The Exorcism of Emily Rose Reinvented the Possession Performance – Film School Rejects

Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves. Welcome to The Great Performances, a bi-weekly column exploring the art behind some of film and televisions greatest characters. This time, we turn the spotlight on Jennifer Carpenter as the titular character in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

When someone says the word exorcism, its impossible not to imagine Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil covered in green vomit and spinning her head around in William Friedkins The Exorcist. That performance shocked the world with its brutality and vulgarity and resulted in a wave of knock-offs that looked to capitalize on the phenomenon, from Italys wildly eccentric Beyond the Door to the Blaxploitation classic Abby.

In addition to the serious copycats, Blairs performance became even more ingrained in pop culture as the touchstone for anyone wanting to spoof exorcism movies, like Richard Pryors hilarious attempt at exorcising a possessed Laraine Newman on Saturday Night Live or when Natasha Lyonne took a crack at spewing pea soup in Scary Movie 2. In 1990, Blair even had the chance to lampoon herself when she starred alongside Leslie Nielsen in the parody film Repossessed. When you consider what made the exorcism subgenre popular, it begins and ends with Blairs Academy Award-nominated role.

But this famous depiction is at odds with the modern mode of possession performances. When you look at the last fifteen years of exorcism-related movies, few of them exude that same Regan MacNeil energy. Demonic possession isnt just about twisting heads or crawling downstairs anymore. These actors are now contorting every part of their body into unnatural shapes to create an intensely physical performance that is patently different from everything The Exorcist made famous.

This major shift in style came in 2005 starting with Jennifer Carpenters fiercely committed portrayal of the title character in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

The film is about a priest on trial for an exorcism that resulted in a young womans death, and it was able to captivate audiences by completely rewriting the possession performance playbook. Carpenters starkly realistic approach to showing what it might look like for someones body to be taken over by a demonic force subverted every expectation we had after watching Linda Blair clones for decades. Wed simply never seen a possessed woman like Emily Rose before, which was director Scott Derricksons intention.

As Carpenter recalled in 2005, Scott said, Imagine all of the clichs you can think of when you hear that word exorcism and lets move as far away from it as possible because if its not new, its not going to be in the movie.'

In preparation for the role, Carpenter did her homework. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which purports itself to be a true story, really is based on an actual court case involving a demonic possession: the 1976 death of Anneliese Michel in Germany. Carpenter used this real event and a 1981 book about the case as her starting place, although she didnt want to make this merely an autobiographical depiction of Anneliese.

The Julliard graduate researched Kabuki theatre, which is notable for its hyper-stylized usage of physical gestures to represent emotions and character intentions. The angled, rigid posturing of the art form would be perfectly suited for a character who had to communicate so much with just her body. Since epilepsy is a theorized explanation for possession cases and a major plot point in the film Carpenter also researched how our muscles can convulse and stiffen during tonic-clonic seizures, which would inspire the unsettling shapes we see her in during the films haunting dormitory sequences.

Carpenters impulses also vary quite differently from Linda Blairs. In The Exorcist, much of Blairs performance comes from an internal stimulus, as if the demon Pazuzu was literally inside her body. With the exception of a violent convulsion early in the film, Blairs physicality is as if Pazuzu had slipped under Regans skin and was controlling her like a machine.

The opposite is true for Carpenter. The way this possession controls her is as if its coming from an external stimulus: some unseen force is controlling her movements from outside of her body, similar to a child playing with a rag doll. Its evident in the scene where Emily Rose is possessed for the first time. Like a marionette on a string, her arms are wrenched above her head as she lies flat in bed with her limbs moving wildly.

When her boyfriend (played by Joshua Close) wakes to find Emily catatonic on her dorm room floor, it looks like something is forcing her body into a twisted contortion, holding her arms and legs in place as her neck juts off the ground, her head suspended in air. The Exorcist hadnt prepared us for this type of image. This wasnt Regan strapped to a bed or even the infamously deleted spider walk sequence. It was an entirely new characterization that frightened us by how real it seemed. In this scene, you can see the influence Carpenters research on seizures had on her performance; we cant tell if this is some dark force from Hell restraining her or just a helpless girl suffering from an epileptic fit.

Were a little less believing that its a fit when her boyfriend follows her into a Catholic cathedral. As she mutters repeatedly to herself in front of a large crucifix, she turns to look at him and we see pleading desperation in her eyes that we never see in Linda Blairs. There is real fear in Emily as she seems to understand what is happening to her, whereas Regan remains unconscious to her possession until the very end.

Emily is completely aware as something bends her spine abnormally backward while her feet remain rooted to the ground like the force is attempting to pull her away from the altar. Its an extraordinary image that Derrickson wanted to realize with as little computer generation as possible. Impressively, the back-breaking stunt was accomplished almost entirely by Carpenter, who only had a small stand behind her that was digitally erased.

Its this striking image that would prove the most influential for the next wave of possession performances, like Ashley Bells in The Last Exorcism. The found footage film, which came out five years afterThe Exorcism of Emily Rose,is incredibly well-conceived and original, but the central image of Bell contorting herself into a human question mark is so evocative of what Carpenter accomplished that its difficult to discount it as anything other than imitation.

In subsequent years, more actors would riff on Carpenters tortuous performance, from Bonnie Morgan in The Devil Inside in 2012 to Kirby Johnson in the similarly titled The Possession of Hannah Grace in 2018. Now it just doesnt feel like an exorcism movie anymore unless the possessed person is either folded like origami or tangled in a knot. That she could erase a pop culture phenomenon and revitalize a dormant subgenre is proof of how terrifying Jennifer Carpenter is as Emily Rose.

Even though Carpenters possession performance has usurped Linda Blairs, what was once refreshing has again inevitably become clichd. More than a decade after the release ofThe Exorcism of Emily Rose, banal shlock like 2013s The Cloth or 2015s The Exorcism of Molly Hartley has made Carpenters style of possession feel trite and overdone.

But just like how Regan MacNeil is still deeply unnerving after decades of emulation, no amount of mimicry can tarnish what Jennifer Carpenter achieved. Her performance is the modern benchmark for exorcism movies, and fifteen years later, her realistic approach remains as effective as ever.

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The Exorcism of Emily Rose Reinvented the Possession Performance - Film School Rejects