“I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. The owner of the real-life box offered to send it to producer Sam Raimi but the filmmaker declined.

In recent years hits like The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true events.įinally in The Possession, a haunted antique carved “Dybbuk” box - containing an evil, restless spirit - turns the behaviour of a young girl (Natasha Calis) from angelic to animalistic. Blatty said Harding “was the physical model in my mind when I created the character, whose first name, please note, is Lankester.” The character of Father Lankester Merrin, the elderly priest and archeologist played by Max von Sydow in the movie, was based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. Raymond Bishop, as the backbone of his novel. He drew from newspaper reports and a diary kept by the attending priest, Fr. He was determined by the Catholic Church to be under a diabolical spell when strange things started happening - levitating furniture and holy water vials crashing to the ground - after he played with a Ouija board.Įxorcist author William Peter Blatty first heard about Doe’s story when he was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The Exorcist, the granddaddy of all demon possession movies, is based in part on the 1949 case of an anonymous Maryland teenager dubbed Roland Doe. Sarchie’s story joins a long list of exorcism movies with roots in true events. “Before going out on a case,” he writes, “I put aside my gun and police badge and arm myself with holy water and a relic of the True Cross.” Working together, they combat the evil forces with exorcism and faith.ĭeliver Us From Evil is based on a nonfiction book of the same name authored by Ralph Sarchie (with Lisa Collier Cool), a sixteen-year NYPD veteran who investigates “cases of demonic possession and (assists) in the exorcisms of humanity’s most ancient-and most dangerous-foes,” in his spare time.

That changes when he meets a renegade priest (Édgar Ramírez) who convinces him a plague of demonic possession has infected the Big Apple. “I’ve seen some horrible things,” he says, “but nothing that can’t be explained by human nature.” The spooky new supernatural thriller Deliver Us From Evil sees Eric Bana play a jaded NYC police officer. Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Sarchie’ Deliver Us From Evil part of a long line of ‘true’ supernatural tales Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014

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