The Pope's Exorcist (2023)
Dec. 21st, 2023 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strixalbaFor Horror Night last night, we watched The Pope's Exorcist, a movie in which Pope Paul VI, in failing health, has hours of free time to spend flipping through a redacted church record book in a Roman cathedral with no one else in it.
We chose the movie based on the strength of the following review by Brian Tallerico: "Listen, this is no masterpiece, but there’s something fascinating about seeing an Oscar winner like Russell Crowe commit so completely to a B-movie this ludicrous. Crowe is all-in as the infamous Father Gabriele Amorth, a purported real-life exorcist who tries to save a possessed boy in Spain. This is a defiantly goofy movie, but it’s better than its quick theatrical run would have you believe, and a great fit for the Netflix horror roster of movies you can watch while you do something on your phone."
And ... that's exactly what we got! The scenery was very cool - a ruined Spanish abbey with a creepy basement and secret underground rooms! Castilian scrublands! Occasional shots of beautiful Catholic interiors in Rome! The special effects were also excellent!
It was also deeply goofy, of course. Russell Crowe plays Father Gabriele Amorth and uses a fake Italian accent the whole way through. The actor playing the possessed boy does a fantastically Gollum-inspired job of chewing on the scenery and spitting out the words that are then dubbed over in a Demon Voice. I hope that child gets to play more horror waifs in the future.
There's a cistern lined with non-Catholic Spanish Inquisition victims' skulls on consecrated church ground, and yet overall it was still more accurate to Catholic theology than the Exorcist TV show. The two heavy caveats to that are (a) it's a low fucking bar to clear and (b) that's the only way in which it surpasses The Exorcist show, and it is in many respects the least important. (Also, The Exorcist already has a Father Tomas who has an illicit affair with a woman who wants him to leave the priesthood for her, which he confesses to his own more experienced, grey-haired career exorcist. They did it better and much more homoerotically.)
(i don't find Catholicism-based horror to be particularly scary: I grew up in Catholicism, so if a movie gets either the vibes or the theology wrong, I can tell and it breaks my suspension of disbelief. And I also don't have specific religious beliefs, so I think (but can't confirm) that if I watched a Catholic horror film that was made by/for Catholics, I would also not find that scary because I fundamentally do not believe that reality and good/evil work the way that they say it does.)
Knowing that it was "based on" a real Catholic exorcist who wrote a bunch of books about his experiences and his practice also kind of threw me out of the immersion for the same reasons that reality TV shows usually do. It's very ... myth-making, about a man who thought that yoga and pre-TERFening Harry Potter were both demonic gateways of Satan. Given how recently he died, and how much influence he had, I'm not sure how I feel about a movie representing him with the visual and verbal cues I associate with run-of-the-mill war-machine action heroes.
Still. It was entertaining and I enjoyed razzing it, and I remain of the opinion that watching someone deliberately injure themselves is one of the things that squicks me the most in horror.
We chose the movie based on the strength of the following review by Brian Tallerico: "Listen, this is no masterpiece, but there’s something fascinating about seeing an Oscar winner like Russell Crowe commit so completely to a B-movie this ludicrous. Crowe is all-in as the infamous Father Gabriele Amorth, a purported real-life exorcist who tries to save a possessed boy in Spain. This is a defiantly goofy movie, but it’s better than its quick theatrical run would have you believe, and a great fit for the Netflix horror roster of movies you can watch while you do something on your phone."
And ... that's exactly what we got! The scenery was very cool - a ruined Spanish abbey with a creepy basement and secret underground rooms! Castilian scrublands! Occasional shots of beautiful Catholic interiors in Rome! The special effects were also excellent!
It was also deeply goofy, of course. Russell Crowe plays Father Gabriele Amorth and uses a fake Italian accent the whole way through. The actor playing the possessed boy does a fantastically Gollum-inspired job of chewing on the scenery and spitting out the words that are then dubbed over in a Demon Voice. I hope that child gets to play more horror waifs in the future.
There's a cistern lined with non-Catholic Spanish Inquisition victims' skulls on consecrated church ground, and yet overall it was still more accurate to Catholic theology than the Exorcist TV show. The two heavy caveats to that are (a) it's a low fucking bar to clear and (b) that's the only way in which it surpasses The Exorcist show, and it is in many respects the least important. (Also, The Exorcist already has a Father Tomas who has an illicit affair with a woman who wants him to leave the priesthood for her, which he confesses to his own more experienced, grey-haired career exorcist. They did it better and much more homoerotically.)
(i don't find Catholicism-based horror to be particularly scary: I grew up in Catholicism, so if a movie gets either the vibes or the theology wrong, I can tell and it breaks my suspension of disbelief. And I also don't have specific religious beliefs, so I think (but can't confirm) that if I watched a Catholic horror film that was made by/for Catholics, I would also not find that scary because I fundamentally do not believe that reality and good/evil work the way that they say it does.)
Knowing that it was "based on" a real Catholic exorcist who wrote a bunch of books about his experiences and his practice also kind of threw me out of the immersion for the same reasons that reality TV shows usually do. It's very ... myth-making, about a man who thought that yoga and pre-TERFening Harry Potter were both demonic gateways of Satan. Given how recently he died, and how much influence he had, I'm not sure how I feel about a movie representing him with the visual and verbal cues I associate with run-of-the-mill war-machine action heroes.
Still. It was entertaining and I enjoyed razzing it, and I remain of the opinion that watching someone deliberately injure themselves is one of the things that squicks me the most in horror.
