The Exorcism of Emily Rose, TransGeneration
‘Once you’ve looked into the darkness you carry it with you the rest of your life,’ Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) comments with a shudder midway through the genuinely creepy The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the first film from writer-director Scott Derrickson. The character is, of course, speaking about the multiple demons he’s convinced were inhabiting his young charge but the sentence also describes the powerful effect that scary movies can have on an audience. And when confronted with a good chiller—no matter the specific genre—it’s hard to resist when the rare terrific one like this comes along. For uninitiated audience members of a certain sensibility, Emily Rose could be their Psycho, The Haunting, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs—or even The Exorcist.
The visceral pleasures of being frightened out of your wits in the safety of the local cineplex are not to be underestimated and though Emily Rose is essentially a courtroom drama gussied up with the possession stuff, it’s still got plenty of those unnerving moments. And like many great scare fests, it often foregoes the implicit and relies on the audience’s imagination. During the film’s opening credit sequence, accompanied by Christopher Young’s ominous music, we follow a middle-aged man (who turns out to be the medical examiner) as he warily approaches a large, beat-up Victorian farmhouse on a gray, bitterly cold day. When there is no answer to his knock, he steps around to the side of the house and glances up at what appears to be a nest of wasps or flies. Many, many cinematic encounters with Satan and his minions have taught us, of course, that flies in winter are not a good thing. A quick shot of a priest (Father Moore) glimpsed through an upstairs window immediately recalls the upstairs room (a/k/a demon central) in The Exorcist.
There will be many, many more similarities to that blockbuster mother of possession flicks throughout Emily Rose. Again, a young teenage girl has become inexplicably possessed and an exorcism has been performed as a last resort. Unlike Linda Blair’s Regan, however, Emily Rose succumbs to the physical maladies that have accompanied the spirit takeover. The exorcism has come too late and when the medical examiner can’t specify death from natural causes, Father Moore is arrested for denying his charge proper medical treatment. The state contends that a case of severe epilepsy went unchecked while Moore and her devout parents opted for exorcism as the only possible treatment. Eventually Father Moore’s lawyer, the tough agnostic Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) comes to the conclusion that that might just be her difficult client’s best defense. So, sort of like the lawyer deciding to prove that Kris Kringle in The Miracle on 34th Street is the real Santa Claus, Eric decides to try to convince a jury that Emily Rose’s possession was real.
The opening credits inform us that Emily Rose is ‘Based on a true story’ and while that throws the movie into another place, the realm of the ‘possible,’ it doesn’t necessarily up the ante in the fright department (one need look no further than the ‘based on a true story’ multiple Amityville Horror pictures for dreary proof of that). It does separate Emily Rose from all the other possession pictures, however, and adds a certain ‘something’ to the underlying creepiness of the proceedings. And the filmmakers have purposely blurred time and place details giving the story a timeless feel. We are in Anywhere USA and the intention of co-writer and director Derrickson is to warn, ‘This could be happening right now.’ Removing these specifics also focuses the film on questions of faith and subjectivity—to the good. (For those interested, a quick Google search easily unearths the actual Emily Rose story.)
What really makes the picture take hold and elevates it a bit, making it one of those scary movie experiences to remember and savor, are the performances. Wilkinson and Linney do their usual inestimable jobs with prickly, not easily likeable characters, with Linney, especially, adding another memorable character to her lengthening gallery. Possessed young women in movies have not just been subjected to various demons, they’ve been besieged by endless parodies (for good reason) but given that, Jennifer Carpenter brings off the doomed Emily Rose with a lot more nuance than might be expected.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose also has its share of laughs—30 years of exorcism pictures and spin-offs practically guarantees that—but even from the jaded, packed preview audience that I saw the movie with, they were uneasy laughs—perhaps the highest praise a film like this could wish for.
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TransGeneration is the title of a powerful 8-part Sundance Channel reality show that focuses on four college students and their journey to become fully transgendered. It’s also the title of a feature version that will premiere at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark St., on Friday, Sept. 9 at 8 p.m. Gabbie and Raci, both male-to-female transsexuals, two of the documentary’s winning subjects, will attend the screening.
As a gay man who can recall a time when just announcing that fact was reason enough to be considered mentally ill, the courage and determination of Gabbie, Raci, Lucas, and TJ are astonishing. The latter two are female-to-male transgenders. That all four are not just open about their sexuality but defiant about it speaks volumes to one from a generation where the Closet was not just a given, but a necessity.
The film, produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (and directed by Jeremy Simmons), the openly gay duo of World of Wonder productions, is another in their fascinating docs on sex and the culture wars. This is the duo responsible for Party Monster, the Eyes of Tammy Faye, and one of this year’s best documentaries, Inside Deep Throat. TransGeneration, at 83 minutes, barely scratches the surface and leaves one eager to go in-depth with its very human subjects. I look forward to seeing the rest of the series that this feature version, rightfully, whets the appetite for. See www.chicagofilmmakers.org.