. First of all, I have a lot of angles in my face, which means she may show danger. You can do a lot of stuff with what I’ve been blessed with. That’s number one, but number two, I think, the rage is from her father, but I don’t think it’s all from her father. I think that seed was planted from him, but the direction where she ended up going, she was raised by a doting parent who loved her but, I’m thinking, abandoned her. Her whole lair is set up down in this area below ground, and she had access to everything.”
Bondurant also provides a fascinating insight to the pivotal scene that (spoilers ahead) sees her confronting her father, ending in bloodshed. It’s an act of mercy and love in response to her father’s betrayal. “I look at that as, this had to be done, but was done in her way, a loving way. As opposed to, I’m not casting a spell on you. I’m not. I’m going to get this done and get it over with, and I’m going to love you, and I hope you forgive me enough, as I forgive you.”
In “The Occultist” special feature, below, Bondurant’s character can be glimpsed wielding a blade and appearing to prepare a goat for sacrifice. When asked about this moment, Bondurant hadn’t yet seen it to provide context on potential deleted scenes. But she did recount how it was to work with the animals in the film and how Vera Farmiga coached her on goat wrangling. “I’ve never done this before. I grew up in New Orleans, so I wasn’t born on a farm. Vera goes, ‘Oh, that’s so easy. You just do this, and this, and this.’ Bam. And I thought, how would you know how to do it? That was a funny little surprise there, but yes, I know how to wrangle goats. With the rats, they brought me into the rat tent. There was a tent set up and all these different rat kennels. Right? I think there were three or four, whatever. And so, the animal wrangler said, would you like to play around with one?
“He put one on my arm and let it go. I said, ‘This is such a cute little rat.’ You tell friends this, and they think, ah rat. Were you afraid that the rat was going to bite you? No, I wasn’t. No, the rat was happy; I’m happy. The rat should have been afraid I was going to bite it. It was fun. The goats were fun. I have pictures with those goats. They were just adorable.”
See “The Occultist” special feature and Bondurant in action on August 24, 2021, with the release of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD.
Here’s a taste…
