From Reaffirming to Challenging Traditions: A critical comparison of The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II

Christopher Olson and I presented our first analysis for the exorcism cinema project at this year’s Midwest Popular Culture Association conference. We subsequently wrote the presentation as a paper that would go in a book we are developing. We just submitted the book proposal last night, and now this morning you can read this analysis […]

The Devil Inside: The One that Pissed Off People

A good found footage movie relies on its ability to trick you into thinking, just for a second, that maybe this could have been happening. We all know it didn’t — the fact that we are seeing a “movie” is the largest proof against that idea — but we still like to trick ourselves in […]

A Judaic Take on Exorcism in The Possession

One of the first movies we could qualify as being exorcism cinema was not concerned with the Catholic approach to possession and exorcism. Instead, it showed us this conflict from an older religious perspective, Judaism. In 1937, a Polish movie called Der Dibuk or The Dybbuk was released as one of the first movies filmed […]

The Last Exorcism Part II: Not Really Real

In our last post, we discussed the first found footage exorcist cinema, The Last Exorcism. What we have found interesting with this latest series of exorcism cinema is this desire to bring to the forefront the idea that such cases of exorcism are real, either through the filming techniques or the demonstration of being inspired by […]

The Last Exorcism But First Found Footage

Before Chris Olson and I started on this project, we were just watching horror movies. I have been fond of found footage style horror movies since The Blair Witch Project. And in my last post on the exorcism cinema project, I started thinking through why these movies are relying on tactics designed to foster a […]

The Exorcist: The One That Started It All

As part of this project on Feminist Tensions in Exorcism Cinema, we decided to watch the movies. All of the movies, if we can get our hands on them. We wanted to know if there were any patterns in what they were representing. As we watched each movie, we liveblogged our experience. Using Facebook or […]

The Demon Within: Tensions in Exorcism Cinema

This year, while concluding the virtual world television project with Pooky Amsterdam and continuing projects on gender and media engaging (such as My Little Pony and cross-gendered media engagings), I will also be working with Christopher J. Olson on a number of projects. One of the new ones is a consideration of the representation of women and feminist discourses in […]