In his new book Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie, film journalist Clark Collis tracks how horror became one of Hollywood’s leading genres, kicked off by 1996’s Scream. Interviewing everyone from Jamie Lee Curtis to Neve Campbell to Eli Roth to Sam Raimi, he covers influential films and franchises including Saw, Final Destination, Underworld, Insidious, Paranormal Activity and The Conjuring. In this exclusive excerpt, he recounts how Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on September 9, revitalized films about demonic possession.—M.M.
Director William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist would influence many of the young horror auteurs who emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s. M. Night Shyamalan was one future filmmaker who would never forget seeing Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin attempt to save the soul of Linda Blair’s Regan at an impressionable age.
“We went to my uncle and aunt’s who had HBO and that’s where I saw The Exorcist for the first time as a kid,” says the Sixth Sense director. “Slept with my parents for one month, dude. One month, I would not leave their room. I’m still traumatized from that experience a bit.”
Friedkin’s original movie failed to inspire similarly successful sequels. Director John Boorman’s 1977 film Exorcist II: The Heretic was an infamous disaster that Friedkin would describe as “the worst piece of s— I’ve ever seen” during a 2019 appearance on The Movies That Made Me podcast.
In the late ’80s, William Peter Blatty, author of the original novel The Exorcist, teamed with the newly founded Morgan Creek Entertainment and directed The Exorcist III. Released in August 1990, Blatty’s movie performed modestly at the box office.
In 1997, Morgan Creek began developing a prequel to Friedkin’s film, which would feature a younger version of Father Merrin. The company hired Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and director of the 1982 horror film Cat People, to oversee the movie. Schrader cast Stellan Skarsgård as Merrin and began shooting the $38 million-budgeted film in November 2002.
When Morgan Creek president James G. Robinson was dissatisfied with the result, the company employed Deep Blue Sea filmmaker Renny Harlin to take over the prequel. Harlin retained Skarsgård in the lead role but shot an almost completely new film, doubling the budget of the whole project to more than $75 million.
The director’s film, Exorcist: The Beginning, was released in the U.S. in August 2004, and grossed $48 million at the domestic box office, a slight return given the cost of the enterprise. Schrader’s original version, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, would be completed and put out the following year, to improved reviews but very little financial return.
The exorcism subgenre was revitalized by 2005’s Screen Gems-distributed The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The film was directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson, who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. Derrickson started making Super 8 films with the camera of his car dealer father and at Halloween constructed haunted houses in the basement of his home.
“I used to bring the neighborhood kids around and charge them to go through my basement of scary things,” he says.
At the age of 17, Derrickson moved to California, attending the Christian college Biola and then USC film school, where he first saw Italian director Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria. “I grew up on slasher movies and then I saw Suspiria,” he says. “I didn’t know horror could be so operatic and such high art. From that point on, I devoured everything.”
Derrickson and another USC graduate, Paul Harris Boardman, successfully pitched to write the screenplay for 2000’s Urban Legends: Final Cut. The pair were also among the clutch of screenwriters who worked on the script for Dimension’s Patrick Lussier-directed Dracula 2000.
In a 2017 message on social media, Derrickson recalled that Bob Weinstein told him that the movie “needs a rewrite. Shoots in two weeks. It’s called Dracula 2000. It’s terrible. But I’m making it anyway.” According to Derrickson, when he asked the Dimension chief why he was making the film if the script was terrible, Weinstein replied, “Because it’s called Dracula 2000.”
In August 1999, Variety reported that Dimension had signed Derrickson and Boardman to a three-picture deal. The principal fruit of that pact was 2000’s straight-to-video Hellraiser: Inferno, the fifth entry in the Clive Barker-created franchise. Written by Derrickson and Boardman and directed by Derrickson, the film starred Craig Sheffer as a corrupt cop whose investigation of a murder leads him to the hellish realm of Doug Bradley’s Pinhead.
“My reach [exceeded] my grasp,” says Derrickson of the film, which he made for just $2 million. “The budget that I had for that movie didn’t fit the script, that’s for sure. But I also had a lot to learn about how to make something scary.”
How The Exorcism of Emily Rose Broke Through, 20 Years Ago
Over the next half-decade, Derrickson and Boardman worked on a slew of scripts, nearly all of which would remain unproduced. Among the screenplays the pair wrote during this period was the first draft of what would become 2014’s Derrickson-directed Deliver Us from Evil, starring Eric Bana and Joel McHale.
Their script was based on the 2001 non-fiction book Beware the Night, which detailed the career of NYPD officer and paranormal investigator Ralph Sarchie. When Derrickson visited New York to meet with Sarchie, the cop recommended that he read another book called The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel. “He said, ‘It’s the most well-documented case of demonic possession I’ve ever read,’” the director remembers.
Written by anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman, The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel documented the case of a young German woman who underwent 67 exorcisms in the year prior to her death from malnutrition in 1976. After Michel’s passing, her parents and two priests were put on trial and convicted of negligent homicide. Derrickson was electrified by the story.
The director believed that an adaptation of Goodman’s book could satisfy his desire to make movies with spiritual themes and refresh the exorcism movie by marrying the subgenre with that of the courtroom drama. “I contacted the author, and I optioned it for $100, and then I wrote the script on spec, and that became The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” says Derrickson.
The filmmaker was inspired not just by Goodman’s book but by audio recordings of Anneliese Michel which the author sent him. “She became friends with the two priests, who gave her all the recordings of these exorcisms,” he says. “There were something like 30 audio cassettes. She gave them to me, and I listened through all of them. Absolutely horrifying. They are truly the stuff of nightmares.”
Derrickson and Boardman’s screenplay relocated the events to America and related the story of Emily Rose in flashback from the perspective of different characters, a structure inspired by the work of Derrickson’s cinematic hero, Rashomon filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.
The script proved a tough sell, thanks to the poor box office track record of The Exorcist franchise in the decades since Friedkin’s film. “I took it around town, and everybody passed on it,” says Derrickson. The director did not approach Screen Gems, believing the studio would be unlikely to take on the project. “Sony’s Screen Gems was a new company,” he says. “They had made the first Underworld, [but] they hadn’t made much.”
Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper got his hands on a copy of the screenplay and reacted with extreme positivity. “I get a call on Monday morning that says, ‘Screen Gems is going to make your movie,’” recalls Derrickson “I’m like, ‘What?! I haven’t even met with them. What are you talking about?’ I’m always going to be grateful to Clint for having the vision to see what that movie could be.”
Derrickson cast Tom Wilkinson as a priest who is put on trial for his involvement in the death of Emily Rose and Laura Linney as the lawyer of Wilkinson’s character. Linney had acted alongside a relatively unknown actress named Jennifer Carpenter in a 2002 Broadway production of The Crucible and suggested that the director look at her for the part of Emily Rose.
In her audition, Carpenter genuinely unnerved Derrickson with her performance of a possessed person. “Jennifer came into the room and, just in front of us, did the kind of things that she does in the movie,” the director says. “I remember watching her in this psychotic state that she seemed to be in, and the way she moved her body, and the sounds she was making. I got frightened, it felt so alien and unhinged.”
Carpenter’s audition prompted Derrickson to reassess his approach to the film.
“I thought to myself, okay, not only am I going to cast her, but I’m going to cut almost all the visual effects,” he says. “This is what’s scary, this person’s performance right here. I realized, this is how you get around The Exorcist. You can’t go over The Exorcist, you’ll never conquer that movie, but you can go under it! That, to me, was the idea, making the terror the result of this naturalistic performance, and that’s how the movie worked.”
Released in the U.S. on September 9, 2005, The Exorcism of Emily Rose comfortably won its opening weekend with a gross of $30 million. The film would go on to amass worldwide earnings of $145 million.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose proved to be the rare original horror blockbuster that did not beget a sequel, with Derrickson moving on to direct 2008’s Keanu Reeves-starring remake of the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.
But the success of the film helped usher in an onslaught of similar tales, including 2006’s An American Haunting, 2009’s The Haunting in Connecticut, 2010’s Eli Roth-produced The Last Exorcism, and 2011’s Anthony Hopkins-starring The Rite.
“No one had really made a successful exorcism movie since The Exorcist, and [our] movie relaunched the possession and exorcism genre,” says Derrickson. “I’m very proud of that fact.”
Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie, is now available from 1984 Publishing.