The Exorcist Files - The Strange Happenings On The Set of Nefarious

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

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Today, things are about to get a little nefarious. I have Chuck Konsleman and Carrie Solomon, the two writers, creators, and just propagators of an incredible film that Father Martin says our listeners know considers the most accurate depiction of the demonic mind ever created. And they are here today, virtually with us, where two or more exorcistic filmmakers are gathered. There is an awesome conversation. Chuck, Carrie, thank you for joining us on The Exorcist Files. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having to say. I never knew I was a propagator, but I'll go with it. Well, you are. And so I think in the interest of that, I want to, this is the icebreaker we ask everybody is.

If you had to, is there even words that could sum up the impact the Exorcist Files has had on you? I mean, should it be canonized? I mean, what are your thoughts on the Exorcist Files podcast? Well, we don't want the typical rules for canonization are a holy death and we don't want to see it go anywhere. So let's have you in contention and everyone, everyone optimistic, but let's not finish that particular part of the job. Let's let it run for a couple more years. Yeah, yeah. You know, die in the order of sanctity 100 years from now and then we'll canonize it.

Okay. All right. So maybe we'll settle for a Duter Canonical, perhaps, right? Maybe we can get in a later accretion. We'll get in there. There you go. But no, folks, both Kerry and Chuck have been huge supporters of our podcast and father and so we owe them an immense debt as well.

So I wanted to have them on because Father has shared a little bit, and we're going to hear from their perspective too, some of the absolutely astounding things that accompanied making this movie. And it is interesting because we've talked about other movies and how this topic seems to attract a lot of bizarre activity. So Kerry Chugg, I would love to. Let's just get right into it and get in since we are a spiritual warfare podcast. Your movie seems to be from an outside observation to be opposed.

Would you agree? Yes, I would say most certainly. So we have the things which are unusual but can be explained in the natural, and then we have the things which are completely inexplicable from the natural. When we wrote it, we knew the spirit dropped on us multiple times. So we knew something was up. It's almost impossible to do a movie about two guys in a row. room because you just, how do you make it interesting? And yet the spirit dropped on us. We felt

these compelling moments that just appeared out of nowhere. And then when we directed it, I mean, things went crazy haywire. Every text message wouldn't go through. Every email couldn't be sent. The cell phones didn't work. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if for some reason, you know, we lose the video here today or whatever. You know, we pray that that won't. happen. But it was a constant thing all time. I mean, everything that occurred, we had, for example, 12 car crashes in 13 days. Now, we were told before we started from the Lord that he would protect us and the crew and everything to go forward. Because this, when you, when you dance, when you take on the devil, you find out whether there is a devil. And so the bottom line is

then I can assure all your listeners, there is a devil. I mean, we saw him tangibly. I mean, we saw him tangibly, we saw a multitude of things. But we had 12 car crashes, just like at one every day, every car was totaled. So these were catastrophic crashes, and yet every single person in the car, not a scratch. Now, these were crew members, or these are all members, these are all people who are somehow associated with the film. Absolutely. Producers, crew members, everybody.

You know, we only had two and a half weeks of active shooting. It was a relatively short shoot. And so one Sunday night, we had an exorcist-trained priest staying with us. He was a clerician, and he stayed with us in an Airbnb. Directors tend to stay in a house when you're shooting because if they put you in a hotel, you can't go to the ice machine without having 12 conversations. So you hide in your room and you never come out. So we're in a house.

We're sharing a house. Kerry's son was there with us staying, and priest is there. And because you're off-scheduled shooting a movie, he's saying mass in our living room at 10.30 at night on a Sunday. By 2 a.m. he was having an emergency appendectomy. His appendix burst during removal. And the surgeon said, if you'd gotten here an hour later, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

You know, so it's just crazy, crazy, crazy stuff like that. I'll let Carrie tell you the story of the satanic squirrel, which is laughable at this point, but just an idea of, you know, I'll set the stage. So on this day when this happens, we were actually shooting the scenes where the mechanics of kind of demonic possession and so forth were being discussed on set. We were in a massive basketball arena. It's where the Oklahoma Thunder used to play, a convention center. It's a 1.25 million square foot facility, so it was just enormous.

We had what we were told was the highest sustained wins in the history of the state of Oakland. Oklahoma that day. So the building was groaning like it was an agony. We had two, we had the support beams of the dome, a 12,000 seat arena, and they were groaning. And then we had the kind of the tin work for the HVAC on the roof. And it was tortured metal sound like it was being ripped around. Some of the crew were not believers, they said it's like we're in hell. And it would reach a crescendo while we were discussing and while we were shooting, when we would, and most of the time when you're on set, you're actually not shooting. So if you're shooting maybe 15%, 10% of the time, it's a lot. When the cameras actually weren't running, the winds would die down, tend to die down significantly,

and then when we were shooting again, it would rev back up. But as an example of the Lord taking what was meant for ill and using it for good when we finally went to sound, because we were afraid we're going to have to re-record everything, which is really tough for actors because they have to match their lip movements. It also tends to mute. You never get back to the original magic or the original performance. So it would have negatively impacted the film overall. Our sound guy, who is an expert, what we've kind of forgotten was the conceit of the film at that point is that there's a thunderstorm raging outside. And all of these low sounds that are coming through and leaking through actually function as though they were sound design for the

movie and they actually enhance the experience. But I'm sure somebody out there wasn't looking to make our life easy. But I think the best part of this, and for your listeners, is that when we were shooting about the demonic, about the devil, and so on and so forth, I mean, it really sounded like we were in hell. And it was like demonic voices from above us, so much so that the atheists that we had on set looked up and they were like, there's something really wrong here. It feels like we're an elf. Sean Patrick Flannery, who was the lead, basically, everybody was freaked out because

basically we'd stop the scene and then we'd go back and do it again and it would come again. But when we would then move the scene to just a generic scene, something that wasn't about the devil, no voices. So we'd go back immediately to do the demonic, here come the voices again. And so it wasn't just the wind sweeping through. Oh, that's a nice coincidence. It was blatantly obvious that every time we spoke about the devil, every time we brought on, you know, something that he didn't want,

no, that we had this, it was like an orchestra from hell above us. And it was abnormal. It was totally abnormal. And this was an everyday event. I mean, we had every single day crazy things, like I said, from accidents. This arena had been prayed over to, there was five pounds of exercised salt in the arena. Okay. So in a phrase I never thought I would utter in a testament to God's plans for your life,

I want to come back to something you said, Chuck, that's satanic squirrel. That was not on my bingo card. So could you elaborate, before we get into exercise, five pounds of salt, could you elaborate on the, apparently the demons that were sent into a squirrel to afflict the film? Well, the same night we had the big wind, we came home about midnight to the Airbnb. And we were just kind of like, we were exhausted. We were going to watch a half hour TV or something. And it was pretty dark in the house.

And Carrie's son was staying with us because it was just before Christmas. He'd come out to visit. And Carrie's son said, Daddy, somebody broke in the house. And I am going to let Mr. Solomon take it from there. So we had the fire. There was a fireplace to the right. So if I'm looking straight at the TV on the right, there's a fire. fireplace. And my boy, I brought him out from Los Angeles at the time to set in Oklahoma,

because I wanted to spend Christmas with them and have them on a movie set and so on and so forth. So I went overboard. I tend to do that, especially at Christmas. So I had Christmas trees, and I had, you know, Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman and the Tall Soldiers, but I also had the baby Jesus and the nativity and all of that. And so what happened was, Underneath all of that was two doors that, you know, how you shut the glass doors on the fireplace. Well, the day before, those were sealed shut. And I noticed that they were totally open, wide open now. And I'm looking around and the place is trashed.

I was on the couch. I didn't even notice this. That's how tired we were. So I go over and I'm like, oh, man, I can't believe this. But what I noticed was the Christmas tree, the ornaments, Rudolph, Frosty, totally fine. but every religious item was destroyed. And it was like the baby Jesus, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, anything that was truly holy. And then we saw this, it was hard to explain, but it looked like excrement on the floor.

And it led to the couch. And all of a sudden I realized that something came down the chimney because we followed the tracks, jumped on the couch. Now, this wasn't funny at the time, but when I told us, story later, people start laughing. And so now we can laugh at it, but it was, it was crazy. It wasn't Santa, right? Just to be clear, it was not Santa that came down. No, there was nothing like that. And so what happened? What is about to prove you? What he's about to tell you will prove it wasn't Santa, yes. Right. And so on the couch, we see that whatever it was jumped onto the couch.

And then we had had mass. There was a table their father used. And they had the, and they had the patent and all the holy items. Walter cloth. All of his pencils were on the table. So what happened was the squirrel climbs up on the couch. You're going to remember, there's food everywhere in a movie set. And they

try to keep us happy. They lay out food everywhere. There's... In our house, it would pull it snacks. I mean, everywhere, right? So there's food that the squirrel could have. Nothing. It goes up on the couch, jumps to the table, goes to the restroom literally on the table.

The top right corner on the bottom left corner, it pees on both corners. And then on the patent, which is the golden plate where the body of Christ is put, it craps on the patent. Now, then it goes off of there, comes back around and up out of the chimney with all this food in the house.

The irony of this was about six months after this happened, no one believed us. About six months after this happened, there was a guy who we met, who was a satanic worshipper. I mean, this guy was really the dog. At one time. At one time, yeah. At one time. But he had become this phenomenally on fire Christian. And we were having a conversation. I told him this story. And he says, why don't you believe that? And this guy goes and tells me how satanic worshippers take creatures like cats, dogs, squirrels, all this. and they curse them and they have them infested and they send them into people's houses to wreak havoc. I mean, it was a trip.

So literally he says what you're dealing with, that was the devil. He used that. I mean, down the chimney, desecrates everything, destroys everything that was on the shelves and so on. Peace by piece, all the religious items broken, then just leaves. It was crazy. We realized at that moment, this is just, this is another. step that we were just, we were shocked by it. So I'm going to assume both, this is a crazy story, I'm going to assume that both of you now have optioned the rides to this and to either feature

Squirrel Interrupted, a new movie, or Children of the Acorns, right? Are those both horror thrillers coming from Carrie and Chuck soon? They on now. Oh my gosh. So I had heard about this story. Now, there are more, we're going to get to premiere night as well, because you guys were not off the hook just yet, not even close. And actually, your car accident story, I remember because a mutual dear friend of ours also had his car hit, and I was just remember thinking, oh, that's terrible. And then he said, oh, yeah, a lot of the crew members had this. And so this is just wild. But I guess, let me just get your reaction to this, because on one hand, as Christians, there should be no surprise, right? Jesus said, look, you will face many trials in this life. So,

No surprise, right? If you're doing something for the kingdom, it is opposed, et cetera. However, we do hear about in movies like this, et cetera, you know, with the original Exorcist and all the things that happened on that set, you hear about Scott Derrickson and some of the stuff that happened on the Exorcism of Emily Rose and some of the weird phenomena that we're having there. But I guess what I'm asking is, how do you reconcile this, like this victory, you know, this kind of like authority that the scriptions, you know,

speak pretty clearly of resist the devil flee from you and yet all this tragedy and you guys were prayed up you know you had all these sort of built-in protections that these other movies didn't have i think and yet you still experienced you know this you know crazy squirreliness so how do you kind of think through the persecution you all felt on this movie well i think that's exactly it it was persecution but he did obviously his displeasure, us revealing his machinations, you know, all the things that the devil does. But, you know, if you look at it, 12 car crashes, right? The devil uses fearing confusion. That's his only, that's his tools.

So he scares us to quit, right? That's what he wants us to do. But we had 12 car crashes in 13 days. Not a person was scratched. So what is this show? The devil attacks the law. Lord defends and then uses that evil for good. Now we're talking about it, right? And people out of your audience are going to start saying, you know, this stuff is real. Well, that saves people to change

their lives, to not play with tarot cards and so on. There's a purpose for every single thing that the Lord does. So he allows us to see the presence of evil, but he frustrates that evil. He allows us to build our faith through facing evil. I myself have seen a demon in real life. And this is no and I wondered and it scared me beyond everything I had ever. I mean, I was messed up for two weeks. But at the end of two weeks, what happened was I suddenly realized, this was when I was younger, I suddenly realized this was a phenomenal gift from God. Because once I saw the demon, I knew there were angels and there were more demons.

And if there were demons, that means there's a devil. And if there are angels, what does that mean? There is a gut. It actually turned around, strengthened me for the future. of doing something like unplanned where we were also demonically assaulted and doing nefarious and everything else we do. So there is reason for everything that the Lord allows and does. But on the other hand, the devil, he doesn't have the capacity to foresee like the Lord does. So the devil is always attacking, trying to scare. The demons were there. No one ever got hurt.

We had people cursing the set. We had people doing what. We all of a sudden walked in one day and there was this Not incense, but what was the smell, Chuck? What was that? Indian? It was actually the person running a facility, burned sage. We had one of the odd, but not necessarily supernatural things that happened was the trade union, IOTC, which controls a lot of the people that work on set, they struck us without warning and without a strike vote, which is just it's just completely unfair. And then they lied to the federal government. They said we fired our whole crew

and they tried to bring down the weight of Joe Biden's National Labor Relations Board on us. So we had to, I had to literally where I had to work with lawyers to keep us shooting as opposed to being able to co-direct the film. So they were trying to shut us down very hard. While that was going on, this woman burned sage. Our exorcist trained priest noticed

that the smell of the sage stopped outside and even though it was burned indoors, is it seemed as though it was a barrier and it never came near the actual shooting area of the set itself. And he actually spoke with some other exorcists and he said, you know, is this normal? Like, yeah, the Lord was, he believes that the Lord was preventing

that sort of pagan superstition or whatever you want to call the effects of that from permeating the set itself. But don't forget, but don't forget we also had in the room for the Mortons who came to the set. We were honored to have them. Now, here's a guy, who if you know him, he's big, you know, he's a great guy, he's fun, and we're breaking bread at lunch.

Four hours later, I get a phone call from upstairs in the suite. I mean, if this doesn't do it for somebody, I don't, you're not going to believe anything if you don't believe this. So we're spending time, wonderful time with father at lunch, and then we've got to get back to work and stuff because we're doing the premiere that night. So we're running all the talent through interviews and the media comes in and interviews. so we're in a big suite up in the room. I get a phone call from my girl that's shooting my team,

and she said, we got a problem in the suite. And I'm like, what's the problem? And she's like, there are demonic voices coming out of the couch. And I'm like, excuse me? Now, normally it's, we ran out of toilet paper. Craft services didn't show up. This is a first. There are demonic voices coming out of the couch.

Literally, there were demonic voices coming out of the couch. Literally, there were demonic. sonic voices coming out of the couch. The cameras were all messed up. They would freeze, the sound mixer, and the lights were flashing on and off. Cut two, I call father up, and I said, we've got a problem. And I told him really quickly, and what does he say? He says, I'll be right there.

But with a voice of like, very different, not the jovial fun. Now all of a sudden, it's like, okay, I know what this is. Cut two, he's at the door, different person. Because he's coming to fight the devil. And literally, he goes in there, does ancient prayer, you know, in Latin. He brings a secretary right in Latin, and he goes, he's got, okay, this was a movie shot because the interview suite is dark. The next room's got light, so he's backlit, which is great.

He's in his black clerks, purple stole. He's got the Benedictine crucifix in one hand. and he's got the Latin right tucked under the arm in the other. So here he comes. He's ready for war. So he comes into the suite where this has been going on. It's on the fifth floor. He puts us back to the French doors to the balcony.

The balcony is only the size of a postage stamp out there. But he goes back to it. So he goes, performs the right. And then afterwards, we talked to him. And he says, yeah, while I was going through the right, I had my right ear. There was a female voice chanting diabolically. He says, I wasn't sure the language.

I got to the part of the right where I declare bow now before the holy and terrible name of Jesus. And he's like, yeah, she was out of here after that. And we can rest to the rest of the rest. So you're literally, you're watching the hammer hit the nail. For those people that think Jesus is in the struggle with the devil, they're totally wrong. I mean, it's heresy. God is so sovereign, so powerful that when he appears through the priest with the exorcism, everything is destroyed.

Everything is blown out of the room and never to return. Then we find out that women downstairs in the premiere are being thrown face down. Two of them. Yeah, we then threw father into an SUV and took him where we expected him to be doing an exorcism for right of place,

which was our theater, the flagship theater of one of the big three chains here in Texas. And in the half hour before he got there, two women in separate incidents on a completely flat floor had been thrown face down in the lobby. And so we were like, okay, yeah, that's a little weird. And then just to cap some other stuff off, you know, so the next day, our booking agent who actually places the films in the theaters, one of the busiest weeks of his life and the most

important as far as the film is concerned, he's only in his 30s. He has a short hop flight from Dallas to Phoenix, as he's even. ear drum bursts during the flight from the pressure change. I've never known anyone who had their eardrum burst, but his does. And then just in case we want any more of the weird weirdness, during the marketing campaign, in L.A., there was a torrential downpour for a whole weekend. But in Burbank, where we were doing our post-production, the entire roof of the building got ripped off.

And it rained. This happened about two or three in the morning, as best anyone can tell, on a Saturday morning, so no one was there. Tarrantial rain. We're talking like what they call an atmospheric river, which is kind of like a nonstop hurricane force, you know, rain. For 10 or 12 hours, every inch of dry wall, every inch of carpet had to be torn into the building.

Our office that we worked out of when they turned out the walls, there was a window, formerly a window and a door in that office that we never knew about. We only saw it when they tore it down the sticks. And our entire marketing team had to work dispersed, for the rest of the marketing campaign for the film. Now, there were only two things going on in that building at the time that this occurred. And it was the only building in Burbank had happened to.

As far as I'm aware, it's the only building in Los Angeles that had happened to. The only two things going on in that building at the time were our marketing campaign and post-production for the shows. 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. Exodus 90 is a spirituality for modern men that is built on three ancient pillars, prayer, self-sacrifice, and fraternity. We all long for something more. We long to be the men God created us to be, sons of a loving father. It's time. to turn away from our idols. It's time to break free from the pharaohs that hold us in bondage. If you're ready to make a fresh start and embark on a journey to uncommon freedom in Jesus Christ, then download the Exodus 90 app today. This is your chance to break free, refocus, and rediscover who God is calling you to be in the new year. It starts January 20th. So go to Exodus 90.com X-Files to learn more about Exodus 90.

That's Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you. Money back. Well, I'm grateful IKEA is not a sponsor for this, given the demonic couches. And I'm also, I know you two are recruiting people and building out, which will get to your business you're building out. But I have to say, your HR video for orientation should come with several lengthy waivers or disclaimers, apparently. So if you're thinking about working with Chuck and Kerry, folks, you're getting all the info you need right now.

Well, I've always said, you know, the Catholic marketing campaign has come die with us. So maybe we can hire that. Wow. Really sexy marketing campaign. die with us. I don't know what ours will be, but somebody needs to work on it. Wow, that's, this is incredible. I know, and we heard from Father Martins about that night, and I do imagine him sort of as a Liam Neeson figure from Taken, where he gets the phone call, and he does have a very particular set of skills that makes him a nightmare for the enemy. But he said he definitely felt,

and he would know, he said he felt something quite sinister in that room. And I think it's interesting, you know, I have now interviewed and, you know, being the sort of the, sorry, trying to be the journalist on the show here and interview all these different people for perspectives. I have interviewed now so many exorcists and it's a tight-knit community. They all know each other, but it is a common thing. They say that just recording equipment just stops working sometimes. And so there is an interesting theory out there that, and you can call them demons, you can call them immaterial, whatever you want to call it. But even among some of my secular interviews I've done, that there's this acknowledgement that sometimes when you document

at this stuff. Equipment, you know, somehow this EMF stuff can be manipulated and somehow the electrical fields can be tampered with. And so it sounds like that's been your experience. Absolutely the case. You know, we have to take our Newsweek interview, you had to get taken three times. So it got taken, and this is 3,000 miles away. So the first time the journalist calls back embarrassed, he's like, my batteries must

have failed. First time it's ever happened. Okay. So we do the interview again, and he knows he's got it recorded and then his digital recorder fails and all the all the information evaporates so finally he says okay how about i send you the questions in writing and you respond and so i did we did and then i tried sending the email carry was working at a desk across the belly of a conference table from me his wifi is working great it took me 20 minutes to send an email and just as a you know i remember for many years ago john debney the composer

of the passion of the christ had such had such problems with his recording equipment when he was composing the score for that film and was not expecting it. He literally, and I don't advise anyone doing this, unfortunately it didn't work for him. Apparently, he went out in the middle of the night into the parking lot of where he was working and challenged the devil to a fist fight. Nobody showed up. It was a gift for him, but he was just so frustrated at, you know, the problems that were manifesting. So yeah, I think, I think, I mean, let's face it, it's just energy. you know, messing with energy for a spiritual being is probably child's play. Not only that, we were on the way out to Texas.

We were in L.A. at the time we were going to bring out equipment and stuff. So we wanted to go to, take a step back. The final, we went to Deluxe, which does the final polish and everything, and you run it on a big screen. Deluxe in L.A. is the size of a city block. It's a monster. It's a hundred million dollar complex easily. It's a city unto itself. it's bulletproof.

Literally backup generator after the whole thing. And so we go into Deluxe and we're just about to do, to run the movie to make sure everything is fine. Vital quality control. Right. Whole building goes out. All the lights. Backup generators come on. They go out.

Everything. The guy looks at us and says to us, you know, this is unusual because this can't happen. We leave there. we hop in the car because we've got to be out in Texas and as we go I said hey Chuck I forgot pull over to the Office Depot over here I want a pad so we can write some notes on the way you know for you know nefarious the TV show

that kind of thing so we pull over to the Office Depot this is in another place completely a couple of hours from where we were okay go to the front door the manager won't let us in why not he says about 30 seconds ago all the lights went out, all of our electricity went out. So we couldn't. He denied us a pen and paper, okay, to write ideas that. This is, people don't understand. They, I mean, it's a constant thing. And after a while,

you get crazy, frustrated, angry, you know, and you just want to quit, which is exactly the point. I have to, I mean, I do, you know, and I, again, I'm a pen and paper guy, but I didn't want you know, Carrie, you do have a voice memo app and you can take notes on your phone, should you ever face diabolical resistance at the office depot or staples depending on wherever you procure your items uh young jett i we are born in another age you're still in that age you got to remember we thought the 80s were cool okay so we thought the codex was a civilization advanced once we got out of papyrus and into things that look more or less like books that's that's as far as we advanced well as as as long as i know you're not riding

The Furious, the TV show on parchment and scrolls, but I think it's still going to be fantastic. As we wrap up here, I want to get a little bit, too, about what was your heart in wanting to write the movie, et cetera, because, again, I've now interviewed a bunch of extras, and it's widely accepted, you know, multiple of these priests have said on our show and others that they consider your film to be the most accurate depiction of the demonic mind and accurately capturing the psychological gaslighting and sort of the personality. So what was kind of the genesis of the film and how did it kind of, I mean, it's a miracle it got done. I mean, any, and the part you guys are not mentioning and any producer, director knows this. It's a miracle when

any film gets done, period. The fact that you did it in the face of such significant opposition, there should be a category for the Oscars for the nominees for most opposed film or best film featuring spiritual opposition. And you guys would be a shoe in. But what was the heart for wanting to do this and walk us through the project? We did not want to do it. Steve Dayes called us up and basically he had helped us and on plan. He was one of the few people with Glenn Beck was the first big entity that stood up for us and it gave us a little momentum. We were under terrible siege. The government, Google, everybody was trying to kill us, take us out. In other words, stop the movie. Unplanned. And so we remembered Steve because of that.

He calls us up one day and he says to us, how much it would it cost for you to do my book? And it's a nefarious plot, which is basically only a diatribe. It's a devil ranting about how we destroyed America, is going to destroy America. And we're like, I don't know, you know, and we didn't want to give him a number, but he stayed on us. Persistent, persistent, persistent. And finally, I just threw a number at him and I said, I don't know, $2 million. Well, the next day we had $2 million. And I was like, uh-oh, now we're going to have to probably do this, you know, and stuff like that.

We just weren't there at that moment. We were finishing up some other stuff when we had some plans. Next thing we know where, you know, we're trying to fight it, but the Lord keeps bringing us back to it, keeps bringing us back to it. Ultimately, we said, okay, Lord, we hear you. We're going to do it. But I will tell you that that movie was not done by us. I know people think I'm being trite. I'm telling you that movie was not done about it.

The spirit came into us and wrote that. Look, we're two guys from New Jersey and Brooklyn, okay? We don't speak like that character speaks. We don't write like that. That dialogue was God. It was the Holy Spirit, like the scene where all hell rejoices. I don't know if you remember the scene after the abortion sequence. When that came right from above, it came out of my mouth.

And literally Chuck and I just hit the floor. I couldn't believe it. And the same thing on set. Every single thing. This was a battle between good and evil. This is between God and the devil. And I think the thing that so blew us away about the movie was when we watched it the first time, it was like we didn't write it. It was crazy. It was like we were watching a movie like if we went to the theater. Because literally we had forgot. I mean, it was just magnificent in that way. I don't know. It's a great piece of work, in my opinion, that the Lord did. I will tell you, we get text, phone messages, emails every day. I'll read this to you. Sean Patrick Flannery literally just sent this to me. He says, there's a letter he got. This movie is affecting people.

And by the way, our numbers, which normally go and hit the floor at this point, are actually now coming back up and rising. people are going in waves. We're growing as a movie a year after the movie. But this is a letter to give you an example. Hi, Sean, I want to share an update over a year later, how nefarious has just completely changed my life. Atheist to Christian, but not only that,

I have joined the ministries through my church that will be entering prisons to give them hope for Jesus. Nefarious still guides me and gives me a different lens to look through when it comes to speaking to these inmates. meeting some last week was a complete humbling experience, and I can't wait to give them specific lines through this movie that made me change my life. We get dozens of these things. So it's not only the spiritual battle, people are going back to church, they're burning their tarot cards, they're getting rid of their fortune dollars. This is an amazing event in spiritual history.

That's what I'm going to say. We are humble to have been, I don't know, puppets, the hand. the eyes, whatever you want to say. We're humbled that the Lord chooses us and praise God that we said yes to do it. Chuck, what about you? How's the movie impacted you? And did you share Kerry's resistance of I didn't want to do this either? And you found yourself along for a wild ride?

Well, yes. Yes to all of the above. Okay. I have sometimes compared being Mr. Solomon's business partner to being, terrified of roller coasters and suddenly you wake up and you find yourself on a roller coaster and the guy next to you is laughing maniacically and then eventually the ride is slowing down. It's coming back into the station. You figure it's over and you realize you're being waved back through.

So for another go-round. So, but we decided, we both decide if we're going to do something. It just seemed like the right thing to do. When the financing came out of nowhere, I said, look, I feel like a golden retriever who spent his life chasing fire trucks. Now I caught one. I got to figure out what to do with it. We got two million dollars.

I got to go figure out how to make a movie with it. Well, how about we take... And we needed a storytelling device because the original book, it was loosely based on, didn't even have a second character to talk to. So, you know, we kind of started thinking about the condemned prisoner

and those who are aren't familiar with the story. It's about a condemned prisoner who is possessed by a demon and the psychiatrist who comes to interview him to determine his fitness for execution. because if you're actually legitimately insane, they won't execute you. And they have a little chat for a couple hours. So it was a very, very interesting experience.

It was also a COVID-write. It was very, very oppressive, the writing of it. We actually had to take a break for a few weeks, which we've only ever had to do once before in a 30-year career. And that was with similarly dark material. It was a concentration camp story that we were working on at one point. we had to take a few weeks away from it. This, we had to do the same thing.

We worked on a comedy pilot for a couple of weeks and then came back to it. But, and the funny thing was when it was completely done, I, Carrie may feel differently. I had no idea whether it was any good at all. You know, we went to go show it to a few people. And if everyone who had looked at it had told me it was terrible and was unfilmable, because it was so different than anything else, you know, it's not a normal story.

breaks all sorts of rules, all sorts of conventions. That theoretically, it shouldn't work. But for some reason, there is some anointing in this film that I don't even quite understand. I won't claim to understand it, but the spirit is using it. There's a military chaplain who's using it for his troops. A person who worked on the film went home to Colorado. She called Carrie, she knew, said, yeah, I was online for confession, and there's a priest that got a friend of mine walked out and knew I'd worked on the film and said, do you know what I got for my penance? She said, no. He said, the priest told me to go watch the movie Nefarious.

So it's just this weird, I can't, we got to, it's apparently now opening in South America. We got word of, Carrie got word of at a conference, a guy who said he's had an atheist friend for 50 years in Venezuela. And the guy called him up and he said, I saw his movie Nefarious and I'm going back to see it again. And now he's a spiritual seeker. Steve Dace got a call from a father who was so happy. He said, I have a son. I'd never heard this before. He has a son who's autistic, I guess, but has a thing called Einstein Syndrome.

He's super brilliant. And he said, basically, the son's in his 20s, I believe, early 20s. He said he's been railing against the concept of a god for as long as he's been old enough to voice the opinion. And they watched the movie together his father and son, just to watch a movie. And the son looked at his father and said, it kind of answers a lot of questions as to why things in the world are the way they are, doesn't it? And the father recognized in his son, he broke down crying, he said, you know, I couldn't do this. All these years I couldn't do this.

Now my son is asking the questions of a seeker. So the movie has got some kind of a power that in its creation, especially at the scripting stage, we never understood. And this was why the devil, you know, we've talked about all of the things that went wrong, but there were also all of the things that went right. You know, we were the first film ever given permission to film inside the wire at a working prison.

And the warden, when we went to initially ask and scout, he said, well, it'll never happen. The board of prisons will never allow it, but if they do, I'll let you. So, you know, and they let us work for three days inside the wire at a working prison. A prison that at one time, not very many years ago, was the most violent prison in the United States in terms of the murder rate.

It's in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, a town of 1,700, half of whom are incarcerated. So it was just crazy. Behind us, there's a scene where the psychiatrist is out in the prison yard talking to the warden, and they're just sharing a cigarette, And they're just, the psychiatrist is kind of shaken. And our video village is what they call it, where the directors are watching the monitors.

We were about 50 feet away, 75 feet away. 10 feet behind us, or an 18-inch glass window was a guy who'd killed an number of murder victims of his. So it was a place of such immense evil on one of the, but we were allowed access. We were totally protected when we were there. We had so many things go right for us as well. And I want to give credit to the Lord for all the ways that he allowed us. He allowed us to go theatrical. And again, even there, the opposition was so strange.

We found a date in the release schedule of movies that had a hole in it. It was a pretty obvious hole, but we went there. Six films came, moved their dates to come land on us. Two of them were horror films. One was the Pope's Exorcist. moved its release date six months to land on our date exactly. And the movie chain said, we've never seen this before. In our whole careers, we've never, it's like a game of chicken and no one is backing out.

We've never seen this happen. So it was that the blessing, the opposition, the blessing, the opposition, the blessing, the opposition. Yes, our booking agent bursts his eardrum on the way home, But he still manages to get us in 1,500 plus screens. Yes, our producer is tucking his child into a car seat, and the door he's leaning against in the street gets ripped off at 45 miles an hour, and his car gets totaled, but he doesn't have a scratch, and neither does his child or the rest of the family.

I just want to say thank you to you for having us. We love your show, and I want to say thank you to Carlos Martin. Chuck and I want to say that. Father Callis was amazing. He did so many things for us. I mean, I go to sleep at night knowing that there are men like him taking on the darkness while I'm sleeping. And, yeah, and I just think, you know, these guys are the real superheroes. You know, I mean, we go to the movies to watch these silly superheroes like Batman or whatever.

And in reality, this battle is being waged by guys like Father Carlos. I mean, I just think it's heroic on every level and especially, because they become a target. And I just want to say to the viewers or the listeners that are listening, if anything, we, from the bottom of our heart, Chuck and I just want you know there is evil and there is good. And good is more powerful and evil. It doesn't seem that way because evil controls the media and they control what you hear and think. And they want you to think that they outnumber us. They don't outnumber the good. But what they do is they try to suffocate our hope. And you have to realize that there is a devil.

We've seen the devil. We see them in almost everything we've done. And I will tell you, God is the king. The devil is literally insignificant in comparison to Jesus and insignificant to God overall. And if God so will something, there is nothing. If he ordains something, it's going to happen. There's nothing the devil can do other than to fear and confuse.

But when he gets you to play with him or to dance with him, And that's when you get yourself in trouble. So throw out your tarot cards. Throw out. Don't go to your fortune tellers. Stop playing with Reiki and yoga and all these things. These things are designed. The whole world is designed to corrupt you and lead you to the demonic.

And what I would say is that just love Jesus and he'll love you. He'll love you whether you love him or not. But if you love him, your life will radically change. It will radic. Just say, Jesus, I surrender. I'm going to try and love you. help me to love you more. But thank you too, Ryan, because I think,

out of all the people we've met, I can honestly say, I think you're the most competent. I love your show. We love everything. And we've told you already how we feel about you. But I think you've done good work here. Well, thank you. I'm going to put most of that on a Hallmark card. I think we could all launch the nefarious lanes.

But thank you all. And I will end with a quote from the now cinema canonical piece of nefarious, which is, I didn't know that we were a battle or a war and of course the responses and that is why friends you're losing so one of the epic lines oft quoted by many of our exorcists so thank you so much for joining us y'all and we'll look forward to your next project and pray that it goes smoother so thank you so much folks listening we'll talk to you soon