Director – Damon Thomas, Screenplay – Jenna Lamia, Based on the Novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) by Grady Hendrix, Producers – David Borgernicht, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Christopher Landon & Jennifer Semler, Photography – Rob C. Givens, Music – Ryland Blackinton, Visual Effects – Folks (Supervisor – Philippe Thibault), Special Effects Supervisor – David Fletcher, Makeup Effects – Blue Whale Company, Production Design – Bruce Curtis. Production Company – Gotham Group/Quirk Books.
Cast
Elsie Fisher (Abby Rivers), Amiah Miller (Gretchen Lang), Rachel Ogechi Kanu (Margaret Chisholm), Cathy Ang (Glee Tanaka), Christopher Lowell (Christian Lemon), Clayton Johnson (Wallace Stoney), Nathan Anderson (Pony Lang), Cynthia Evans (Grace Lang), Cameron Bass (Brother Morgan), Ashley LeConte Campbell (Sister Kathleen), Rachel Leah Cohen (Mrs. Rivers), John Stoneburner (Mr. Rivers), Michael Wayne Foster (Micah Lemon), Michael Proctor (Jonah Lemon)
Plot
Teenagers Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang are best friends at the Aberdale Academy Catholic girls’ school. Along with two other friends, they sneak off to a lakeside vacation home on the weekend. While taking LSD, Abby and Gretchen venture up to the abandoned house where a girl was reputedly sacrificed in a Satanic ceremony. After becoming separated, Abby and the others return to find a terrified Gretchen. Afterwards, Gretchen begins displaying disturbed behaviour at school. Abby realises that she has become possessed. Her only hope is to call in an exorcist from a Christian youth mission team.
This is a film based on the novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) by Grady Hendrix. Hendrix is a rising name as a horror writer, having written other novels including Horrorstör (2014), The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020) and The Final Girl Support Group (2021), a number of which are also in option for film and tv treatment. In addition, Hendrix has also written the screenplays for Mohawk (2017) and Satanic Panic (2019).
The film version is directed Damon Thomas, who has emerged through British tv with works such as Crooked House (2008), The First Men in the Moon (2010), Lightfields (2013) and episodes of Penny Dreadful (2016-8), Killing Eve (2018-20) and Dracula (2020), among others. The film is produced by Christopher Landon, a horror regular and the director of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015), Happy Death Day (2017) and Freaky (2020), among other works. The film was released to Amazon Prime.
Your initial impression of My Best Friend’s Exorcism is something light and fluffy in an innocuous Young Adult vein – maybe somewhere around the level of the Twilight films or Vampire Academy (2014). However, this quickly proves not to be the case at all and the film pushes for something a little more out there.
(l to r) Elsie Fisher and her best friend Amiah Miller in a calmer moment
I have championed the name of Amiah Miller ever since I spotted her as a child actor in War of the Planet of the Apes (2017). Now she is blossoming into a young woman (aged eighteen) and showing much promise as an adult actress. In fact, her performance as the titular best friend quite makes the film. When we meet her, she seems to encapsulate a wholesome Girl Next Door innocence. Throughout the course of the film that is increasingly turned on its head to the point she is peeing in a waste bin in the classroom, projectile vomiting and then going the possession route. Around the time of the scene where she persuades Elsie Fisher to get in the dunking pool while saying “You know you can trust me” and then thoroughly embarrasses Elsie by confessing her fantasies of the priest (Cameron Bass), the range of expressions she goes through in a single scene show that Amiah has matured into an actor of quite some promise.
Right from the outset, My Best Friend’s Exorcism kicks in with a great sense of 1980s period setting – even the credits are mocked up like an 80s film. Not to mention a killer soundtrack of iconic 80s tunes. What I really liked was the way the film tapped typical American parenting of the era – from Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No (to drugs) campaign and of absurd groups like the Christian evangelist bodybuilders. In particular, there is the scene where Elsie comes to the conclusion that Amiah’s behaviour is because she was raped and tries to explain that to her conservative parents, where their more immediate concern is that she was taking LSD. There is something astutely on the ball in the writing in these parts.
There is something of Needful Things (1993) when it comes the scenes of Amiah Miller pitting people against one another and playing on their fears. Damon Thomas creates some scenes of undeniable grotesquery, like where Amiah Miller feeds Rachel Ogechi Kanu a diet powder made up of tapeworm eggs, resulting in her vomiting forth an eleven-foot-long tapeworm. The scenes where Elsie Fisher is required to draw on the services of one of the evangelistic bodybuilders (Christopher Lowell) to conduct an exorcism come with some amusement, not to mention offers one of the few depictions of exorcism on screen to buck the cliché of having it conducted by Catholic priests.
