NEARLY 45 YEARS after The Exorcist scared the hell out of audiences when first released in 1973, director William Friedkin is returning to the subject of demonic possession with a new documentary called The Devil and Father Amorth.
Friedkin has long maintained that the original film was based on an actual case, but the new documentary will follow a real priest, Father Gabriele Amorth, the official Vatican exorcist, as he performs an exorcism on a young woman in Italy in 2016. The documentary will also compare the actual exorcism to the fictionalized one in Friedkin’s horror classic.
On the Fourth of July, 2017, Friedkin told Moresby Press that he had just finished the documentary. The Devil and Father Amorth then premiered Aug. 31 at the Venice Film Festival. The film will be released in New York and Los Angeles on April 20, followed by a worldwide digital release.
The director was granted access to witness the real-life exorcism and to film it on a video camera.
“I’ve never stopped being fascinated by the nature of good and evil, and the possibility of demonic possession,” Friedkin said. “In the early 1970s when I directed The Exorcist, I had not witnessed an exorcism but I wondered how close I had come to portraying reality. I had been curious to meet Father Amorth for many years and when he granted permission to meet and film him in Rome ... it was the opportunity to complete the circle and see how close that film came to reality.”
Unlike in the 1973 movie, where the possessed child is strapped to a bed like a chained monster, the woman in the documentary visits the exorcist as if seeing a psychiatrist for therapy sessions. Still, Friedkin was terrified by what he witnessed, he wrote in Vanity Fair magazine.
The new film, Friedkin’s first since Killer Joe in 2012, marks not only a return to the subject matter of demonic possession and exorcism, but to his documentary roots. The director got his start in live television for WGN in Chicago, where he was born and raised. He launched his filmmaking career with the TV documentaries The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), about a man on death row for murder, whose life was spared because of the film; and The Thin Blue Line (1966), about the narrow distinction between police and criminals.
Friedkin won the Academy Award for Best Director for his 1971 film The French Connection, in which he used “an induced documentary” style of filmmaking that gave the true-crime thriller its powerful realism. Friedkin used the same techniques when filming The Exorcist.
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