Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  It is interesting to note Nicola’s participation in the making of this film at that particular time in the history of the Catholic Church. As indicated before, many felt that the Vatican II had modernized the understanding of religion and, particularly, the devil; and meanwhile there was a priest advising on a Hollywood film that depicted the devil as a true, personified being that was at work in the modern world. Nicola’s interest in the film could have been twofold. He worked to maintain the realism of the film in order to ensure that the ancient Catholic rite was presented in a manner appropriate for the church, but also to assure that the public or the new church did not quickly forget these ancient rites. The issues between the new church and the International Council of Exorcists will be addressed in a later chapter, but suffice to say, there could have been motivating political factors that contributed to Nicola’s participation.

  There are other levels of truth to the film that add to the disturbing effect the film has had on the audience; one of them that still, to this day, has not been replicated. Special effects are regularly used in films and often contribute to our willing suspension of disbelief. Special effects remind the audience that what they are viewing isn’t real. However, in the case of The Exorcist, even the special effects are so close to reality that the audience rarely receives the reminder that special effects are being used. This is because many of the special effects are not that “special.” The film depicts the room in which the demon resides as being ice cold, the priest’s breath visible with every word. That is because it really was that cold on the set. Friedkin brought in massive air conditioners and lowered the temperature of the set to 30 degrees in order to achieve a “real” effect, rather than a special effect. During a disturbing scene in which Regan is throttled up and down in her bed, there is nothing more than a pulley system rigged to Linda Blair’s back that jerks her up and down, back and forth. It provided a more realistic vision of someone being moved against her will.

  Friedkin insisted on shooting the opening sequence in Iraq, much to the disappointment of the producers because of the cost; but Friedkin insisted that it could not be in Arizona or Mexico or any other desert. It had to be in the cradle of the world, a place ancient and barren. Also, the statue of the demon that Father Merrin sees in Iraq is the image of an actual demon called Pazuzu. According to the Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology, Pazuzu is an “Assyrian and Babylonian Demon god of the first millennium BCE, who sends diseases, pestilence, and plagues into households.”11 Friedkin’s adherence to reality causes a level of discomfort that is unlike nearly every other horror film ever made. Perhaps The Exorcist taps into some kind of deeper, shared knowledge—something passed down from ancient times. The average viewer probably knows nothing of Pazuzu, but there is something about the demon’s image that arouses discomfort. For some reason, the demon, which is accurately represented in the film, appears as something foreign, grotesque, and evil, yet stirs something in our collective consciousness that is familiar. Suddenly, the demon is no longer wandering the barren plain of the Iraqi desert but has taken up residence in a Georgetown home, inside an innocent little girl. The very notion of it is the true power of the film—this ancient evil is not banished to some foreign desert but is actually right next door.

  The Exorcist stands to date as the most horrifying film ever made. It doesn’t ask for the viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief because the assumption of the film is that the viewer already believes—already knows deep down that it’s true. At least, that appears to be the formula that Friedkin and Blatty were using, and it worked. The Exorcist took the world by storm. It was a world that had lost itself in its modern ideas. Louise Sweeney’s article for the Christian Science Monitor in 1974 was entitled “Occult Interest Suggests Technology Faith Shattered.” In this article she writes, “A cultural paradox is at work in America today: the stainless-steel society glistening with technology and bristling with scientific rationality suddenly reverts to the occult. Why?”12 This is a question that she asks several different psychologists and theologians, and they are the very same questions being explored today in this very book. Perhaps The Exorcist’s lasting power comes from the fact that we have failed to find the answers to these questions, or, perhaps, we are no different than the men and women who roamed the earth in the Iraqi cradle of life who feared Pazuzu and wore amulets to protect themselves from his evil. Perhaps we are still those people despite our “stainless-steel” society. Perhaps the truth of The Exorcist is a truth about the nature of man rather than the nature of Satan.

  The Exorcist’s power ultimately rests within the audience. Its effect at that particular time in history can attest to that very power. Newsweek ran two cover stories, lines for theaters wound around city blocks; there was a surge in occult interest, in Catholicism, and in requests for exorcism. People were frightened. Fear is the most difficult emotion for a film to manifest, and therefore represents one of the greatest artistic feats of the film industry. If you want to make the audience cry, you can usually kill one of the main characters or the family dog; if you want to make them laugh, simplistic physical gags or toilet humor will usually do the trick. But the art of eliciting fear is something entirely different. The audience is not in any danger—they are sitting in a theater surrounded by people; there is nothing in their vicinity that should create an emotion of fear. Fear is an emotion that is brought about by some kind of perceived threat. Thus, the audience must perceive a threat on screen. If the audience has been masterfully drawn in to the film by the director and actors, then they come to identify with the characters in the film and fear on their behalf.

  However, with certain films, that fear is extended outside the theater because the threat represented on screen is something more real, something more true. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho terrified audiences nationwide with its infamous shower scene. Suddenly people were terrified of roadside motels that they had previously frequented. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws had much the same effect; people were afraid to go into the water, and fisherman were killing sharks by the boatload. In these two particular cases there was an empirical basis for the films; people are murdered (daily), sometimes in motel rooms and sometimes by mentally deranged maniacs; and shark attacks do happen every year and, while rare, they can represent a frightening possibility for surfers and swimmers. But where does this leave The Exorcist? The public reaction was much the same as that of Jaws and Psycho, and the film has demonstrated long-term effects on audience perception and reaction. The film was re-released in 2000 and included scenes that had originally been cut from the film, much to Friedkin’s dismay. The Exorcist’s re-release coincided nicely with the sharp upturn in public interest in the paranormal, upon which this book is based.

  Both Psycho and Jaws represented the possibility of film becoming reality, and thus they had enormous audience impact. The Exorcist, however, is not about something that we know to be empirically true. The Exorcist renewed an ancient fear, something that we do not deal with on a day-to-day basis, something that we do not read about in daily newspapers or that has an annual week devoted to it on Discovery Channel, such as Shark Week. It tapped into an audience reality that may not be an empirical reality. It touched different aspects of the audiences’ religious-cultural experience and thus elicited real horror—the horror of a true evil that exists in the world, the horror of supernatural entities bent on our harm. The truth of The Exorcist is that whether real or imagined, the film tapped into a primal, ancient fear that rests in the collective human conscious.

  THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT

  My original intention was to dissect the story of The Amityville Horror, as it has become one of the “true” stories that has made its way into the American cultural mythos. However, the story has been told, retold, and debated so many times that any further analysis of the film seems pointless. Furthermore, it is a film that belonged to a past generation. It was remade in an attempt to gain a younger audience, but the film—starring Ryan Reynold
s, normally a comedic actor—was pretty much laughed right out of the theater, and the old line about it being a “true” story did not seem to resonate with the younger generation. That being said, The Haunting in Connecticut did seem to stoke the paranormal fires of the newer generation. Of course, being a resident of Connecticut and not living too far from the town of Southington, perhaps I just paid closer attention. The film enjoyed moderate success and better DVD sales, but also garnered quite a bit of attention in the media due to the true story factor.

  The Haunting in Connecticut and The Amityville Horror are similar in several respects, nearly making them interchangeable: each haunting resulted in the family abandoning the home; each investigation involved Ed and Lorraine Warren and the exorcism of a demonic presence; each haunting involved a fair amount of media attention; and neither home experienced any difficulties when the new owners moved into it. And, of course, both were turned into books, cowritten by a horror novelist, and were subsequently turned into films. The Connecticut case also had the further distinction of being featured on Discovery Channel’s A Haunting under the same title, thereby giving more credence to the “true story” than it would probably have had otherwise. Therefore, I have chosen to use The Haunting in Connecticut rather than the Amityville story for contemporaneous purposes.

  First, let’s start with the story as told by the Snedeker family through the book, In a Dark Place, which was coauthored by Ray Garton and the Warrens.

  In 1986, the Snedekers moved to Southington, Connecticut, so their son, Philip, could continue to receive daily cobalt treatments for lymphatic cancer at John Dempsey hospital, which is part of the University of Connecticut. Philip was 14 at the time; though his name is listed as Stephen in the book, we will refer to him as Philip. Carmen’s husband, Allen Snedeker, was not the children’s father and was not living at the house a majority of the time during the two-year haunting. Instead, he continued to work in upstate New York, staying in motels and living with his family on the weekends.

  The house, which was formerly a funeral home, is still standing on Meriden Avenue in Southington, though the current owners don’t seem to appreciate the newfound fame as they are constantly questioned about whether or not their house is haunted. The new owner, Susan Trotta-Smith, stated in an interview with the Record-Journal, “We’ve lived in this house for ten years. Our house is wonderful. This is all Hollywood foolishness. The stories are all ludicrous.”13 Similar to the Amityville Horror house, the new owners have experienced none of the reported phenomena but are plagued with sightseers, trespassers, and paranormal investigators. This could be due to the entire thing being a hoax or it could be due to the exorcism that was supposedly performed on both residences which expelled the entities; take your pick as to which is the truth.

  The Snedekers only lived in the lower half of the house. The house was divided into two apartments for rental. Carmen claims that she was never informed of the history of the house, but it became apparent when they took a look in the basement and saw that many of the tools and the equipment used for preparing bodies were still in place. According to Carmen and the book, Philip immediately began to complain of hearing voices in the basement and seeing visions. He claimed that the house was evil. Naturally, the parents thought this to be his imagination. That was, until Carmen began experiencing the haunting herself, along with her other children, a niece who stayed with them during her parents’ divorce, and, supposedly, a neighbor. The story tells of a black dog constantly barking at the house, mop-water turning blood-red, apparitions of dead, naked beings, a green-glowing woman seen in the vacant upstairs apartment, the house shaking, and ghostly sexual molestation.

  For whatever reason, despite his insistent fear of the basement, the Snedekers forced Philip to make the basement his room; however, the book indicates that he slept on the couch in the living room most nights until his brother moved into the basement with him. It is then reported that both boys began to see visions of dead people in the room and hear whisperings. They slept with the lights on, which apparently prompted Allen to remove all the lights due to the electric bill climbing ever higher.

  However, that is where the similarity between the actual purported story and the Hollywood film end. The film postulates that séances were held in the funeral home and that the funeral home owner never actually buried the bodies. Rather, the bodies were hidden in the walls of the house, which Philip burns down at the end of the film. There was also very little involvement from a priest, though the book vaguely details an exorcism held at the home, which concludes the haunting.

  Philip’s cancer went into remission during the two years at the home, but he was then institutionalized for sexually assaulting his own cousin, who was living at the home. Carmen Reed and the book insist that Philip’s cousin, Trish, was constantly being sexually assaulted by the ghosts; the implication is that Philip became possessed by the entity and then committed this act. In fact, there is a lot of ghost rape in the story of the Snedeker haunting, including rape of Carmen and even Allen. When the Warrens were eventually called in to investigate, Lorraine used her psychic abilities to determine that the house had been the site of ritualistic necrophilia, which had then caused a demonic infestation; “hands—rough, male hands that reached down to fondle the dead bodies, to touch their most private parts in horrible ways … fingers closing over limp, dead male genitalia … entering the cold, dead private places of women…”14 Following the release of the book, Carmen and her family appeared on an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael entitled, “I Was Raped by a Ghost.” The Warrens brought in their investigative team for an extended period of time, including their nephew, John Zaffis. It is during this time that Zaffis claims he was attacked by a demon, while everyone else in the house was sleeping in a demonic-induced trance. Zaffis writes in his foreword to The Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology by Rosemary Ellen Guiley, “One of the demonic cases brought me face to face with genuine evil: a reptile-like entity that manifested in an infested home, a former funeral parlor in Southington, Connecticut, and came at me down a staircase. The intensity of the evil was astonishing. I had never before experienced anything like it, and I have to admit, I was so shaken that it was several days before I could return to the case.”15 As indicated before, the investigation concluded with the Warrens obtaining an exorcism of the property from a priest and the haunting ended.

  The haunting story, as told by Ray Garton’s In a Dark Place, tells of a highly sexualized haunting that stemmed from sexual abuse of dead bodies in the care of the funeral home owner. However, the film uses scenes of old séances centered on a child medium and on bodies improperly disposed of in the actual walls and foundation of the house. It tells of a priest who warns them about the dangers of the house and warns them to “Get out now!” The film is a long way from the story told in the book. It even caught the ire of Lorraine Warren herself, who said, “Imagine, if it had been done the right way, it could have been something that could more or less educate the public on what happened. They chose not to.”16 However, leading up to the release of the film, several other revelations were made concerning the supposedly true story.

  Joe Nickell investigated the case following the release of the book In a Dark Place and reached radically different conclusions regarding the family’s experience. He appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael episode to offer his take on the haunting. “On the Sally show, I appeared with the Warrens and the Snedekers as well as several of the latter’s skeptical Southington neighbors. Ed made veiled threatening asides to me (not aired) and, offstage, swore like a sailor. During the taping, the Snedekers sat on a brass bed while telling their story of demonic sexual attack.”17 The Snedeker family made the rounds on the talk show circuit, from Maury Povitch to A Current Affair. Nickell brought out the landlady and neighbors who refuted the story. “Long before the Sally show, in response to the Warrens’ shameless media exploitation, the Snedekers’ landlady—who had served them with an eviction notice for failing
to pay their rent—had responded to the supernatural claims. She and her husband, she said, had owned the property for two and a half years and experienced no problems with it.”18

  Even more damning were the accusations from Ray Garton, primary author of In a Dark Place, which surfaced after the release of The Haunting in Connecticut.

  They couldn’t keep their stories straight, for starters. The family was a mess, but their problems were not supernatural and they weren’t going to get the kind of help they needed from the Warrens. At the time I was with them, Carmen was running some kind of illegal interstate lottery scam that I don’t think I was supposed to find out about, but when I did, she repeatedly urged me not to mention it in the book and not to tell anyone. Their son, around whom their entire story centered, was nowhere to be found. I never met him. I was allowed to talk to him briefly on the phone, but as soon as he started telling me that the things he “saw” in the house went away after he’d been medicated, Carmen abruptly ended the conversation. The Warrens repeatedly told me they had videotape of actual supernatural activity shot in the house and they were going to show it to me while I was there, but they never did. They said they couldn’t find the tape. I never saw the inside of the house (the former funeral home in the story) because the people living there at the time wanted absolutely nothing to do with this circus, and they claimed there were no problems at all in the house. The Warrens explained that this was because the house had been cleansed by a priest who had performed an exorcism, but to the best of my knowledge, the Catholic church has absolutely nothing to do with the Warrens in any official way, and there are questions about the legitimacy of the priests who work with them. Since writing the book, I’ve learned a lot that leaves no doubt in my mind about the fraudulence of the Warrens and the Snedekers—not that I had much doubt, anyway. I’ve talked to other writers who’ve been hired to write books for the Warrens—always horror writers, like myself—and their experiences with the Warrens have been almost identical to my own.19