et’s talk about The Devil and Father Amorth. In the film, you were witness to a real-life exorcism and you spoke to experts about it. What are your personal conclusions about demonic possession? I have no idea. I believe that there is a possibil- ity that it could be some kind of a disease for which there is no medical name right now, but that there might be in the future. I had three of the leading psychiatrists in this country talking about the film, and how the Diagnostic Manual of Medicine (which is the psychiatric textbook) now recognizes possession. If somebody comes in or is brought to a psychiatrist and they believe they’re possessed, the psychiatrist doesn’t say, “No, you’re not really possessed, that’s a delu- sion. We’re going to give you a little bit of talking therapy and some medication.” They treat it as demonic possession. I’m not sure the exact number, but I think there are around 400 dis- eases recognized by the DSM, and possession is now one of them.
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Is that your personal opinion, that it’s a med- ical thing?
I have no idea. I’m not a Catholic. I wasn’t Catho- lic at the time I made The Exorcist, but I made The Exorcist as a believer. A believer in the teachings of Jesus, not necessarily in the Catholic Church, but teachings of Jesus as they’ve come to us in the New Testament. And I strongly believe in those teachings and so I made the film with that mindset. I did not make The Exorcist as a cynic and I didn’t speak to Father Amorth as a cynic. I spoke to him as a man that I admired very much; the most profoundly spiritual man I’ve ever met, and he believed he was dealing with the Devil and demonic possession. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do to debunk him; I wanted to see how the two other medical disciplines felt about what he was doing, both psychiatry and neuroscience – and to my amazement, these top neuroscientists had no idea what affliction this woman [in the documentary] had. They had never seen symptoms like that before! I asked them if I had brought this woman to them, would
they give her an MRI, and they said no, there’s no point. Because while everything originates in the brain, this does not appear to be a disease of the brain – this is something else. That’s essen- tially what they say, all of them, in the course of the interviews that I did with them. I had no idea what the opinion of neurosurgeons or psychia- trists would be.
Were you swayed one way or the other about the existence of evil?
Of course! I believe that there’s good and evil in every one of us, absolutely. Everything from road rage to murder. We hear often about people committing unspeakable acts of evil who would never have done anything like that in the past – it has become my belief that there is both good and evil in all of us, constantly fighting for our better angels to thrive and succeed.
Do you believe that dabbling in the subject of Satan can evoke dark forces, even if it’s in the arts?
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