The Exorcist Files - The Exorcist Movie with Fr. Martins

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Father Martins breaks down the most famous Exorcism movie of all time.Thank you for our sponsors for making this show possible.Check out ReadThelion.com for amazing news and coverage on the most pressing issues of today.FountofGrace- incredible, handmade Catholic sacramentals, jewelry and medals. Use code EXFILES for 20% off.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to The Exorcist Files, where today we will unsurprisingly be talking about the most famous exorcism movie of all time, The Exorcist, aptly named, right? I'm here with the one and hopefully the only, Father Carlos Martins. This is a much anticipated and promised bonus episode from our Kickstarter. Again, thank you to everyone who has supported the show and supported our Kickstarter crowd fund. We really appreciate it. We're bringing you these bonus episodes while we have new Kickstarter. cases in the pipeline, which I do want to address. Many listeners are asking about new case files. Be assured, there are way more in the pipeline. We create them in batches, though, to keep the production cost down to a minimum. We promised season two would contain these bonus episodes, and we would address specific topics, and we are in the midst of releasing those now.

I just also want to say, the show is more than just creating reenactments of demonic activity. It's also interviews, topical discussions on all things spiritual warfare, and that might include history that might include spiritual gifts. Spiritual warfare is broader than just demonic reenactments. Alrighty. Well, Father, thanks for being here today. We're going to talk about the Exorcist. I guess maybe to start, I know it's been a minute since you've seen the movie, right? Oh, gosh. You know, I was sitting down and trying to calculate this. I was probably 15 or 16, so we're talking 35 years ago since I've seen it. Not to add any clarity on your age, but how old were you in the movie kind of came out?

negative one years old. So the movie came out in 1973. I was born in 74. I didn't see it until around the year 1990, maybe 91. I don't think it was later than that. Interesting. So you held off. So ironic for an exas, you kind of held off and didn't see it. Was that just out of lack of curiosity or had the movie kind of left the zeit guys before you became a priestage? Did you find horror movies interesting at all? You know, I remember watching movies like Friday the 3rd. 13th and Nightmare and Elm Street and stuff like that. I never found them scary. They were just kind of comical and stupid, but you watched it for the cheese. You watched it for the silliness of it all, you know, so on Friday the 13th, here's this guy who dies, he drowns in a lake,

and he comes back, and he kills everybody. And so they shoot him and he does get wounded, but he keeps coming at them. You know, so just, there's just kind of contradictions everywhere. And at the end of the day, kind of an insult to one's intelligence. But, you know, what I found different when I watched The Exorcist was there was not that insult to the intelligence. So I was born into a nominally religious family. And we didn't practice our faith. We didn't pray. I mean, we went to church at Christmas and Easter. But faith didn't really have a place in our lives. However, I was put in Catholic school, and Catholic school was the high point of the experimentation that was happening in education with kids in the sense that the grammar books were tossed out at that time. The dictionaries were tossed out.

There was this prevailing belief that for kids to succeed in school, that you had to throw out these structures and just allow the raw person to come out. the issue with that, which we now know is grammar is a set of tools that enable effective communication. But at that time, it was this desire to just discard all of this stuff. I went to Catholic school in Ontario, Canada, and the catechism was thrown out, and religion was a kind of expressive thing. What color would you be for God? And if you were a leaf for God or a tree, what kind of tree would you be and why? It was all this metaphorical kind of junk that was vacuous.

You know, kids aren't stupid. No one believes this. This is idiocy. But when I saw the movie The Exorcist, it did affect me in the sense that I could not discount what I was seeing here. The primordial aspect of evil was touched within me, like that awareness. And it was not easy to discount it as make-believe. So whatever element of faith I had within me, the stories of Jesus exercising in scriptures that I did hear, that notion of Christ being the vanquisher of evil was put front and center and made the question come up within me. Either he is or he isn't, and there is no middle ground.

In other words, at the end of the day, all that is left is the truthfulness. of Christ or not. And in other words, it's not Buddha, it's not Hinduism. I had some study in those elements. I mean, we had a course in high school where we looked at all of those things and where we looked at a multiplicity of different religions, including even witchcraft and shamanistic religions and so forth. And it was easy to identify either superstition or just ignorance. in those things, like the whole notion of karma and stuff like that. But in terms of Christ, if the devil is real and if he does this and what was encapsulated in the movie The Exorcist was very different than what is in any movement. And look, you know, the proofs in the pudding.

Hollywood makes all kinds of scary movies, monster movies, you know, vampires, werewolves, villains of every different sort, some that are, you know, have a supernatural dimension to them. But when you're in a theater watching those things, you'll hear people let out a laugh here and there just how silly it all is. Some don't, but lots do. When you're in a theater watching an exorcism movie, where the Christian dimension of Christ, the real authentic dimension is presented, nobody laughs. There's something primordial that is there. And this is why, among other reasons, Hollywood keeps going back to it because it is a perent. Neil Seller. Unfortunately, my criticism with Hollywood, as evidenced in the movies put out by

Russell Crow recently and other Exorcism movies, they just don't tell the story properly. So Hollywood has a lot to learn about storytelling. Well, who knows? Exorcist Files the Movies. Coming to you in a theater, 28, we'll see. All right. Well, Father, why do we get a little bit into the movie The Exorcist is also based off a best-selling book, and the book's actually really good. I found it really captured the psychology of the demonic really well, the gas-lining. But, Father, maybe you could give a little background on the film, the book, the story, and then the case, obviously, because what makes this particularly chilling is that this was inspired by some real events that happened, right?

Yeah, for sure. So the movie The Exorcist is based on the book called The Exorcist, which was written by William Peter Blady. And Blady also wrote the script for the movie The Exorcist, which was then directed by William Friedkin. But the whole thing was based on the story of a man that we now know died in 2020,

just a month shy of his 86th birthday, and that is Ronald Edwin Hunkler. Hunkler was the boy upon which the story the Exorcist was based. So obviously in the story, the gender changed and many circumstances changed. So to be clear, and from the outset, Ronald Huncler, the possessed person for decades, has been called by the pseudonyms Roland Doe or Robbie Mannheim. I've always known him as Robbie.

In the exorcism world, that has been by far the most common name used for him, Robbie. And so I'm going to keep that throughout this episode. I know him as Robbie and I always have. And so I'm just going to keep that. It's less confusing for me. But like I said, he is also known as Roland Doe. So he was born in 1935 in Maryland in a small town named Cottage City. Cottage City is only maybe 10 miles, 12 miles away from the White House.

So it's not far from where the political action is within the city. the United States. Following his liberation, he finished school, went on to college, and then he became an engineer, and he was hired by NASA. In fact, he patented technology that was used to make the panels on the space shuttle resistant to extreme heat. He, in addition to that, he helped the Apollo missions during the 1960s, which culminated in putting a man on the moon in 1969. His identity has been obscured and kept underwrapped since the exorcisms, which at first occurred at Georgetown University in 1949 and then progressed on to St. Louis. But the exorcisms were multiple. I believe it was only one that happened at Georgetown.

The exorcist himself was severely injured in that exorcism. So Robbie had been taken to Georgetown U. Georgetown had a cutting edge medical facility, which had been opened just a few years prior to the events. So he was examined there by different psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, given a battery of tests. It was while he was being seen at the hospital, at his visits there,

that the decision was made, look, we think we have enough here for an exorcism because we can't find anything pathologically wrong with him. What were his symptoms again, or what was going on with him that prompted them to do the investigation? And the movie, obviously, Regan has, they think it's seizures, right, and she's, you know, urinating in public and, you know, exhibiting very bizarre behavioral symptoms. Right. So they began with common infestation stuff.

So scratchings in the house. The scratchings at first were downstairs in the house in one room. Everybody thought it was a rodent. Goes on for 10 days. Then they think, okay, well, the rodent seems to be dead now. Well, guess what? The scratchings now are hovered around his room. And they go on for a while.

And then all of a sudden, they cease just being scratching sounds. And now his mattress appears to be scratched. Now, Robbie himself feels a scratch or a cut during the night, and he senses a person in the darkness walking around his room. And lights going on, lights going off, other noises and so forth. And then all of a sudden, the bed starts shaking of its own accord, and then sliding across the room. And at one point, it slid so hard, it actually knocked his family over. So the whole bed moved across the room. So it's at this point the family goes to their Lutheran pastor.

The family, they were German Lutherans. And the pastor said, look, for this kind of stuff, you need to go to the Catholics. I don't feel competent for this. And so that's what they did. They approached a Jesuit priest. The Jesuits run Georgetown University. At the time, they were plentiful there. And that began the process by which Robbie that was then examined at the school, at the university,

and then the first exorcism took place. Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90. The Exodus 90 challenge begins this year on January 20th. But this isn't just a 90-day program.

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That's Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90.com. 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you. So, Father, was there an inciting event? We've taught in this show that demons typically don't just happen out of nowhere with nothing. Was there an inciting event or a doorway that the case discusses that was the opening for this really famous demonization? Yeah, there sure was. So Robbie had an aunt. At times, she's called Harriet. At other times, Aunt Tilly appears to be a nickname for Anne Hary, regardless, let's call her Aunt Tilly.

Aunt Tilly was a spiritualist. She made contact with the dead and communicated with him, or at least believed that she did. The medium, for our purposes anyway, was a Ouija board. In the story of Robbie, the Ouija board is the tool by which that, that sin, that transgression was done. So, Robbie at this time, the symptoms manifested when he was 13 years old. It was some time before that, probably at most a couple of years, when she used the Ouija

board and invited him to do the same, and he did. And everything was fine. And we don't know how many times that occurred that he participated in that. but it all hit the fan when she died when Robbie was 13. And at her death, very shortly afterwards, is when the manifestation started. And so much so that the family thought that it was Aunt Tilly that was the cause of all of this stuff happening. The lights turning on and off, the bed sliding and so forth. And even during the possession, they would refer to the entity as Aunt Tilly.

Tilly. All right, just to be clear, there was no assaults on him or harassment until that time. Everything was peachy until that moment. That's what is reported. And so the question is why? Why did it take the death of the aunt? Or why did the demons wait until the death of the aunt to exercise their rights over Robbie? And you know what? I don't have an answer to that. To give an answer, I would have to be on the inside the head of the demons. And of course, I'm not. And I say demons because in the actual story of Robbie, there were multiple demons. Although in the movie, Bladdy and Friedkin, they reduce it down to one demon, which they call Pizzou, which is an actual demon. Pazuzu was the god of the winds. He had power over wind in the Mesopotamian culture. And he is always depicted with a

double set of wings, so kind of two wings going up, two wings going down. He has the head of an animal, the body of a man. He has male genitalia, which are typically depicted, like his male genitals are depicted very long and snake-like with the head of a snake, and he has the tail of a scorpion. So, you know, obvious evil iconography there. Why did Blady pick Pizzou, and, you know, only he knows. I personally don't ever recall encountering a demon named Pizzou, although I have friends who have. Yeah, it's interesting also. In the movie, there's a great scene where Father Karras is greeting Father Marin and says, Father, I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities

Regan has manifested. I'd say there seem to be three. She's convinced, and then Father the Marion interrupts and goes, make no mistake, there is only one. Which is interesting because we've interviewed a lot of actions in the show and they say it's actually rare that you're fighting just against one. Isn't that correct, father? It's rare, I would say, when you have manifestations as strong as Robbie manifested or in the case of the movie as the character played by Linda Blair manifested. I would say it's pretty rare for there to just be one and there to be that level a demonic

a cult because they always want to bring in multiple demons. And it is to a demon's advantage to do that because it gives him cover. It gives him, you know, look, you're bringing in foot soldiers that are helping you conquer the enemy. So that's what you want. Now, why did Bladdy feel the need to reduce it down to one demon? Well, keep in mind that every demon is a personality, as you just mentioned right now. Bladdy actually incorporated that in the movie. There appear to be three different personalities. Every personality is going to be a character in a movie.

And characters need development, right? The demon here is front and center. The demon is the villain. So if you have multiple demons, you have multiple villains, and those need a development. And it becomes difficult as a storyteller to accomplish that within a two-hour movie. So to simplify it, Bladdy, reasonably,

reduces it down to one demon, and the properties and the qualities of all of them get reduced to one. So for the purposes of communicating a story of good versus evil, this is sufficient. Awesome. Now, obviously, in the movie, Georgetown plays a prominent role in the sense that there's the famous scene with the steps and the tubular bells, which is interesting are not used throughout much of the movies. Sort of like chariots of fire. I was surprised it's actually only used in one walking scene and not throughout the movie, but everyone is. is very familiar with that famous tone. But what was the connection, father, if any, between the author, and I think he was at Georgetown

while this was going on, right? He was in his final year of his undergraduate degree at Georgetown when these exorcisms were happening. Now, at that time, they were not happening at Georgetown themselves. I believe that only one took place, and the priest there, Father Hughes, was severely injured. The exorcisms were then moved to St. Louis. which St. Louis also had and has a very large Jesuit population. And so what happened is that the case was transferred to them, so to speak.

The Georgetown University Medical Center, while Robbie was in there getting tested and being evaluated and so forth, and nothing in the assessments and in the evaluations accounted for the phenomena that people were experiencing around him. And the priest, nobody was more skeptical than them. You know, they looked for what was reasonable here in terms of a pathology, in terms of human illness, psychological illness, psychological trauma, et cetera. But at the end of the day, nothing added up that could explain the symptoms, that the bed would be shaking and would lift when Robbie is lying on.

on top of it? What could it count for the bed sliding across the room so hard that it knocks somebody down like a bowling pit? So this is the kind of stuff that is happening and other things besides. A bottle of holy water gets thrown across the room. Nobody threw it. Nobody was anywhere near to it. So, you know, Robbie could have 3,800 diagnosed pathologies, diagnosed human illnesses. Not a single one of them would explain that phenomenon. So we're talking here about causality. We're talking here about what is a sufficient cause for certain events to have occurred. And so at this point, look, we've got to make a decision.

Either we give some credit to what is stated in the scriptures, and this is what confronted these priests. Either we believe that the scriptures contain authentic stories about Jesus battling demons or we don't. but if we don't, then we have to accept the consequences of that. That is that the book, the source of and deposit of revelation that we all believe in, has factual errors in it. And they had a strong enough faith that they didn't go that way. And they thought, well, we're going to ask the bishop for permission for an exorcism. The bishop granted it. What happened?

So Robbie was tied to his hospital bed at Georgetown, and he was tied because of the violent resistance and manifestations that he would do to the presence of the priest. This was in the presence of and with permission of his parents, obviously. And at one point, Robbie broke one of the restraints that bound his arm, but nobody saw that this happened. He reached down and pulled one of the springs out of the mattress and lunged towards the priest and drove that spring into his arm and tore it from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. If you go on the internet, you can see images of that injury. And I mean, it's a very

ugly wound. And it's a wound that affected the priest for the rest of his life. Like, it left him with a certain level of handicap because the wound was so large. And that was the end of his career as an exorcist. He just didn't want to face that again and who can blame him. It was from that point then that Robbie was sent to St. Louis. And that decision was more of a decision of the parents, I think, than the Jesuit priests themselves. Although it was Jesuits that handled the cases in both cities, both in Washington, D.C. area and at St. Louis. But what happened was there was a series of raised welts on Robbie's body that would appear. So they were debating whether to get out of the city,

to get out of the house that they were currently living in, and to see if that would help, she had a sister in St. Louis, and there was the opportunity to move in with her. And on Bobby's body, the word Lewis appeared. And so then the question was, gosh, when do we leave? And the message came Saturday. So it was as if answers are being dictated to this, and these welts are just appearing out of nowhere.

Robbie is not causing them. Robbie is not scratching them into his body. Certainly, he could do so when people are not looking, but they're looking at him, and the waltz are just appearing on his body. At one point, there's a large kind of welt that they said appeared as if a small pitchfork was being dragged across his body. So it starts with a single line and then there's a fork of two lines. They can see this and there's blood coming out along the entire scratch. So there's no hand causing this. They are observing this thing manifest itself right in front of their eyes.

There's no natural explanation for such a thing unless something that is invisible, something otherworldly is causing it. So, Father, let me ask, let's maybe get into the difference. between the exorcism and how it goes in the movie, the book, and then what actually happened. In the movie, obviously, we have two priests, one who is on the verge of losing his faith and is on this journey, another sort of veteran spiritual warfare priest and Father Marin. And it's one and done, and we'll obviously get to the ending that's controversial there. But in real life, it was not just one exorcism, right?

Oh, gosh, no. It was a great many. At one point in a five-week period, Robbie had an exorcism done to him every single day. And that, I tell you, the priest that did that is an absolute hero. Because he did that every evening and the sessions would last past midnight. And he was up in the wee hours of the morning, you know, by 5 a.m. To get ready for his 6 a.m. duties beginning the next day. It was an absolute heroic, heroic effort on the part of that priest.

Father, you've talked about in the show, one and done is rare in exorcism, but day after day in succession, have you ever gone through that in a gauntlet? I've always, maybe I'm wrong, but I felt like we've shared that multiple extrasms typically take place maybe over a week or so, but not day to day like that. Is that abnormal? It was abnormal for me, certainly. I didn't have the time because of my responsibilities to be. able to do that, but also to what I found is giving a week in between sessions helps the victim

kind of adjust to new normalcy. Every exorcism is effective at some level. It is. It causes the demon to lose more real estate, more power, even if it doesn't appear to. In other words, the demon is going to try very hard to make it look like nothing is effective. And that's his strategy against you. It's a mind game. And it can appear over time that, oh my gosh, rather than losing power, he appears to be getting even stronger. It can look like that, but you cannot put your faith in that. You've got to put your faith in Christ and in Christ's battle against the demon. Although obviously you have to make an assessment in this case, you're an exorcist,

meaning also you're a judge of effects and you're a judge of events and you're a judge of many things. You're evaluating. At the end of the day, you cannot. fall into the trap of losing hope that your efforts are having an effect because the devil is always going to go after that. He's going to go after that because that's the best strategy he has. If he can trick you, if he can cause you to lose hope, well, then he's won a great thing. So when you look at the number of times that Robbie was subjected to exorcisms, and to be fair, it wasn't always just the same priest, even when the events moved to St. Louis.

There were multiple priests, but there was a five-week period where one single priest conducted each exorcism, and that is just absolute heroism. Spiritual decapulana. Father, you mentioned a couple priests, so this might be a good time to segue. So in the movie, obviously, things get pretty epic when Father Marin shows up, and he's an old-school, tough priest that just doesn't mess around with the demon. sort of the contrast to Father Carus and that he's very much in the know of what's happening. In the real story, there is a priest, Father Raymond Bishop.

Could you tell us a little bit about him and some of the chilling anecdotes that he recorded? Yeah, so Father Bishop was an old school Jesuit. The Jesuits are a community of priests founded by St. Ignatius Laola. And Ignatius Loyola was a highly intelligent, very exacting person. He had great trust in reason and reasoning and saw it, rightly so, as a gift from God. And so when we engage in reasoning, we are using a gift given by God. And so what you have in Father Bishop's accounts, because he kept a diary, and this diary of events in his mind could also be useful in future cases of exorcism. and Father Bishop kept very painstaking details.

And to give you an idea, here's a paragraph. Since Mrs. X, Mrs. X is Robbie's mother, is a native St. Louisian, she thought of leaving her home and taking the boy to St. Louis in order to avoid some of these strange manifestations. It seems that whatever force was writing the words, these are those spontaneous scratch marks, these spontaneous welts that a manifest in Robby's body spelling words in exactitude. In other words, it wasn't something that looked like the word X. It was the word X and no one could doubt it.

It seems that whatever force was writing the words was in favor of making the trip to St. Louis. On one evening, the word Lewis was written on the boy's ribs in deep red. Next, when there was some question of the time of the departure, the word Saturday was written plainly on the boy's hip. As to the length of time, the mother and the boy should stay in St. Louis, another message was printed on the boy's chest, three and a half weeks. The printing always appeared without any motion on the part of the boy's hands, so it just manifested. It just appeared. The mother was keeping him under close supervision. there seemed to be a sharp pain when the marks occurred so that the boy doubled up and utter a rather

terrifying sound, as if the marks were being scratched on him from the inside out. The markings could not have been done by the boy for the added reason that on one occasion there was writing on his back. Even in St. Louis, the writing continued. There was some question of sending Robbie to school during his visit there, but the message no appeared on his wrists. Also a large N on both legs. The mother feared disobeying the order. So the question then is, okay, why would the demon do this? And we're in the realm right now of speculation. These people, mom and the priests, took these scratches and what they communicated as advice, as instructions to follow.

So in other words, they did not believe that these came from the demon. Were they justified in that? I can't really say yes or no. Certainly, the liberation did happen in St. Louis, and it happened through the use of the church's prayers. And then there was a manifestation at the end of the presence of St. Michael, the Archangel. And it was a manifestation experienced both in the room and in the church attached to the place where the exorcism was occurring.

But I think in the eyes of mom, in the eyes of some of the family members, they thought that this was Aunt Tilly, or maybe Aunt Tilly, communicating. And could it have been her? At the end of the day, I don't know. I don't know. They chose, for whatever reason, to follow these instructions. And at the end of the day, the boy was liberated. So should they not have followed them? I can't tell you. Would I have followed them? I don't know. I think you have to be present in this situation. You have to make a discernment. And there's a lot of things happening beyond just the mere scratches. When you're kind of in the moment, in the exorcism, during the manifestations, you're also listening to what you're experiencing inside. You're praying. You're praying both in the room and you're praying outside the room in your own prayer time.

and you're being attentive to the way in which God is swaying you about different things. And so could I have been swayed by what I believed was God to follow those same sorts of instructions? Theoretically, yes. I never have been. I've never seen Welts like that myself. Certainly nothing that ever communicated writing. I've seen Welts appear on flesh spontaneously, but they were just mere injuries, never actual communications of writing. In the movie The Exorcist, on Reagan's torso, the words help me appear. And so the film, it sounds like they took this anecdote and made it that Regan was crying for help in the throes of her possession.

Right. Now, what could have produced that writing? You know, your guess is as good as mine. Ultimately, I think it did come from God. I think it came from God. Did he use some agency? Did he use St. Michael? Did he send St. Michael to produce?

that writing. Did he send Robbie's guardian angel? Did he send Aunt Tilly, who was bound up somehow in that possession? That may be part of her purgation in purgatory is that she's bound up with this. And so, you know, some people will immediately raise a question, maybe even an objection. Well, if this is of God, why was the scratching? Why were the welts so painful? And maybe that's all part of the suffering of it all. Maybe that's part of the purgation that the possession is in and of itself, that it requires a certain amount of suffering. And Robbie is undergoing that suffering for his own sins in participating in the occult act that his aunt introduced him to, but also for the sins of the ant, perhaps, and the sins of humanity. We're all connected to one another, and a sin by one

affects all of us at some level. And we're talking about it today. Just like Emily Rose, we've talked about the, it probably says something about this case that you and I are discussing it here today and the amount of people that have been impacted by it, right, Father? Well, speaking of suffering, there was a lot of suffering off camera. During the movie, there was quite a bit of controversy

about injuries and things happening. Father, could you give us a little bit of flavor? Anyone who has produced any content around exorcism that attempts to have fidelity to the truth usually find some strange things happening. And on the film set of The Exorcist, they had a lot going on, right, Father? They certainly did, yeah.

So there was a lot of trouble in the making of the actual film. Linda Blair, the actress who played the possessed girl who played the real-life Robbie, as well as the actress that played her mother, both suffered severe back injuries from a faulty rigging of a special effects harness.

So both had significant back injuries. During production, a fire broke out that burned down most of the set. In fact, it burned down the entire set except for one thing, the bedroom in which the exorcisms took place. And that event spooked a lot of people that were involved in the film. Two of the film's actors died during production and at least two crew members did as well. to other crew members in on-set accidents lost appendages. One lost a thumb, the other lost a toe. The crew was so jaded with all of this that it is said that the director, William Friedkin,

who was not a Christian, in fact, towards the end of his life, he's now dead along with Bladdy, but Friedkin, the director, stated towards the end of his life that he remained an agnostic. He had great respect for the teachings of Jesus. did not call himself a Christian. It is said that he called in a priest to bless the set. But something even more twisted happened. One of the minor actors in the movie, and this is a guy that plays the radiologist. And in fact, he was an actual medical technician when Blattie or Friedkin went into the hospital at Georgetown to see a procedure being enacted. He was so impressed by the procedure. He said, look, I want this guy to play the technician. that does it. That actor that this medical technician who played a minor bit in the movie,

he went on to become a serial killer. So he murdered a journalist for which he was convicted and served 24 years in prison. But it is strongly suspected that he's the killer behind the infamous bag murders, which were the murders of six gay men in Manhattan during the 1970s. He was never convicted of those, but there's never been any other suspect other than him. We've had Chuck and Carrey on, the writer, producers, and directors of Nefarious, and they shared everything from dead squirrels and technology going dead. People on the film, Emily Rose, Scott Derrickson has made comments in public and some of the actors about strange phenomena occurring on set.

Also, while we're no strangers to having technical glitches on this show, even when we try to produce stuff. So Father, would you just say it's just a general rule? You try to document anything the enemy's doing, get ready, get that troubleshooting and the customer service line ready. When you look at what is going on off camera with the film The Exorcist, and based on the experiences, we document on this show about other movies like Nefarious, Emily Rose, etc. Do you look at this and go, it seems like this movie was opposed spiritually? Well, I think, look, so the philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, who was the favorite philosopher of Adolf Hitler, He was the philosopher that famously wrote, God is dead, we've killed him.

He had a saying in one of his works, and it's hauntingly accurate, I think. He says, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you. So when you go and probe and talk about the devil, the devil is probing you. And he may or may not appreciate the publicity that you're giving him. At the very least, he's going to despise you. The devil has no friends. He may have accomplices, associates, but he doesn't have friends. And so if he can strike you, he probably will.

If he can do something to make your life a misery, he probably will. And so the amount of time that it took to film this movie was inordinate. I mean, it went off the production schedule for so long because obstacles just kept being placed in front of it. And then, you know, Chuck and Carrie from the movie Nefarious, they know all about that. And for them, it was a cause and effect. Any time that the dialogue in the movie was centered on the devil, then the wind picked up in an inordinate way. And it was so loud that they had to hit cut. But the soon as the director uttered the word cut, the exterior wind died down.

It just became a very eerie cause and effect relationship. It is. And interestingly, I mean, even with Emily Rose, actors would report equipment malfunctioning, and Jennifer Carpenter, who played Emily Rose, said that her radio would turn on constantly by itself. And also the other star, Laura Linney, would have her TV come on spontaneously. Has that something that's happened to you, father? Is that a pretty standard demonic manifestation? Well, I've had my car radio come on spontaneously and the volume turn up really loud, like that maximum and none of the buttons would do anything. I've had my phone just start acting crazily even when I powered it down to turn it off, turned on by itself. Text messages telling me to F off, telling me to leave Person X alone and threats. That bad things would happen to me if I continue to help. Yeah, well, that's a common experience we've documented Father Barton on the show shared that he had some interesting phone calls come in after he did his first actressism. So I guess unsurprisingly, but to be fair, we'll get into some of the skeptical claims here.

Obviously, this is an entertainment industry with horror, and it's great for PR if you have backstory that helps that. So there's certainly, we have to concede there is an incentive to have drama around the making of a movie, and the horror industry does often leverage that. But, Father, not everyone accepted this story right at face value. There are many who are still skeptical about this. Could you talk a little bit about the credible and maybe discuss some of the claims that maybe this whole thing is just blown up out of proportion? Yeah. So there are a lot of people that think that all of this was just a hoax.

And I can understand that thinking because at one time, I would have been very skeptical to it. You know, when I wasn't a Christian, I would have thought, hey, this is just somehow people's imaginations if they're being honest or the world is filled with dishonest people and they're looking for their 15 minutes of fame and looking for some publicity that is going to get them some money and I just don't buy any of this. But I think what you have to do is look at the evidence. Now, someone that rejects the evidence, you know, for example, there's a gentleman named Joe Nicol, so he's part of something called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

They have a journal called the Skeptical Inquirer. And at one point, Joe Nicol wrote this. He said nothing that was reliably reported in the case was beyond the abilities of a teenager to produce. The tantrums, trances, moved furniture, hurled objects, automatic writing, superficial scratches, and other phenomena were just the kinds of things that someone of Robbie's age could accomplish, just as others have done before and since. Indeed, the elements of quote unquote poltergeist phenomena, spirit communication, and demonic possession, taken both separately and especially together, as one progressed to the other, suggest nothing so much as role playing involving trickery. And I could not disagree more with this guy.

So I think Joe Nicol and those like him with regard to this case are engaged in good old fashion superstition. So Robbie would be lying on his bed and the bed would start jumping violently. And it lifted into the air with Robbie on it. So how could this be done? This wasn't done just in front of his family, but in front of medical staff, in front of very, very smart priests. These are priests with graduate degrees who one would think would look under the bed to see is there something under this bed that has been placed here to produce this effect. This happens also when Robbie's at the hospital, right? So how could Robbie be placed in a bed and the bed do

this? So Mr. Joe Nicol, give me a scenario where this could happen. And all of these people are tricked. The increased manifestations during the exorcism sessions are another point of fact. The lights turning on and off by themselves. How could Robbie do this in the hospital? The bottle of holy water being thrown across the room by itself. No one was near it. So we're taking this on the communication of very rational persons who are in the room. And these are rational people. These are people with careers. These are Jesuits who gave many, many, many interviews until the day that each one of them died regarding this, why would they subject themselves to this kind of ridicule and skepticism if they didn't actually believe that this was the case, even though they exercised all their

rational powers to try to find a natural explanation for these events. So this is the kind of thing that the skeptics don't tackle. So you might just say, hey, look, I just don't believe it because people are dishonest and that's it. And if that's your explanation, fine. But you are far from disproving them. You are not engaging in science. You're engaging in superstition. You are subscribing to your own theory apart from establishing actual facts, apart from engaging in an actual cause and effect explanation. The last priest to die who was present at the exorcisms said, And at the time, you know, in the late 40s, he wasn't a priest. He was a seminarian.

So he had driven the priest, Father Hughes, to the exorcism. And he gave numerous interviews. And again, he said that the scratches would just appear, would just manifest on Robbie's body out of nowhere. It could not have been Robbie who did them. He talked about Robbie being able to spit 20 to 25 feet. across the room and always hit the priest in the eye and never didn't hit the priest in the eye. So you look at the case of the family. So at one point the priest said to the family, look, I think for Robbie's sake, it would be

helpful if you converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism. Why? Because then they could administer the sacraments, Catholicism and the Orthodox believe the same thing, that the sacraments are the ways which Jesus Christ has left to heal the world. So they wanted to introduce Robbie into the sacramental life of the church. So they suggested to the family, would you convert? The family said yes. So if the family didn't feel like what these priests were doing was helpful, they would have never done that. Let's say the family takes the position, hey, the priest wants us to convert.

Okay, big deal. Let's just do this if it keeps them happy so that they continue to see us and we can keep going on these exorcisms. My money is not on that. They went to their Lutheran minister first and he was terrified of the diabolical phenomena and he said, take this guy to the Catholics. They did that. And then they went to numerous exorcisms over 30 that lasted for hours.

this is no small inconvenience to the family. It shows that the family thought that these were good things. And it put their son through obvious trauma, but they were willing to do it. They assented to it. And so the priests at a certain point said, look, we think this is going to help. The family at that point is convinced enough to say yes. And there's a lot of very smart people, university educated people, people who worked at a university that was renowned, who had contact with Robbie during the possession.

None of them said that this could be chalked up to merely a psychological trauma. What may have been wrong with Robbie psychologically, it simply could not produce the phenomenon that they were witnessing. So to imagine that Robbie duped all of these people, that none of them were smart enough to discover his trickery. But now this guy, Joe Nicol and the committee for skeptical inquiry is when decades later and removed from the fact that this is just absurd. And that's why I call it superstition. Right.

Superstition being the belief that we trust in the irrational rather than reason or science to believe in the unsubstantiated rather than in reason or science as the cause of causation. All right. Well, why don't we land the plane here? So, Father, as an exorcist and your tight-knit community of other exorcists, what is the general consensus on the movie itself, but not just from an accuracy standpoint, but also do they view it as a net positive? Horror is a controversial topic. What do you and your fellow exorcist kind of think of this film in totality? You know, we never talk about the movie The Exorcist. I mean, we may talk about our own cases, but there's nothing special. in terms of demonic possession about this movie. We don't go to it to learn. There's nothing in it that we have not ourselves experienced. You know, I've said before, the one thing that does not happen is the 360-degree head-turning, although the devil can make it look like a head does that.

We've had on our show before, Monsignor Brankan say that he saw somebody's head turned like the head of a wolf kind of instantly and then change back. I've said that I've seen a person's canine teeth suddenly like in a flash grow, since they were two inches long coming out of his mouth like they were the teeth of a great big cat or of a lion. But these are illusions. These are the demon producing a mirage, an illusion, which he can do because he can bend light. Through trickery, cause something to appear and to manifest it that is simply not there. But everything else we've seen. And I can't think of anything in the movie that I haven't seen besides the vomiting of the pea soup.

But gosh, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Like, the devil does gross things. The spitting with perfect marksmanship I've experienced. I've gotten spit in my face. If the devil all of a sudden vomited a disgusting substance out of the mouth of the person possessed, okay, who cares big deal. So it wouldn't face me at all. And Father, obviously the film is very well done. It is a cinematic masterpiece. And I find the gaslighting really well done, especially in the book, you know, Regan's dress is missing. It's a slow and gradual escalation. And I also find it interesting that they have a priest who seems to be losing his fate and another veteran on different journeys. Despite whatever the film gets right, Father Karas is bending over backwards to not do an exorcism or administer. that this is demonic, even to the point with conversing with Regan in another language,

and he just can't get there. And it's Father Marin, on the other hand, has absolute confidence in what this is. But obviously, the film gets some major things wrong. The biggest one being that Father Carus, in a moment of well-intentioned stupidity, invites the demon into him and jumps out the window. Father, maybe you could address why that is so unrealistic. Well, I wouldn't even say it's unrealistic, but it would be a horribly, horribly stupid thing to do. because in saying that, in offering yourself in place of another, you're not being a hero, you're being a gigantic idiot because you're giving the rights to the demon. All right.

So the demon has wiggled rights from Robbie. They weren't explicit rights. You know, Robbie didn't say, demon, I hereby summon you within me and take control over me and yada, yada, yada, but the devil obtained them through Robbie's use of the Ouija board and maybe other things besides, but we certainly know of the Ouija board. But he didn't know what he was bargaining for. Now you have this priest who knows dang well what he's bargaining for. And he's a greater piece of real estate than Robbie. Why? Because he's a priest. Right. So he possesses the sacrament of Holy Orders. He's an agent of Jesus Christ. So it's the wrong kind of heroism. As an exorcist,

you have to be very aware at every moment. You are not the exorcist. resist. Christ is. You are simply his agent. And so you may want things to end whenever you want them to, you want them to end yesterday. You want to agent this so that this person is liberated as soon as possible. But that's up to Christ. At the end of the day, you have to cede the timeline, the authority. You have to cede the pain that this possessed person is going through and the inconvenience that you are. You have to seed all that to Christ. That's what it means to not be God. The exorcist is not God.

Neither are you, neither are mine. And so we cannot take the place of Christ and decide, you know, I'm going to bring about an end of this right now, and do something that is abhorrent to our identity as Christians. So to give any rights to the demon as he did willingly is stupid. Now, why did Blatty do this? Well, Blatty had to end the plane, right? He had to end this epic two-hour movie, and he had to do it cleanly and quickly, and then the priest goes out the window and dies. And so it looks like, you know, this is a scene, Allah, the garrisoned demoniac when the demons go into the pigs and they bring about the death. And so here's a very dramatic, quick and clean end.

I wouldn't say that it's not realistic because it can be done, but it would just be something that would be so absurd. A priest doing this would be the absolute most scary thing about that exorcism. Absolutely. And it also points to an interesting dilemma that we face one storytelling, which is stories. There's protagonist and antagonist, and the antagonist needs to be equally matched, or at least be able to strike the protagonist in a way that creates that story tension that we all respond to. And yet, the spiritual dynamic is that the enemy is somehow at parity with God. And so movies like this, typically in Hollywood, dial up the phenomena and turn it into a shouting match, when in reality, that's actually not the drama and what's happening.

And so his caving in at the end seems to point towards a concession that doesn't need to happen, right? Maybe you could speak a little bit to how these are often portrayed at parody in shouting matches, and that's not the actual battle. Exactly, exactly. If as an exorcist you're shouting, that implies that you don't have. confidence in Christ. So you have to be the person who is the most filled with confidence, the most filled with faith and belief in the power of Jesus Christ. And power is manifested in calmness. It's manifested in a spoken authority. And Monsignor Patrick Brankin just epitomizes that for me. The demon will say something, will utter a command to him, and he will stop, and he will

say, you do not tell us what to do. We tell you what to do. In the name of Jesus Christ, you will do this, you will give up this, you will do X. And the demon will interrupt him, will exercise a belligerence over him and so forth. And he just calmly responds when he desires to those things. As a matter of fact, he shows how much confidence, how much power, how much authority of Christ he has within him by simply stating the facts. And by simply reminding the devil that Christ is the one in charge here, not you. Amen. And Father, last question. Obviously, Father Carus is a really compelling character because in the film he's depicted in losing his faith. And yet Father Maron does sense this in

him and brings him in. Maybe you could comment on that, Father. Have you ever known a priest who is losing their faith in a way that Carus has? And maybe you could speak to that even if you are going through doubts, that doesn't change the mark on your soul. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and the role that confidence in your relationship of God plays before you go into an exorcism. Yeah, certainly. If there was a priest or anybody at all who I was aware that is losing his or her faith, sure as heck exists would never bring that person into an exorcism because that faith is going to be tested. There's lots of wiggle room for games, and if you don't have your faith to protect you against them, you just don't belong in that room.

So although it made for good storytelling in the movie, because it showed a contrast between these two priests, in real life, you would just never do that. When somebody is struggling in his or her faith, an exorcism is the wrong place to bring that person into. It's the wrong place. You might think, well, gosh, they're going to get to see all kinds of diabolical phenomenon and the laws of nature being contradicted. and so where in reality, the devil is so intelligent, the devil is so cruel, the devil is so cunning at being able to go after someone. You don't want to subject a human being to that because you're going to wound that person psychologically. You just don't want to do that. You're going to be responsible for that person being beaten up in that room.

So basically you don't want to use an exorcism as an apologetic for the devil, right? Yeah. It brings up an interesting question because, Father Marin had, does seem very aware of Father Karras' internal doubt and still brings him into the room. So I wonder if a case could be made that Father Marin, despite being portrayed as the confident, the priest who actually has the faith, et cetera, he ends up dying. He has a heart condition. The demon doesn't actually kill him. But perhaps him bringing in a doubting priest maybe contributed, you could argue, to Father Karras' death. Maybe. I mean, we're talking in the realm of theory here because this only happened in the movie. But, you know,

Hey, sure. You know, in other words, he can't really rely on the prayers of a non-believing priest because he's probably not praying at that. Priest in the movie, he's not even quite sure that he believes in God. He's watching eyes open just sort of like a science experiment. And I guess the point is, Father Marin's portrayed as the spiritual warfare expert, but you would say that no spiritual warfare expert of Marin's stature in any realistic scenario would ever bring in someone like Karris if he was aware of that.

Heavens no. That person is not going to be an asset to you to the exorcist in the room. He's going to be a liability. He's going to be occupying your attention. He's going to be dividing your attention. You don't want that person around. No, that's right. You say, wait outside and join for margaritas and you can hear about it through secondhand, right? Okay. Well, we got to land the plane. This has been an amazing head spinning discussion, which I probably should mention too, Father. We addressed this before, but no head spinning in real exorcists. right? Well, not 360-degree head spinning. The appearance of it may be, but not the actual thing. A neck isn't made to do that. The person would die. Watch out. Possessed chiropractors could be dangerous. All right. Well, folks, thank you so much. This has been our deep dive into The Exorcist. Father, would you say people should watch it, or do you not have an opinion on it? Or would you say avoid it? Just listen to our show instead. Any final thoughts on this? I don't know that I really have an opinion on it. If you want to watch it, watch it.

But at the end of the day, what I would say is believe in Christ, pat in your life after him, have a sincere, genuine prayer life, learn how to pray, go to church on Sunday, and keep the moral law. Then not only will God be yours, but the devil will flee from you. Amen. Awesome. All right, folks, thanks for listening. We will see you next week.