Director – Daniel Stamm, Screenplay – Robert Zappia, Story – Earl Richey Jones, Todd R. Jones & Robert Zappia, Producers – Paul Brooks, Earl Richey Jones, Todd R. Jones & Jessica Malanaphy, Photography – Denis Crossan, Music – Nathan Barr, Visual Effects – Folks VFX (Supervisor – Laurent Spillemaecker) & Tempest FX, Special Effects Supervisor – Ivo Jivkov, Production Design – Jonathan McKinstry. Production Company – Lionsgate/Confluence.
Cast
Jacqueline Byers (Ann Karja), Colin Salmon (Father Raymond), Christian Navarro (Father Dante), Posy Taylor (Natalie Holt), Virginia Madsen (Dr Peters), Ben Cross (Cardinal Matthews), Debora Zhecheva (Young Ann), Koyna Ruseva (Ann’s Mother), Nicholas Ralph (Father Raymond)
Plot
Ann Karja is a nun studying at the St. Michael the Archangel School of Exorcism in Boston. She has a fascination with exorcism due to having been abused by a mother that she believes was possessed. However, she is barred from participation in the program because the Catholic Church forbids women as exorcists. At the school, Ann establishes a rapport with young Natalie Holt, a girl who is possessed. The college’s head exorcist Father Raymond sees this and permits Ann to join the other trainees. However, the demon inside Natalie has come for Ann and is determined to taunt and prey upon her mind.
The Exorcist (1973) is a landmark film. It laid down the essence of the Possession and Exorcism film, creating a series of tropes that have been endlessly repeated since then – the possessed in cracked face spouting obscenities in a deep voice and projectile vomiting; the Catholic priests chanting “the power of Christ compels you” as they conduct the rituals of exorcism and so on. The Exorcist was followed by a number of copies for several years afterwards. The genre was revived in the 2000s and since then there have been a number of films that recycle its essentials with the likes of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), Blackwater Valley Exorcism (2006), The Rite (2011), The Devil Inside (2012), Deliver Us From Evil (2014), Backmask/The Asylum/Exeter (2015), The Vatican Tapes (2015), Incarnate (2016), The Crucifixion (2017), The Exorcism of God (2021) and The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), among others. For a more detailed overview see my essay Possession Films.
I was very impressed with director Daniel Stamm’s second film The Last Exorcism (2010), a clever and witty work that subverted the tropes of the possession and exorcism film. It was something that Stamm never quite followed up on. He next made the negligible 13 Sins (2014) for Blumhouse and has spent the rest of the 2010s/20s directing episodes for assorted genre tv shows. Prey for the Devil marked Stamm’s return to making a full-length film, his fourth film in all. I had little enthusiasm for another exorcism film, although was buoyed up by seeing Daniel Stamm back in the director’s seat. He had done something incredibly inventive with The Last Exorcism, so I was intrigued to see what he would do with a traditional exorcism film.
A possessed Posy Taylor finds crawling up the wall on her back offers a good daily cardio workout alternative
The other interesting twist is that the film makes an effort to join the 2020s push for gender equality on screen and gender-flips traditional roles. This does present a problem, as the opening credits acknowledge, as the Catholic Church is very much a male-dominated province and exorcisms are always conducted by priests – a role that women are barred from holding. This either says something about how the push for gender equality on screen is getting hard up for new material to take on, or else how behind the times the Possession and Exorcism Film is, still being rooted in an archaic church dogma.
Despite hopes for the film, Prey for the Devil proves to be a crashing disappointment that makes me think that The Last Exorcism was a one-off fluke or that its success was due to reasons other than Daniel Stamm. It is a film where the pop-up effects of the genre have become so tired and overwrought that it feels that Stamm is just parroting the moves of others, while winding everything up with a series of loud slams and roars on the soundtrack.
Stamm does add one or two novel effects – the possessed girl (Posy Taylor) manifesting stigmata on the back of her hands out of which crawl maggots, or her long hair taking on a life of its own and trying to force itself down her throat. However, by about the point that we see Posy Taylor scuttling up the wall onto the roof on her back, the only real word for this is ridiculous.
