The Devil in the Detail

The Pope's Exorcist stars Russell Crowe as the Vatican's chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, who documented thousands of real-life cases. It is not the first possession film purporting to show actual events - but can we ever believe what we're seeing with our own eyes? Total Film investigates...

- By Jamie Graham

Another month, another exorcism movie, though the trailer of Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist makes viewers sit up by blazing, ‘Inspired by the actual files of Father Gabriele Amorth’ across the screen. A quick watch of the featurette on the film’s IMDb page reveals a stern-faced Russell Crowe, who plays Father Amorth, telling us, ‘He performed thousands of exorcisms, and had not only done it for 36 years, but had documented the things he experienced.’

But can the events depicted in The Pope’s Exorcist be any more authentic than Crowe’s Italian accent? In the trailer, we see a young girl cough up a dead bird and speak in a gravelly demon voice as her eyes change colour; bodies levitate and objects fly across the room. This is the stuff of movies, right? It doesn’t happen in real life. Or does it?

SENSATIONAL MEMOIRS

Born in Modena, Emilia-Romagna on 1 May 1925, Gabriele Amorth was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1954, and was appointed an exorcist of the Diocese of Rome in June 1986. In 1990, he and five more priests founded the International Association of Exorcists, on which he served as president until his retirement in 2000. As detailed in Amorth’s memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story (1990) and