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Monday Mini: What Possession Movie Tropes Say About Us · Stuff Mom Never Told You

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Hey, this is Annie. I'm welcome to Stuff One Never
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Told You production of iHeartRadio. Yes, I'm still by myself.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Samantha is down for the count with COVID right now.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: We've got a lot of travel coming up, so trying
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: to get ahead. And I will say for this episode,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: I am largely quoting one article from tour dot com
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: called from the Exorcist to talk to me. Possession Films
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: teach us to Fear the Wrong Things by j R. Farasteros.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: I hope I got that someone correct. That my good
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: friend Barry sent to me because he knows I love
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: all things possession, which is funny. I thought it was
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: kind of appropriate because we're wrapping up our religious miniseries Promise.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: But I'm not religious. I am not religious at all,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: but I do find myself drawn to these stories and
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: we're really focusing on Western Christian ideas of possession for this.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: My mom wouldn't let me watch The Exorcist. She wouldn't
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: let me have it in her house because she was
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: so afraid of it. And I have just found myself
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: gravitating to a lot of these stories sometimes and sometimes
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: that gives me pause. I'm like, why am I being
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: drawn to this when I'm not religious, and I think
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: that's you know, I don't believe in ghosts either, but
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I love ghost movies, so I don't think that's necessarily strange,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: but it is strange when a lot of Christian law
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: is wrapped up in it. One of my favorite movies
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: now is The Exorcist, And another reason this was on
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: my mind is because William Friedkin has died recently, and
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: I also happened to see the new movie Talk to
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Me with some friends. There will be minor spoilers for
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: that in here, but not that many. But when I
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: was watching it, it just occurred to me a lot
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: of the stuff in this article, a lot from these
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: quotes we're going to read that I was kind of like, huh,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: it's interesting who gets possessed in a lot of these movies?
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: What that says.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: So that being said, let us start with our first quote.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Possession films are inescapably religious. What that means changes from
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: generation to generation and from culture to culture. As fans
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: of South Korea as the Whaling can attest, The Exorcist
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: is undeniably the grandfather of possession films as a subgenre.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Directed by William Friedkin. The Axiosist was released in nineteen
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: seventy three, and it's based on a book of the
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: same name written by William Peter Blattie that was released
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one. The Exorcist was a box office juggernaut,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, a title
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: it held for forty years, and receiving ten Oscar nominations,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: including Best Picture. Now, if you haven't read about this
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: movie and the reactions people had when it came out,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: they're quite dramatic. People were getting sick, they were passing
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: out like it was a very intense and for some people,
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: very formative experience. I remember when I first started at
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: this job, I asked my coworkers what was the scariest
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: movie they'd ever seen. I'd say over half of them
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: said The Exorcist. Then I would not describe them as religious.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: And it's just fascinating to me that it had that
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: much of an impact. And I do think it's important
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: to keep in mind the time when this came out,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: and who was being possessed, what was the story going
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: on behind it in terms of You've got your single
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: mother who is a career woman and her sweet daughter
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: is the one that gets possessed. So that being said,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: here's another quote to that point. The Exorcist is a
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: baby boomer horror movie. Through and through the good guys
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: here are the institutional church embodied by the two priests.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Both the book and film were released in a time
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: of cultural anxiety, particularly with regard to religion. The FDA
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: authorized the birth control pill a decade later in nineteen sixty,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: which gave women control over their reprojective system for the
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: first time in history, with predictable outcomes. Not just the
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: free love movement of the sixties, but a massive change
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: in marriage habits and the twenty years after the pill
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: was released, divorce rates more than doubled, are the percentage
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: of adults over eighteen who are married. Plummeted into this milieu,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Laddie and Friedkin give us the story of a broken
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: home in which a young girl is tormented by puberty
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: demon and can only find solace when a father comes
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: into the house. As Jude Doyle explains in Dead Blondes
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: and Bad Mothers, Reagan's smooth baby skin erupts and scabs
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: over into weeping, discolored mess. She has outbursts of temper,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: insults and resists authority figures, makes display of sheer pointless defiance.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: She talks obsessively about sex, mostly to shock people. She masturbates,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: she bleeds from her vagina. In other words, Reagan becomes
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: a teenager. Her demon is puberty. And yeah, I would
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: also add she curses a lot. That's kind of a
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: plot point. Is like, oh, she's cursing now. Basically she
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: goes from like your very innocent and heavy quotes young child,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: too not messy, angry, somewhat violent. I don't know, maybe
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: I'm being too nice, violent, obsessed with sex, yeah, obsessed
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: with shocking people, like saying things to shock people. And
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: she she is like, she's at the right age for
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: puberty for sure, and she does. I thought that was
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: interesting pointing out like the father has to come into
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: the house. I hadn't really thought about that. And I
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: also want to come back and do a follow up
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: episode about nuns now that the nun has become this
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: horror icon and talk about nuns and horror. But yeah,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: that's how she's saved. As a father comes into this
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: house with where her biological father is notably accent, she
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: gets the church father is the one that saves her.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The quote continues. The Exorcist is family based on a
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: true story and exorcism performed in Saint Louis in nineteen
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: forty nine. The real child was a boy, not a girl,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: and he came from a two parent home. The framework
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: that resonated so strongly with moviegoers in nineteen seventy three
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: was entirely artifice, a reflection not of the true story,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: but of white American anxieties. So yeah, I mean, that's
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: interesting that they thought this would hit more with audiences
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: that it was a young girl. And in a lot
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: of the exorcism movies I've seen, it is often a
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: young girl or young woman. I had a friend say
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: to me recently, why is I think he was talking
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: about Monster Squad. It's been a long time since I've
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: seen Monster Squad. But why did the virgin have to
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: be a woman? Why? What? There is a lot of
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: male virgins about? But yeah, I mean, I think that
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: goes back to the ultimate corruption, And a lot of
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: our horror is young, usually white girls who are innocent.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: But when it happens with men, I feel like it's
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: much more often uses they kill their whole family or
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: something are a very violence, whereas with women it's much
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: more like take their soul. That's just my experience.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of movies about possession and extorcism.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: The quote continues. Compare that to James Wand's twenty thirteen
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: The Conjuring, also based on a true story, though set
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, the Conjuring embodies the anxieties
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: of millennials rather than their boomer parents. The Warrens contact
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: the Catholic Church to obtain an exorcism, but because the
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: parent family isn't Catholic, approval for the right must come
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: from the Vatican, and the Warrens are convinced the family
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: won't survive long enough for that approval to come. In
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the reality, the child of another family did die in
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Bashida's care, and she was tried for murder, with rumors
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: swirling that she had sacrificed the child in an act
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: of witchcraft. The court found her innocent, however, But yeah,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: that movie is very much my friends and I like
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: to joke again, I enjoy this movie, but we like
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: to joke that it's sort of like superhero Christians like
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: swooping in and it is that the first one is
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: very much about motherhood, and that's sort of how it's
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: like Bashievah's ultimate sin is that she's killing these children,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: and that's how they save the main woman, the mother
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: of the family, is they remind her of like how
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: important her children are to her, which is not necessarily
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: a bad storyline. It's just worth examining why that is.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: There's also a lot of messaging about the dangers of
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: not following God. There's a whole warning about you, you know,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: you need to get your children baptized or else, sort
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: of almost blaming them like this wouldn't have happened if
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: you had followed God. The quote continues ed Warren is
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: successful not because of the church, but despite the Church.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: What matters in the conjuring is not religious affiliation but belief,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: a particularly millennial attitude embodied by the phrase spiritual but
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: not religious. Nearly a third Millennials claim no religious affiliation,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: compared with just thirteen percent of boomers and twenty percent
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: of Gen X, whose defining possession film might be the
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: middle finger to the American dream that is Beetlejuice. And
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: I think that's really fascinating. I think that's interesting to
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: look in how it's shifted with generations, because I would agree.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: When I read that the whole spiritual but not religious,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, that describes a lot of my friends.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: I even I remember having a very long conversation with
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: a big group of my friends about this movie that
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: was pretty much about like the Vatican was trying to
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: cover up this lost I don't know part of the Bible,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: and the lost part of the Bible was just saying,
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: like the religion is, it's not the church, it's not
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: the stone, it's not the building that is spiritual or
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: religious or is going to save you. It's within you.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: It's being spiritual. And it was funny to me because
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I can't even remember the day. If I just tried
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: to some of you, I bet some of you do know, right,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't like a really well known movie, but
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a lot of us have seen it and had heard
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: that part like yeah, resonated, But the quote continues to
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: generalize a bit. Boomers love church. Gen Z rebelled against church.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: Millennials look for spirituality outside of church. Gen Z doesn't
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: think about church much at all, which there has been
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: a lot of headlines about that recently. I've I've seen
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: quite a few, and we have been talking about that
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: in our religious mini series. Okay, and then here is
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: final quote. It's perhaps an unavoidable feature of possession films
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: that they teach us to be afraid of the wrong things.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Often what's implicitly demonized is equality and dignity, single parents,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: female sexuality, grief. We didn't even cover how insidious chapter
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: two demonizes transgender people. Possession films, whether intentionally or not,
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: communicate that a world without institutionalized faith is a world
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: where we're at the mercy of evil powers that wish
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: to do as harm. But when the institutions we're told
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: should protect us prey upon us instead, maybe it's time
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: to take our chances. Possession films, even those as groundbreaking
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: as talked to me, are conservative at their heart, But
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: maybe gen Z has the right of it. Perhaps those
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: institutions that have proven themselves so untrustworthy aren't worthy of conservation,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: which I think relates back to what we've been talking
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: about in this religious mini series, that we have so
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: many examples of harm that these institutions have done, and
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: that's not to say they haven't done good, and that
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: that inherently makes religious people somehow wrong or something like that.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Not at all. I think it's just questioning, as always,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: these messages that are being communicated to us through entertainment
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: that we enjoy, which I enjoy. Like I said, the
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Exorcist is one of my favorite horror movies of all time.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: I really love the conjuring it, but it has always
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: struck me who is targeted, who is possessed? Who does
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: the saving? And that sort of message is still there,
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: and I think a lot of us recognize that. I
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: think a lot of us recognize that it's often very
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: conservative in nature of like, oh, why does it have
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: to be a virginal girl who gets possessed and is
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: being tempted that going through puberty aka a demon? I
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: think a lot of us know that. But I just
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: wanted to bring that up because I have been thinking
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: about it recently, and in case anyone else has any
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: other thoughts about it, maybe you remember the name of
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: that movie I was talking about. I'm sure it's gonna
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: count of you right after this is over, or if
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: you have any suggestions, Samantha and I would love them.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I'm really sad she wasn't here for this one, but
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: we'll have to come back to it in the meantime.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: You can email us at Stefida moms Stuff at iHeartMedia
• 14:26
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• 14:28
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• 14:31
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• 14:37
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• 14:40
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• 14:42
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