Interviews
How ‘The Exorcism’ Puts a Deeply Personal, “Quietly Radical” Spin on the Possession Movie [Interview]
There’s much more than meets the eye in The Exorcism, from writer/director Joshua John Miller and co-writer M.A. Fortin (The Final Girls). Or rather, there’s a lot bubbling beneath the surface in this possession horror story.
The Exorcism stars Russell Crowe (The Pope’s Exorcist) as troubled actor Anthony Miller, who begins to unravel after taking on a role in a supernatural horror movie. So much so that his estranged daughter (Ryan Simpkins) wonders if he’s slipping back into his past addictions or if art is imitating life in horrific ways. It’s also hard not to see The Exorcism imitating life, as Joshua John Miller’s father, Jason Miller, playing the doomed Father Karras in horror classic The Exorcist, which served as a significant source of inspiration behind the film.
Beyond the personal ties to The Exorcist, Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin pulled from an ambitious well of real-life influences and inspirations when crafting The Exorcism, formerly titled The Georgetown Project. Possession horror becomes laden with metaphor as the life partners mined from personal experiences working in Hollywood, for better and worse.
The Exorcism faced a long road to release, having shot primarily in 2019 before pandemic-induced delays. It feels like a natural progression from the personal and meta-story driving The Final Girls, but what specifically was the impetus for this equally personal tale?
Joshua John Miller answers Bloody Disgusting’s first question with humor, “Well, we were thinking about this a lot. I think the impetus was the Trump election and that white straight men seemed to be possessed everywhere around us. We sort of got tired of seeing women as hysterical women being portrayed as being possessed. We thought, ‘Well, what if we actually did something about a guy that’s possessed who’s saved by two lesbians?’“
M.A. Fortin expands, “It was just like a car crash of things. It was like someone who had brought up exorcism movies and then the political climate and then really drilled down on the fact that most exorcism movies are pretty patriarchal by nature. I don’t know, somehow one day it was just like, ‘hey, what if?'”
“[We wanted to] subvert the expectations of the genre,“ Miller adds. “But it was definitely also obviously personal. There are personal elements, and I think Final Girls is very much, obviously, a love letter to my mom, and I think The Exorcist was a love letter, obviously to my dad, but also a FU letter to Hollywood a little bit, because we wanted to sort of tell a story that Hollywood men making movies in the studio system or working the studio system is a deal with the devil.“
“Hollywood Productions is often such a pressure cooker, and it seems sometimes it can really bring out the worst behavior in people,“ Fortin agrees. “And you can meet a lot of wounded people here who may not necessarily be bad people, but…“
“They’re possessed,“ Miller cracks.
“… but they’re inflicting,“ Fortin continues. “They don’t know how to handle their own trauma, so they don’t inflict more. I don’t know; a lot went into this pie.“
“We’re life partners too, as well as writing partners and collaborating on the movie, on everything,“ Miller tells us. “We had a really traumatic experience that nearly destroyed us on every level prior to making this movie. The more I look back on this movie, I realize, ‘Oh, this movie is a lot about that experience.’ And feeling claustrophobic in that there was nowhere to go to talk to about it. It was pre-Me Too. It was just on the cusp, and there was nowhere to report anything. When you had no agency, and you feel like Ryan Simpkins in that room when Russell’s coming towards her and says, ‘Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go?‘
“I think that sense of entrapment and terror was how we felt a lot in certain rooms in the business.”
The writers infuse their latest with their own trauma, using horror as a throughline to navigate it all. That was part of their plan from the start. Fortin reflects, “It’s interesting because the more we worked on the movie, the more it was like psychological horror or you could say family drama with horror elements, I don’t know. There’s all kinds of alphabet soup you can play with when it comes to this stuff because, for some reason, when it comes to genre, categorization is really, really important to some people. But it just felt like genre, I think, because we felt internally screaming from a lot of the factors that fed into what made The Exorcism, The Exorcism. I think there was never any contest. It was just like, well, yes, obviously this would be within playing in the genre sandbox.“
“I never thought of it as a possession movie or an exorcism in my head. I always thought I wanted to do John Cassavetes’ Opening Night as a horror title. That was sort of the actor goes batshit,“ Miller reflects. Yet, years of rejections over The Final Girls script taught them to withhold that as part of their pitch. Miller gives an example, “We did use to pitch Final Girls as Friday the 13th meets Terms of Endearment, and people would show us the door.”
Fortin confirms, “‘Here’s a bottle of water. Have a wonderful day.‘ They validate your parking, and that’s it. I think another factor was just, it’s interesting because I don’t know that we set out for the movie to have any kind of real political bent, but looking back on it, thinking about it now. One of the things about just anything having to do with the exorcism movies is the veneration of all the Catholic Arcani. They’re the faith-based horror, the horror genre. I know horror and religion and faith and Catholicism specifically bring a lot of comfort to a lot of people, and I would never try to refute that. But it’s also a fully blunt instrument for the rest of us, especially now. I think for us, it felt at least quietly radical to have an exorcism movie that featured queer people.“
While the writers are forthcoming in saying they didn’t set out to recreate The Exorcist through a queer lens, the inclusion did let them push the subgenre forward in daring ways. Particularly surrounding lead character Anthony Miller and his traumatic past with the Church. It gets so bold that it even shocked Miller to find a partner in Miramax.
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“I think that I was surprised how willing Miramax was to make this script, to be quite honest with you,” Miller admits.
“It is a sad movie, and partly why it’s sad is I think you make the things that you make come from you, from wherever you are at that moment in your life,“ the director continues. “And my mom tragically passed away right before the movie started shooting, which only added to the weird Exorcist myth. But that was such a tragic shock and so sad that I think it was just unavoidable that that immense grief was palpable in the movie.
“Ryan’s [character in the movie] is also dealing with the death of a mother and the fallout of unresolved grief. Russell’s character is dealing with unresolved trauma. We all have different grief traumas, and so I think there was just no way to escape that; the meta aspect of what had happened in our personal life. Not only was she my mother, but she was also [Fortin’s] mother-in-law, who was like a second mom. They were incredibly close. I think it’s too much to say this work of art is cathartic for us to deal with something. I think actually it was the opposite because it’s like we were looking so head-on to something that was recent.“
While The Exorcism is clearly personal, that doesn’t mean the scares get sacrificed to the drama.
Miller sums it up, “To me, the horror is in the grief. The horror is in the violence, emotional violence that happens between the daughter and father. The trauma they both share. Obviously, what happened to Russell’s character as a kid. For me, the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time was The Zone of Interest. To me, that was one of the most disturbing, upsetting, and terrifying things I had seen. I was nauseous for two hours, and all the horror was in your imagination, right?”
The Exorcism releases in theaters on June 21, 2024.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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