Hollywood Exorcism

"The power of Christ compels you!
The power of Christ compels you!"

Tracey: What's that?
Dorien: A sword. I have to imagine a sword that ignites a circle of fire.
Tracey: You mind my carpet.

— Birds of a Feather, "Ghost"

By the power of Almighty Christ, I cast the demons OUT of this page description!

Back in the day, exorcisms used to be all the rage. Any instance of mental illness (and sometimes physical illness) was ruled to be Demonic Possession. You know what that means: head spinning, projectile vomit, levitating off the mattress and speaking in tongues. Pretty soon you have no choice but to haul in an exorcist to cast the demon out of the person in question and send it back to Hell.

These affairs are likely to be very dramatic. The exorcist will call upon a deity's name (usually Jesus, but sometimes the Holy Ghost, the Father, or another deity altogether if the religion is not of this world). There will be splashing of holy water, physical and emotional battles of will, fervent chanting in Latin, and perhaps some cool special effects. Expect the walls to bleed, the subject of possession to wail and shake in ways no human could imagine, and a demon to emerge either in physical or shadow form. Or so Hollywood would have you believe.

Nowadays, the Catholic Church is loath to declare "possession" and perform exorcisms; the exorcists in the Church are trained to ensure that what they are dealing with is deemed a genuine demonic possession and not something that can be dealt with by a doctor or a psychiatrist. This trope still gets play in Religious Horror and other such genres, but it is more likely to be subverted in works that either treat demons as nonexistent or consider exorcising the Big Bad to be too easy and anticlimactic.

Another point: Fictional portrayals of exorcism will sometimes involve "bell, book and candle." In real life, the Catholic casting-out ritual of bell, book, and candle is a form of excommunication, something entirely different. The particular ritual involved is no longer practiced, regardless.

Finally, note that non-Catholic demons and exorcisms may look completely different, ranging from much gentler to much more violent. To this day in many cultures, mostly those where animist religions predominate, demonic possession is still considered a legitimate medical complaint. You will find that a few Christian denominations will consider an exorcism for the most ridiculous things.

Related to Demonic Possession. Compare Banishing Ritual.

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Examples

Comic Books

• Blaine Abel of Revival has a side gig performing these. He genuinely believes in demonic possession and has (poorly) researched the subject. However his successful cases were themselves faking it and backed down when he called them out privately.

Films — Live-Action

• The Exorcist is probably the Trope Codifier.
  • Although the Catholic Church's reluctance to perform exorcisms was explicitly mentioned.
    Chris: How do you go about getting an exorcism?
    Karras: I beg your pardon? Well, the first thing — I'd have to get into a time machine and get back to the 16th century... Well, it just doesn't happen any more, Mrs. MacNeill... since we learned about mental illness, paranoia, schizophrenia... Since the day I joined the Jesuits, I've never met one priest who has performed an exorcism. Not one.
  • A good quarter of the book was dedicated to details of Fr. Karras' scholarly research and interviews with "Regan" to convince first himself, and then the Bishop, that this was the genuine article.
  • The doctors also say it might help. They conclude that as Regan genuinely thinks that she is possessed by a demon, an exorcism might convince her that the demon has been driven out.

• Scary Movie 2 opens with an extended parody of The Exorcist. The exorcism is even wackier, one of the priests is an unprofessional pervert, they all projectile vomit on each other, and eventually the priests just say "screw this" and pull out a gun.
• In The Order, Alex Bernier performed an exorcism on Mara before the movie begins.
• The movie Practical Magic has a rare example of witches performing an exorcism on one of the main characters, to rid her of the ghost of her ex-boyfriend.
• Constantine (2005):
  • The title character's attempt to exorcise Mammon from Angela Dodson. It doesn't work.
  • He performs a successful exorcism on a girl early in the film, trapping the demon in a big mirror and then dropping the mirror off a building before the demon can break out.
• Works like Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror (1979) apply this trope to entire buildings.
• The Rite plays this straight, albeit in a more subdued manner than usual, and lampshades it by having the exorcist joke about profectile vomit head spinning.
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose plays the exorcism rite as very much Hollywood Exorcism despite being loosely based on the real-life death of Anneliese Michel after a failed exorcism.
• In This Is the End, Jay Baruchel attempts an exorcism on a demonically possessed Jonah Hill. The others criticize him for copying The Exorcist, but (to everyone's immense surprise) it actually starts to work.
• In the The Devil Within Her an Enfant Terrible is possessed by the spirit of a Depraved Dwarf and later exorcised by a nun. In the end, the child is free and the dwarf dies.
• The Bell Witch Haunting has a priest called in near the end of the film, who seems to take the exorcism seriously, but is reading off of cue cards. It does not end well.
• Gandalf the White casts Saruman out of King Theoden of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in a manner very reminiscent of an exorcism. Gandalf primarily uses his power as one of the Maiar to do the deed instead of calling upon any higher power, though.
  Gandalf: I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound.
• I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle has an attempted exorcism of a demon-possessed motorbike that, after spectacular supernatural phenomena of both dark and light varieties, ends up failing.
• The Blackcoat's Daughter: Father Brian performs a standard Hollywood one, sprinkling Kat with holy water while she's restrained in a hospital bed commanding the demon inside her to depart. It easily obeys, implied to be a result not so much of his exorcism but due to its work being done.

Literature

• Usually averted in Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels. Sure, there are ghosts and demons, and exorcists ply their trade, but the exorcisms aren't anything like what you usually see in Hollywood: the main character uses a tin whistle to send ghosts away, whilst others use card tricks, lighters, or poems. There are as many methods of exorcism as there are exorcists.
• Shadwell tries to perform an exorcism on Aziraphale in Good Omens, and believes it worked since, coincidentally, the angel stepped into a summoning circle just as Shadwell finished his incantation.
  Aziraphale: Oh, fuck.
• Robert Westall:
  • Break of Dark plays this straight in Blackham's Wimpy. Dadda Townsend, the bomber group's resident Irishman with some time at seminary, tries to convince the German ghost in S-Sugar to leave with the Bible, rosary beads, Latin and some just plain understanding and reasoning. It doesn't work.
  • In The Watch House the malevolent ghost of Scobie Hague is eventually laid to rest by a Catholic priest.
• The Changeover: Laura removed the villain, Carmody Braque, in a way that could be comparable to an exorcism.
• In Andrei Belyanin's The Shaimer of Shaitan, the titular demon possesses a guard named Aslan-Bey in order to use him to kill the protagonist Lev. Lev and Nasreddin manage to disarm and tie up the possessed guard, and Nasreddin attempts to exorcise him using a Muslim prayer he read about once, while Lev threatens Shaitan with a big stick, whacking the guard a few times with it. Finally, in order to humiliate the enemy of humankind, Nasreddin covers Aslan-Bey's nose and mouth, leaving the demon only one exit point. It works.
• In A Head Full of Ghosts a teen girl behaves strangely and her dad decides she needs an exorcism. The twist: He sells the rights to a TV crew.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy. A Catholic priest successfully performs the ritual to banish a Possessed from the body she has taken over. However it's later pointed out that the ritual only succeeds because that particular Possessed believed it would work, having brought up in a more religious time and spent centuries in The Beyond which she assumed was the Hell she'd been told about. When Joshua Calvert tries the same trick later it doesn't work, as the Possessed he's confronted with used to be a Muslim.
• In the Bardic Voices novel The Robin and the Kestrel, the main characters see an exorcism being performed publicly as a church miracle, but Robin immediately recognizes it as false because it features several stage magician tricks that she knows herself. This serves as part of her motivation to take down the evil Bishop who serves as the novel's Big Bad, as those tricks are supposed to be secrets only her people know.
• Averted in The Devils of D-Day by Graham Masterton where it's pointed out that exorcisms are hardly ever used these days, and the only priest who actually believes in the danger is too old and feeble and ends up getting killed. In the end the protagonists have to call up angelic assistance for the task.

Live-Action TV

• Back in 2000 BBC did a show called Everyman and one of the episodes was about real exorcism done by real priests. "Everyman- Exorcism "
• Subverted in an episode of Psych. The subject of the possession plays it up, and a real Catholic exorcist is called out. But she's faking, using what she knows of possession from movies (and stealing the priest's medication to bring on some symptoms) to convince everyone she's possessed, all to cover up a murder.
• Law & Order has also subverted this a few times with the exorcism-gone-wrong, leading to somebody's death. Usually the victim is suffering from some form of psychosis.
  • One episode deconstructed this trope. The exorcist did a very Hollywood-style exorcism, tying a girl to the bed, and that led to her death. A priest pointed out that there are procedures before doing a real one, most notably to eliminate the possibility of just more mundane causes like the above mentioned psychosis, nor would he have been so reckless about the safety of the girl.
• In the first episode of The Chosen the priest Nicodemus tries this on "Lilith." It doesn't work, and he's mocked by the Voice of the Legion for his effort.
• In True Blood, Miss Jeanette performs an exorcism on Tara's mom to cure her alcoholism. In all fairness though, Miss Jeanette turns out to be a fraud. And yet, Tara's own exorcism results in her accidentally summoning Maryann.
• The Angel episode "I've Got You Under My Skin" shows Wesley attempting and Angel succeeding in performing an exorcism on a possessing demon. There's talk about an exorcist priest which the two had sought before, but the priest in question had been killed by the same type of demon they wanted to exorcise. In any case, turns out the child was even worse than the demon.
• A techno-fantasy version in the Torchwood episode "Sleeper" (supposedly forcing an alien secondary personality to manifest, but played just like Hollywood Exorcism).
• Demon-heavy show Supernatural keeps things simple. To exorcise a demon, recite the proper incantation in Latin. Getting the demon to sit still long enough to do it is one thing though, and remembering the words is another...
  • This trope is parodied in "Bring 'em Back Alive". Lucifer drops in on a very familiar Demonic Possession scene and expels the minor demon with a gesture. The demon in question was apparently just messing with the priests for shits and giggles. The priests really aren't happy to discover that Lucifer just helped them out.
• The Scooby Gang performed an exorcism with bell, book and candle in one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though on a ghost rather than a demon. Cordelia was reluctant to participate, as "I've seen that movie. Even the priest died."
• Nice twist on this in the Babylon 5 Direct to Video spin-off The Lost Tales. A character on the station is spectacularly demon-possessed, but we don't see the exorcism, as the preacher has him shipped back to Earth for it. The concept is that demons are trapped on Earth by some mystical barrier, and this demon is deliberately trying to get exorcised from its victim on a space station so that it can then wander the universe freely.
• A nun tries this on Jaye in Wonderfalls.
• A very creepy Criminal Minds episode titled "Demonology" centers around a priest who has been performing lethal exorcisms. However, it's left ambiguous as to whether he was using poisoned Holy Water (the team's working theory) or if the victims were all actually possessed by "taking you with me" demons.
• A medium attempts to exorcise Sally in Being Human (US). It very nearly works, but Sally manages to stop the ritual by briefly possessing the medium.
• Salem: Mercy's father gives her one, though it doesn't have the usual "The Power of Christ compels you!" bit. Notably it includes making a cut on her stomach, and then a snake slithers out. Turns out that was how the witches were controlling her, it actually worked.
• Penny Dreadful has two attempts in the episode Possession, as Vanessa's control over her Demonic Possession finally erodes. The first, conducted by a priest, completely fails, whereas the second attempt by Ethan succeeds.
• A Justified Trope in the first episode of Los Espookys, where the protagonists are hired to fake a demonic possession so that a priest can exorcise the "demon" and improve his reputation.
• An episode of CSI involved a teenage girl that had apparently been possessed and The Alleged Expert of a priest that had tried to exorcise her being one of the suspects (the team even sees the recording of said exorcism attempt and spends a good minute or so believing that they are seeing some kind of Snuff Film until things are made clear). It turns out that the girl is a psychotic killer that was planning to (and eventually does) kill her family (which drives the priest to kill her in a Vigilante Execution), but the episode milks for all its worth the theory of whether the girl was really possessed by a murderous demon, simply went crazy, or was that monstrous and the whole "possessed" thing was just some attempt to get away with her murder via an Insanity Defense.
• The Sandman (2022): In "Dream a Little Dream of Me", Johanna Constantine's exorcisms involve a lot of Latin chanting and dramatic light shows and other effects as the demons struggle to avoid being banished.
• Wellington Paranormal: The officers exorcise Bazu'aal in the "Demon Girl" episode using a online video tutorial and end up having to wait for the video to buffer.

Music

• Brian Eno & David Byrne's "The Jezebel Spirit" includes an audio excerpt of a real priest performing a real exorcism, from 1980.

Podcasts

• Averted in The Magnus Archives episodes "Confession" and "Desecrated Host" which are narrated by a Catholic priest and exorcist. Exorcism and the problems that prompt it are presented as being much less dramatic and horrific than the Hollywood version. Most of the time.

Radio

• In Linda Smith's A Brief History of Timewasting, the cast perform an exorcism on a spirit inhabiting Linda's flat. They try the bell, book and candle method, but since they can't find the required items, cab driver Worra improvises with a musical air freshener (bell), the manual for his Nissan (book), and a glowing car cigarette lighter (candle).

Tabletop Games

• In Magna Veritas, Walther is the archangel of exorcists. Originally the vicar of a little church, he somehow managed to exorcise demon prince Andromalius himself, which earned him an instant promotion (skipping all angel ranks) but left him schizophrenic from the mental battle. Angels working for him can banish a demon and get the original soul back in the body, in a state depending of where it was.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Most cases of exorcism are treated by a quick lasbolt to the head before the daemon can fully emerge (psykers are particularly prone to Demonic Possession, shooting them straightaway is actually a Mercy Kill).
  • The Ordo Malleus section of the Inquisition is charged with investigating suspected Chaos activity and putting a stop to it before it gets out of hand. Best case scenario is that no more than a dozen people end up getting killed, while the worst case scenario may well involve an Exterminatus — an order to have an entire planet destroyed to prevent further spread of Chaos contamination.
  • The Exorcists chapter of Space Marines take it further: Every member of the Exorcists has survived a deliberate Demonic Possession (well, of something living in the Warp, at any rate, and as weak as they can get) before being exorcised, the end result being a Space Marine with Psychic Powers that's invisible to all but the strongest demonic entities and psykers. While even passing familiarity with the Warp would lead one to think it obviously doomed to fail, it somehow succeeded, and the Exorcists' first test run saw them achieve a kill ration of 97 to 1.

Video Games

• The final battle of Sweet Home (1989) involves the survivors trying to exorcise the vengeful spirit of Mamiya. This involves using important items and Praying at the right moments.
• In Chinese Paladin, at one point you are required to help a relative overcome some demons. To that end you are tasked with finding an exorcist, who promptly performs the ritual with all the bells and whistles, while chanting a chinese rhyme. Hilariously the moment he finishes, his wards and seals burst into flame as the real Demon shows up. Apparently the words he used to bring demons out were right, but all of his wards were fake. Ironically, at the end turns out the demon he aggravated was the benevolent one, so even if he was real he would have done nothing anyways.
• FAITH: The Unholy Trinity involves a priest returning to the site of a failed exorcism that had claimed the lives of his colleagues (and the victim's parents) to try to finish the job. As this is a Retraux video game, his technique consists entirely of aiming a cross in the general direction of what he's trying to exorcise. Somehow, his cross is also able to scrounge up relevant documents as well.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: The veteran demon-hunting Sourcerer Jahan attempts to exorcise the demon influencing Lohse, which involves plenty of speaking in tongues, exhorting it to come out, and invoking its name, along with an implied Battle in the Center of the Mind. He fails, so Lohse has to find and kill the demon herself.

Webcomics

• Knights of Buena Vista is a Campaign Comic covering Frozen (2013). When Elsa's powers are revealed, an NPC shouts that she must be possessed by Satan. Then another NPC wants to get some holy water and a two by four.

Web Original

• The Protectors of the Plot Continuum perform exorcisms to cast out the specters of badfic authors from whatever fic the mission takes place in with the help of bell, book, and candle, though in this case, the book is a copy of whatever canon the fic takes place in that bears its author/creator's signature. The bells also serve as convenient blunt force weapons in a pinch.

Web Videos

• The Adventures of the League of S.T.E.A.M.: In webisode "Dinner with the Devil", Sir Conrad performs one. It goes awry.
• In episode 4 of Spooked, the team perform an exorcism, complete with Bible recitals, candles, a circle of salt and a member of the group dressing up in priestly garbs.
• Pokemon Pals: Parodied when Ash and Brock hire a "pokepriest" to exorcise a Ghastly out of Misty.
• One such ritual takes place in an episode centering on Demonic Possession in Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel), where Michael Taylor, a British man, is subjected to three priests armed with crucifixes, who manage to remove all but three demons from him. This comes back to bite all of the parties involved later on...

Western Animation

• Parodied in The Crumpets episode "Hairifying". The twins (who pretend to be medics) claim that the frightened Ohoh is "possessed" and Li'l-One seeks an exorciser for him. The twins fool Ohoh into getting his "night terrors" cured by having him consume a green tablet which leads to him emitting green foam and bubbles from his mouth. Triceps arrives and shakes Ohoh and presses her arm in his mouth to attempt ejecting the "demon" she suspects to be inside him before getting vomited by him. Eventually, Li'l One summons their neighbor Ms. McBrisk, who wears a black garb and holds sticks of fire, and candles are seen as she begins an exorcism. As Ohoh lays on a bed, she ties all of his limbs before giving him a potion to cure him. The potion's unintentional side effect is a green odor from Ohoh that turns females into zombies.
• In the The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror XXVIII, Maggie is possessed by a Pazuzu figurine that Homer thought was pizza. The demon is exorcised from her and goes to Bart, who has "the darkest soul I've ever seen". In the next segment, Marge notes that Maggie still has "a touch of Pazuzu". She projectile vomits.
• Parodied and deconstructed a bit in The Boondocks, when the soul of a deceased Jerkass possesses a mild-mannered neighbor. The second half of the episode is a Whole-Plot Reference to The Exorcist, with the "priest," who is in reality just a local racist who takes odd jobs, brandishing things he considers anathema to black people, such as a belt, job application, and a book — not a Bible, just a book — to cast the evil spirit out. Huey eventually ends the possession peacefully because the trauma of the ordeal would likely have killed the victim.

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