THE UNSEEN KNIFE: NOTES ON WRITING A POST-BLATTY POSSESSION NOVEL

Saint Peter Martyr Exorcizing

a Woman Possessed by a Devil

Antonio Vivarini, 1440-55

(This is a little essay about my novel THE LIBERATION, currently ON SUB 😓)

A troubled young priest falls in love with the possessed woman he's supposed to exorcise.

This is where I started three years ago: a clean, simple log-line us aspiring screenwriters churn out by the dozen, in hopes some production company will pay us to turn one into a movie or a television series. I knocked out a spec TV pilot for a limited series which I called THE LIBERATION. The show's central couple, Father Peter and Terri, are drawn together by a mutual attraction. When Terri begins to display the signs of demonic possession, Peter tries to vanquish the evil inside her. But in the process, the smitten priest discovers that his attraction to the afflicted young woman is far more sinister than he ever could have imagined. I only had a vague idea of how it would all play out; that's what writers rooms are for, after all. The LIBERATION script turned out well. It got me my TV/film agent (I have a marvelous literary agent now -- Hi, Chris!) and a few meetings with production companies. And later, when nothing came of those meetings (the way of all flesh and most spec scripts), I decided to try turning the story into my first novel. It would be a love story and a demonic possession story. The possession we crave and the possession we fear. I wanted it to be a little ambiguous so that both believers and non-believers would find it a good read. All I needed was a model. Th ur-text for possession novels is of course William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel THE EXORCIST, which I had never read. I had seen the film countless times, like most kids in the late 70s, and I still consider it one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen (excluding the LOOK WHO'S TALKING franchise 🤭). I knew I had to start there.

Blatty's book turned out to be a really useful model for my own, though not in terms of what to do but in what not to do. THE EXORCIST is not a love story (yes, an understatement), and more importantly, it has little tolerance for ambiguity. The 'doubt' about Regan MacNeil being possessed by the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu, periodically expressed by the (spoiler!) doomed priest Father Karras, gets increasingly ridiculous as the infernal shenanigans ramp up. No surprise, there. Blatty was a staunch Catholic, and he credits the idea for the novel to a suggestion from the Jesuit Reverend Thomas Birmingham. From the beginning, the horrifying story of Regan's possession, suffering, and eventual exorcism has a tacit Catholic stamp of approval. To adapt a horror cliché: the call was always coming from inside the church.

THE EXORCIST (book and film) introduced two things nearly inescapable now when telling a Christian possession story: a set language for demonic affliction and a set model for exorcism. This language of possession we horror fans know like a native tongue. Poltergeisty activity, spinning heads, spewed pea soup, contorted backwards spider-walks, death metal growing. Unflattering statements about the proclivities of one's deceased mother. The model of exorcism is equally gospel, really an adaptation of the TV medical-drama model: a patient with strange symptoms stumps local GPs, until a fancy specialist arrives and provides a diagnosis and a cure. If you sub in a demoniac for the patient and an exorcist for the specialist, you have your basic possession story. Rinse out the pea-soup, untwist the head, and repeat. Blatty's model became the way to tell possession stories, and not only in books and on film; it caused the real-life demand for exorcisms to skyrocket after the 1973 release of the film, and the Catholic church had to rush to appoint exorcists to keep up. Father Gabriele Amorth, the head exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, counted the EXORCIST film as one of his favourites. If the novel was at least partially intended as a PSA for the power of Catholic redemption, it was a wild success. THE EXORCIST almost single-handedly made demonic possession the 'in' thing in art and life in the 1970s, and you couldn't escape it. But I had to try.

As a first step, I set my story in rural Saskatchewan, Canada in the summer of 1973, just a few months before William Friedkin's film version film hit theatres in real life and transformed the world. That way, at least, my characters didn't have the Blatty script to follow and would have to invent their own language of possession and liberation. But I was a newbie novelist, and I knew how hard it would be to reinvent the wheel. I needed to see other ways demonic possession had been handled. As a recovering academic, I did have research chops, so I dove deep into the history of Catholic exorcism. And what I found there was fascinating, bizarre, and absolutely crucial for the story I wanted to tell.

One seventeenth-century man's demon was routed by a priest in front of a small audience "in the form of a flame of fire like a band of gunpowder from a cannon, with a great stench and of such force that it gave a great blow to two assistants, one of them on the face and the other on the ear, from which he remain[ed] deaf". In 1920, a woman was induced to vomit up "a cursed bolus of salted pork she had eaten seven years earlier, releasing her from seven demons". And in the 1980s, a demon punked an exorcist that he was the spirit of a dead Mafia boss who turned out to never have existed. (A movie waiting right there, boy!) I also discovered it was a standard church practice in earlier centuries to leave some demons unexorcised so that the possessed could rat out hidden sorcerers and witches, and be exhibited to audiences as evidence of God's victory over Satan. These captives were called "useful demoniacs" -- sort of like a satanic version of Hannibal Lector. This variety showed Blatty's model of exorcism was just that: one model, amongst so many others. But it was only when I encountered more contemporary accounts of possession that I found the emotional core of my novel.

In his 1990 memoir AN EXORCIST TELLS HIS STORY, Father Amorth included an anonymous first-person account of a demoniac. This man had escaped his harsh father and ended up in a life of addiction, abuse and despair, and when he tried to turn his life around, he had felt a dark 'someone' take hold of him:

'Someone' was not happy with my new life ... I felt that I was suffering with something other than my body; in fact, I felt that my body was a stranger. I was prey to the strongest despair, and I saw, I know not with whose eyes, a terrible darkness that was not part of the room in which I was or of the bed in which I had lain for months. This darkness was engulfing my future, my ability to live, and any hope of tomorrow. It was as though I were being killed by an unseen knife, and I felt that whoever was pressing this knife hated me and wanted something more than my death ... '

This wasn't the inhuman possession popularised by Blatty's novel. No histrionics. No spinning heads or pea soup. This was the very human condition of suffering, of pain, of being lost and alone and forsaken. Of the dark 'someone' who wasn't you. Of the unseen knife.

This was the language of possession I wanted my characters to speak. As a young Marine who fought in the Vietnam war, Peter had seen first-hand what the Devil could do. And when he came home, he knew what his mission had to be. He has come to the tiny farming town of Redfife, Saskatchewan in hopes of being trained by the veteran exorcist Father Henryk. But he discovers that Henryk has flown the coop after an unsanctioned exorcism of a young girl. The new parish priest, Father Daniel, offers Peter shelter and a friendly ear, but Daniel can see his guest is haunted by ghosts from his past. With no mission, no mentor, and no plan, Peter needs a new battle to fight, if only to stave off the darkness that's finally caught up with him.

Terri has her own demons to fight. She's an aspiring actress who fled a repressive home in Redfife to make her name in Hollywood. But the avant-garde cowboy movie she was shooting in northern Saskatchewan, the one that was supposed to make her a star, has collapsed. She and her co-star and best friend Malcolm have nowhere else to go except for her family's farm. There she finds her stroke-paralysed mother Sarah and her resentful cousin Agnes, and the repressed memories that flood in threaten to overwhelm her, too.

When Peter meets Terri, they find they share a darkness ... and a spark. And just as their affection kindles into something forbidden, Terri is stricken with what looks to be demonic possession. Is Terri truly possessed by an evil entity? Or is she performing the greatest role of her career: the avenging dark angel that will destroy all her would-be 'liberators' -- including Peter? The unseen knife wounds every character. And some of them will be lost forever.

Three years later, my clean, simple log-line has become my first novel: no longer clean and no longer simple. THE LIBERATION (currently ON SUB 😓) doesn't read like a Blatty-esque possession story -- which may frustrate some hardcore horror readers -- but I think the story and its characters are all the better for it.