The Devil and Father Amorth (2018)

In 2018 Slant Magazine published a piece on William Friedkin christening the filmmaker the “Auteur of Existential Dread”. A fitting moniker, seeing as Friedkin has openly discussed being fascinated with the balancing act he and fellow humans perform behaving for society versus the impulse to fully lose control. This almost sociological interest of Friedkin's was apparent from his entry into the film industry, the documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) which centered on a death row inmate staring down his own fate. “The thin line between criminal and cop”, as Friedkin calls it, is at the core of films like The French Connection (1971), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in LA (1985) and Killer Joe (2012) whereas films like Sorcerer (1977), Rampage (1987) and Bug (2006) all feature characters staring into some form of void or succumbing to the madness. The Exorcist (1973) is clearly the most obvious example of the tug-of-war between the light and the darkness that is at the core of so many of Fredkin's films, but it's also a curious film in that Friedkin had never explored that eternal, internal battle in such a literal (or spiritual) way before. It wasn't until The Devil and Father Amorth in 2018 when, stemming from a Vanity Fair article Friedkin had written two years prior, Friedkin returned to the topic of exorcism and the documentary format where his career began.

Until his death in 2016, Father Gabriele Amorth was the Vatican's “Exorcist-in-Chief”, said to have performed the right an innumerable amount of times. Introducing the documentary with the backstory that led to William Peter Blatty writing The Exorcist, Friedkin begins Father Amorth's story, his journey to performing exorcisms and his granting Friedkin permission to film his handiwork. More than a one-note work however, Friedkin presents the footage to and interviews a host of theologians, priests, doctors and psychologists that, along the journey with Friedkin himself, attempt to contextualize the strange phenomena of possession and exorcism.

In a lot of ways, The Devil and Father Amorth is reminiscent of another documentary from a controversial filmmaker focused on the esoteric, Richard Stanley's The Otherworld (2013), in that there's bound to be a large segment of the audience going in with a healthy amount of skepticism. Regardless of religious beliefs, pre-concieved notions of concepts like “God” or “Satan” or “good” and “evil”, The Devil and Father Amorth poses a litany of fascinating and potentially unsettling existential questions that throughout the course of the documentary that various persons of faith, science and medicine ponder and like in Friedkin's fictional narratives, there is a lack of concrete, black and white answers. The exorcism performed by Father Amorth is actually fairly typical of how such acts have been reenacted in various media. Nothing that comes anywhere close to Friedkin's immortal 1973 film, but some of the more common possession symptoms are displayed by “Cristina”, the unfortunate woman feared to be under possession. As noted in the film, the exorcism filmed by Friedkin was actually her ninth go-around with Father Amorth, and later in the documentary Friedkin recounts with great dramatic fervor an incident, not caught on film, an incident in an old village church that put the fear of God and Satan and him. Again, like everything else in the film, the story is open to interpretation but it's another engaging moment in a documentary that, while bound to be dismissed by many, is serious about its subject, Friedkin's connection to it being obvious.

Born and raised Jewish, Friedkin has spent most of his life as an agnostic, though has long stated that he views the New Testament teachings of Jesus as a utilitarian means of going through life, though as seen in the documentary, even among the most faithful there seems to be various personal “levels” of faith. One of the more telling moments in the film comes when Friedkin is taken aback by an admittedly surprising remark from Robert Barron, an Archbishop in Los Angeles, who admits that he would not be able to perform the same tasks as Father Amorth as his faith is not at the same levels as Father Amorth's to confront legitimate evils. Nietzsche's famous abyss quote is also brought to mind by writer Jeffery Burton Russell who warns Friedkin that devoting too much time to researching evil can have a profound and depressing effect on the psyche. As for the skeptics, Friedkin told The Guardian “I’m not interested in convincing you, or anyone else... This is what I saw, and the only way to deal with that conclusion was in this way, getting closure through this film. You’ll have to work that out for yourself.” Ironic that Friedkin would use to word “closure” as many will no doubt walk away from The Devil and Father Amorth without any, though ultimately it's that existential open-endedness that gives Friedkin's work its power.

Object of Obsession (1994)

Of all the parallels that can be drawn between the horror and erotic thriller genres, perhaps the most trite but also one of the more curious are the longstanding accusations of misogyny hurled at both genres. Curious in the sense that a lot of the criticisms tend to be contradictory and confused,  particularly as it relates to how women are written and portrayed, especially when it comes to erotic thrillers. The typical byline is that the women in films from both genres are perpetually victimized male fantasies, in effect denying the the characters the agency the screenplays give them. Direct-to-video erotica of the 90's was particularly fertile ground for subversive, female focused narratives, best exemplified by the series of softcore films made by hardcore pioneer Gregory Dark from 1991 to 1996. With a few exceptions, the classic erotic thriller or noir idea of the “femme fatalle” is a rare thing in Dark's erotic thrillers. Dark's fatales tended to be of the homme variety with his narratives beginning in Carnal Crimes (1991) and continuing in films like Secret Games (1992) and Animal Instincts 2 (1994) focusing on female fantasies turned dangerous. Made near the end of Dark's softcore cycle, Object of Obsession saw Dark once again taking a quintessential erotic thriller scenario's, the woman-in-peril, and flipping the script of the fantasy gone wrong, telling the story from the titular female object of obsession's perspective.

During one of her many nights in alone, Margaret (Erika Anderson), a single divorcee stuck in a romantic and professional rut, receives a phone call by mistake. Thinking nothing of it, the following night she receives another call from the same caller, a mysterious, smooth talking male voice calling himself “Blaze”. In her loneliness, Margaret begins to look forward to Blaze's calls and when Blaze proposes they finally meet, Margaret agrees. After proclaiming he should have “saved” Margaret sooner, Blaze (Scott Valentine) takes Margaret to his apartment. Finally excited by the prospect of something new, Margaret's hopes are swiftly deflated once Blaze leaves and Margaret finds herself trapped inside his large apartment, merely a plaything for “Blaze”.

Although being one of Dark's most explicitly female-centric erotic thrillers, Object of Obsession ironically shares a key quality with one of Dark's rare male-driven narratives, Night Rhythms (1992). Like that film, the more urban-based setting of Object of Obsession gives the film a noticeably different look than the more affluent suburbia set softcore, though the film is still very much a product of 90's erotica and story wise it is somewhat familiar territory for a Dark softcore feature. Once again he's zeroing in on desperate mindsets that lead to fantasies going haywire, though he'd never subverted the erotic thriller formula quite like this before. While not a limited set film in the classic sense like Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) or Rope (1948), naturally a good amount of the film is set inside Blaze's curiously decorated, very modern (by 90's standards), industrial-esque apartment where Erika Anderson literally becomes the films main focus being the only person on screen. Margaret's time alone leads to Dark taking the film into some truly unexpected territory, really turning the material on its head late in the film, particularly as is relates to the villain and voyeurism, a Dark constant, playing a major role. Compared to Woody Brown's obsessive psycho's in Animal Instincts 2 (1994) or Secret Games 3 (1994), Scott Valentine's Blaze, who looks a lot like adult star Peter North whom Dark worked with in the hardcore realm, is more measured and collected, and indeed Dark has noted the influence of The Collector (1965) on Object of Obsession.

Dark found himself at somewhat of a crossroads as the 90's drew to a close. Having begun to work in music videos in 1996 beginning with the video for the Melvins' “Bar-X the Rocking M” as well as continuing to make hardcore more visually and psychologically interesting with Snake Pit (1996) and Shocking Truth (1996), he began to tire of the limitations placed on erotic thrillers. Dark told Psychotronic Video in 1997 “Actually I like doing stuff like Snake Pit and Shocking Truth... And I like doing stuff in music video, like with the Melvins, more than I do those erotic thrillers. I mean, a lot of that erotic thriller shit is just like network TV, it's the worst, most unimaginative stuff you could come up with.” By 1997, the erotic thriller well was beginning to run dry and by then Dark was out of the softcore game entirely, though Animal Instincts: The Seductress (1996), Dark's softcore swansong, was a markedly different approach to the genre. While nowhere near as avant-garde as The Seductress, in a lot of ways Object of Obsession plays like attempt by Dark to break out of the mold of his previous erotic thrillers somewhat with an interesting central setting and a pretty radical turn of the tables story wise, Dark proving once again that the truly progressive films and filmmakers often reside in the most maligned of genres.