Anybody can make a demon swear. These movies make you wonder what happens when the prayers stop working.
By Rory Jackson
The best part of an exorcism movie isn’t when somebody starts speaking Latin. It’s when the person who knows Latin starts looking worried.
By then, somebody has usually tried everything else. The doctor has run the tests. The family has blamed stress, grief or the plumbing. Now a person with a book and a bag has walked into the house, and everyone’s pretending that this is a plan.
I love a good possession movie, but possession alone doesn’t get you on this list. The attempt to drive something out has to matter. That could mean a priest, a shaman, a desperate relative or somebody who took the job for money and is now reconsidering the entire concept of employment.
And no, we’re not ranking these by how far somebody can rotate their head. We’re ranking them by how much we wanted to be somewhere else when the ritual started.
10. The Rite (2011)
Anthony Hopkins could make reading the warranty on a toaster sound like an invitation to damnation. Give him a priest’s collar and a skeptical seminarian to bother, and you’re already halfway to a decent Saturday night.
The Rite is uneven, but it understands how comforting it is to have one person in the room who’s seen this before. Hopkins plays Father Lucas like a man who knows the work well enough to be casual about it. The movie gets considerably less comfortable when that assurance starts to crack. The younger man has been looking to Lucas for proof, and it turns out proof is the last thing you want to be alone with.
What got us: The moment the man who knows what to do becomes the man nobody knows what to do with.
9. The Exorcist III (1990)
For a movie with Exorcist in the title, this one spends a surprising amount of time letting George C. Scott get irritated in hospitals. I mean that as praise.
The exorcism arrives late. By then, William Peter Blatty has already made us sit through conversations with a man who knows things he shouldn’t, in an institution where everyone has a reasonable explanation for why nothing unusual could possibly happen. The final ritual isn’t the scariest scene in the movie. It earns its place because it’s a desperate intervention in a story that’s spent most of its time denying anyone the satisfaction of intervening.
What got us: All that time spent looking through glass, hoping it matters which side you’re on.
8. The Cleansing Hour (2019)
Two guys stage exorcisms for an internet audience. The priest is a performer, the miracles are fake and the whole operation depends on nobody asking too many questions. Then something shows up that doesn’t give a damn about the production schedule.
The Cleansing Hour is the rowdiest movie here. It’s also nastier than its setup suggests. The livestream matters because the people running it have taught their audience to applaud somebody else’s distress. When the suffering becomes real, why would anybody watching believe it? The frauds have built the perfect place to get away with torturing someone. They just assumed they’d be the ones in charge.
What got us: Realizing that an audience can watch you beg for help and think you’re finally getting good at your job.
7. The Last Exorcism (2010)
Yes, we put a found-footage movie on the list. Nobody’s more annoyed about it than I am.
Patrick Fabian plays Cotton Marcus, a preacher who lets a documentary crew follow him so he can show them how a sham exorcism works. He’s charming enough to sell the performance and confident enough to explain the tricks. That makes Ashley Bell’s Nell all the more upsetting: she’s a person in trouble, and the man who arrived to expose a con can’t afford to admit he might be out of his depth.
The ending is less persuasive than the long stretch that gets us there. But the sight of a practiced showman running out of patter? That works.
What got us: Waiting for Cotton to explain the trick and realizing he’s waiting for an explanation, too.
6. The Medium (2021)
Two found-footage entries. Don’t get used to it.
The Medium follows a documentary crew filming a shaman in Thailand as her niece begins behaving in ways the family struggles to explain. What makes the film unsettling is how much time it gives us with people who understand their own traditions. They aren’t walking into this blind. They know what they believe, know who to call and have reasons for their choices.
The film takes its time getting to the ceremony, and that patience pays off. By then, people have made preparations, assigned responsibilities and put their faith in a plan. If you’ve ever watched a group of competent people realize their plan depends on one thing they can no longer guarantee, you know how ugly that silence can get.
What got us: The gap between knowing how a ritual is supposed to go and being able to make it go that way.
5. The Wailing (2016)
There’s a sequence in The Wailing that cuts between two rituals. Drums hammer, people scream and the editing makes you desperate for one of the ceremonies to work. The catch is that you’re no longer sure whose success you’re rooting for.
Na Hong-jin gives us a father trying to save his daughter while everyone around him offers a different account of what’s happening. Each explanation sounds plausible right up until the next one arrives. I’ve seen plenty of movies where evil tricks the hero. Far fewer make me suspect that I’d have fallen for exactly the same thing.
What got us: Cheering for an intervention before we understood who it might be hurting.
4. The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)
This is where I officially lose the right to complain that found footage never does anything for me.
The filmmakers begin by documenting Deborah Logan’s experience with Alzheimer’s. Jill Larson makes Deborah a person before the film asks us to be afraid of what’s happening to her. You see her irritation, her pride and the effort it takes to keep strangers from treating her like a case study. That makes the supernatural turn feel like a violation, not a shortcut to making illness scary.
The attempt to break the hold over Deborah doesn’t look like a textbook Catholic exorcism. It’s a scramble to interrupt a ritual and stop what’s using her. The famous cave image gets passed around for good reason, but it hits harder when you’ve spent the movie remembering who’s supposed to be in that body.
What got us: Wanting desperately to see Deborah again and becoming afraid of what looking for her might reveal.
3. The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
This is the one that made me want to call somebody. Not a priest, necessarily. Just somebody who might pick up.
A brother and sister return to the family farm as their father dies. A priest enters the story, but the film takes a vicious interest in whether spiritual authority means anything if you can’t trust the person claiming to have it. There’s no reassuring procession toward a grand, orderly deliverance. Help arrives in forms the family can’t verify, and even the sound of a familiar voice becomes a reason to hesitate.
That’s what earns it a place here, even though it’s the furthest from a traditional exorcism movie: the characters reach for the kind of intervention this genre has taught us to trust, and the film won’t grant them even that small comfort.
What got us: The possibility that the voice offering help knows exactly what you need to hear.
2. The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
Most exorcism movies end when the ritual ends. This one puts the priest on trial.
That’s what makes Scott Derrickson’s film so damn unsettling. In the bedroom, you want somebody to do whatever it takes to help Emily. In the courtroom, you have to sit there and consider whether the people who thought they were helping her made things worse. The movie doesn’t let the fear you felt in one room excuse what happened in the other.
Jennifer Carpenter is frightening when the film asks her to be, but the moments that get me are the ones where she’s exhausted and scared and just wants somebody to tell her what’s happening. Everybody around her has an explanation. Nobody can give her a night’s sleep.
What got us: Realizing that the people trying to save Emily might be wrong, and that being wrong could cost her everything.
Just ask filmmaker Stephen Taylor. After watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he says he woke up at 3:33 a.m. every night for a year. Not around three. 3:33. I’d love to ask him how long it took before he stopped wanting to look at the clock.
1. The Exorcist (1973)
Yes, it’s the obvious answer. The obvious answer can still be right.
The thing that scares me most about The Exorcist isn’t in the bedroom. It’s the time Chris MacNeil spends trying to get somebody to tell her what’s happening to her daughter. Those medical scenes give the film a kind of dread no amount of pea soup could buy. Ellen Burstyn plays a mother who’ll listen to anyone who might help, and each person who can’t makes the next conversation harder to bear.
Then there’s Father Karras, who enters the room carrying grief and doubt instead of the easy authority we’ve been waiting for. The ritual doesn’t make him suddenly certain. It gives him something to do for a child when certainty is no longer an option. That’s why the scene still works after decades of parodies. You can laugh at the spinning head and still find yourself willing him to get through the next prayer.
What got us: The look on Karras’s face when you realize he needs the ritual to work as badly as the family does.
Who Do You Call When the Prayer Doesn’t Work?
An exorcism movie can buy a lot with a good makeup department. What it can’t buy is that moment when you start taking inventory of the people in the room and realize nobody has a better idea.
That’s the part that scares the hell out of me. The person holding the book can be brave, prepared and absolutely sincere. They can also be wrong. And once the door closes, the rest of us are stuck in there finding out with them.
Which exorcism movie got to you? Better yet, tell us the moment it happened. It probably wasn’t the one they put in the trailer.
