 Hello and welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies, but before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we're drinking Slaundered Lamb English Bitter. Today we're going to bring to you The Exorcism of Emily Rose. And this is our first Trash or Treasure segment of 2024. That's right. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is directed by Scott Derrickson, and he did Hellraiser Inferno, which we covered. Yep. He also did another horror movie called Sinister. Might make a good Trash or Treasure in the future for us. I think it would. And then he's kind of progressed into all this Marvel garbage with Doctor Strange and all that shit. And he slated to direct Labyrinth 2. Just leave it alone for fuck's sakes. Jennifer Carpenter is in this, and she was in the very notable show Dexter. Laura Linney is in this. She was in the acclaimed show Ozark, which was fucking great. And Mothman Prophecies, which was also pretty good. That one we got to cover at some point. Yeah, I kind of dug that movie. Yeah. The late Tom Wilkinson is in this. He's been in tons of things. Run out of space on our SD card. The exorcism of Emily Rose starts off like in this kind of really drab, somber farmhouse. And it's dreary and looks cold out in the rain. A medical examiner shows up at this house and sees his family. Something dramatic has happened. Comes back down and there's a priest there as well. And he's like, I'm sorry, she's dead. So the priest that's at this farmhouse, Father Richard Moore, gets arrested. Fucking hauled away. Yeah. He gets put in jail, man. He's in his orange jumpsuit and everything. He's in the clinker. Fucking threw the book at this poor bastard. Blamed for the death of Emily Rose, who was in his care. He was supposed to do a exorcism on her. And she died basically from malnutrition while being under his watch. The church, of course, is involved in all this. And they want to avoid a scandal. They don't want their name dragged through the media and dragged through the mud. So they're kind of telling them, you better plead guilty, leave us out of this. All right. Fucking assholes. But the state really wants to go hard on this poor bastard. And he needs a lawyer. So the church appoints him, Erin Bruner. And she visits him and they have a very profound discussion, right? And he's telling her like, I'm not going to back down. I'm not going to plead guilty because I want to get Emily's story out. It's not about me. It's not even about the church. It's about her. Warns her to be aware because there's sinister forces. So Erin Bruner travels to Emily Rose's farmhouse. She goes to meet the family to get a backstory. She was very innocent before she left the farm to go to university. The family kind of protested her leaving. The trial ends up becoming a battleground between science and faith. The church does not want Father Moore to testify. During this trial, while all the proceedings are going on, they get attacked spiritually by something. And it's exactly what Father Moore had warned, right? There's evil forces lurking about that are trying to manipulate this trial in some way. If you want to see what happens with this trial, see who comes out on top. If it's the state or the church, then keep watching 2008's Exorcism of Emily Rose. That'll bring us to the treasure of the Exorcism of Emily Rose. And the first thing is while it's based on a true story. So there's legitimacy there. This shit happened. Yeah. This trial happened in real life in Germany in the 70s. And it wasn't Emily Rose, it's Annalisa Michelle. For the most part, I'm surprised. Yeah. It's pretty well the same. Parents did see her go through these transformations and apparently saw her have stigmata and all this crazy shit, so they called a priest. And apparently there was like 67 exorcisms they tried doing on her. All were failures. She refused to eat and she did dive malnutrition and dehydration like in the movie. They also charged the parents rather than just the priest. Another treasure about this movie is the way it's set up where it actually takes place after the exorcism. The first scene, everything's done. You don't know what happened. It's just this guy showing up. Shit's already hit the fan and the shit has hit the floor. And it's all done. And you're like, what happened? So you're instantly put into the situation that you need to know more about. Which leads to the structure of the movie, right? Because obviously this movie isn't structured like a usual movie. It's not beginning, middle, end. It's all over the place. They use the courtroom setting and the trial as a way to kind of take you back in time and witness what happened to Emily. And that's a real kind of original thing I think for an exorcism movie for sure. I don't think it was ever done before this. Yeah, I like how they use the real life aspect of a courtroom drama to drive the supernatural end of things in this movie. The way the courtroom makes you part of the jury. As a viewer, you're put in that position. You listen to the defense and the prosecution just like the jury does. You're sitting in the jury box! Yeah. You're put in a position to kind of decide that she suffers from seizures, was she multiple personality, whatever, or was she possessed. The way that the trial takes place, you're presented with evidence on both sides and they're both convincing, torn the same way a jury member would be torn. She doesn't have to prove that Emily was possessed. No. She just has to prove that Father Richard Moore wasn't responsible for her death. She just has to sew a little bit of doubt. Right. And I like that where it's, no, she doesn't have to prove that demons exist. The atmosphere for this movie is fantastic. It's dark and dreary, snowy. Right from the get-go, right from the opening scene. You almost feel it. You almost get the chills yourself, right? They keep that tone in this movie pretty steady. They're at the whole movie. The whole thing. All the courtroom stuff is really realistic looking. It's kind of like dull. It's all dull. Like the courtroom is dull. What a dull thing. When they take you back to the possession scenes, it's like, it's shot in a completely different way. Like it's more vivid. The camera's a little shaky. Also what helps with the atmosphere of this movie is sort of the scant music in this movie. There's not much, which is actually good. It works in this movie's favor. Little violin strings, little notes. They have little somber piano notes, keys playing throughout. It doesn't overwhelm you, right? Yeah. It allows you more to absorb the story rather than all this background shit that's going on. And a big piece of treasure for this movie really is the fact that this movie does not take all those exorcism tropes that we saw in the biggest exorcism movie ever, the exorcists, and rehash them. It does its own thing. Well, just the structure of the movie alone is its own thing. The fact it takes place after the exorcism is unique. But even like the possession scenes are more grounded in reality, I find. You're not seeing people's heads being spun around backwards. There's no pea soup vomit. It's basically whatever the actor, Jennifer Carpenter, could do with her own body. Yeah, and her own voice. And her own voice. Because it's what she's physically doing on camera with no real effects. As the jury member, as the viewer, you're like, ah, is it possession or is it somebody who's afflicted by all these mental issues and epilepsy and stuff like that? Because she's doing all this herself. It could go either way, right? It could go either way, and I love that aspect of it. It's like that time that walked in on you. Hey, Adam, you want to do that? Holy shit! Holy shit! I need to call a priest! An exorcism! Or is that a cognac? You drank a whole bottle of fucking cognac to yourself? Nah, you fucking asshole, you should have shared some with me! You deserve it! I like how everybody is alone in this movie. Everybody's isolated, right? Father Moore goes back to his cell. He's in prison, man. Yeah. Erin is by herself. She doesn't have a partner at home. She goes home to an empty apartment and then... With all this burden on her shoulder. Yeah, yeah. Emily Rose is alone fighting the demons inside herself. And it allows for these sinister forces to try and chip away at them, right? The characters in this movie are very strong. Father Moore, who's a very strong-willed priest, he's not bowing down to the fucking church. The church is a powerful entity. One of the most powerful on earth. And he's saying, nope, no, I'm not gonna do what they say. Erin, who's extremely strong-willed, she has to be to be able to fight the fucking state. Stuck in the middle between the state and the church. She's like torn. You also have Emily Rose too, right? Who starts off young and innocent and she slowly gets corrupted. Something happens to her and you're not quite sure what it could be, right? You see how the events change each character as the movie progresses, right? Which is really cool. That'll bring us to the trash for the exorcism of Emily Rose. And, you know, I'm really torn on this movie. I'm really am torn on it because for me it does a lot of great things, which we just talked about. And the first thing that I gotta say is, for a movie that's called the Exorcism of Emily Rose, I don't know who the fuck Emily Rose is. I have no clue. Right. This movie does not do a good enough job making you identify or feel sad or sorry for Emily Rose. Like, you don't know her. You have, like, you know, possessed Emily Rose, but you don't know Emily Rose beforehand so much. And I think that hurts the movie because then you don't feel for her. The movie's named after her. We should feel something more for her. I don't feel like she's the victim in this, you know? I feel like everyone else is the victim except for Emily Rose. And her family, too. I thought that Emily Rose's family should have been incorporated a lot more in this movie. And you don't really feel what happened to them. You get a hint of it. Imagine living with that. Living with a possessed person up in the top room of your farmhouse. It would be terrifying. Yeah, it would scare the living shit out of you. Like, they should have went a bit more into that so you can really feel what the family felt going through this. It's all about Aaron. It's all about Father Moore. But what about the people who really suffered from this? Exactly, yeah. And that's the family in Emily Rose. Yeah, the family unit. Another trash aspect of this, which is the sort of the possession side that Emily Rose takes, or the possession sort of tropes, right? Walking through the rain and she's seeing, you know, like there's that car that drives by and there's that phase. Bro! It's like, you didn't need that. You had a smart movie going. And then why did you throw this garbage in? Then there's that whole scene in the farmhouse where she jumps out of her bedroom window where she's in the barn. And there's all this madness happening. It's like, no, that's taking it too far because now as the jury member, as the viewer you're supposed to be, you're being swayed too much in the other direction. Exactly, yeah. And it's too unbelievable, right? It's got to be steeped in reality for this movie for it to really work. Another piece of trash I had about this movie was, and Justin kind of disagrees with me a bit, is for me it was too much of a courtroom drama. Like, where the point where I was starting to fucking get bored and like, oh, Kay, like, it dragged. Fucking get going. Yeah, it kind of, it affects the pacing. Yeah, it hurts the pacing. Yeah, it hurts the pacing quite a bit. I like the fact is the courtroom drama because it's neat, but it's almost, it's too much. Like, it just tipped the scales a little bit too much as opposed, if they would have introduced some of those aspects we mentioned, like, a bit more of the family, a bit more of Emily Rose past before she was possessed, but offset that a little bit, right? I see all that. I agree with it, too. I got the sense that they didn't quite know what to do or where to take the possession side. But they knew how to, what to do with the courtroom drama. Yeah, and so they stuck with what they knew. Yeah, and so the thing is, is that I'm kind of glad that they stuck with the more grounded aspect of the courtroom, right? And it's like, if they would have showed more Emily Rose and all that, I fear they would have just went to Hollywood and spoiled a pretty decent movie. So the Exorcism of Emily Rose, Trash or Treasure? It's Treasure. Yeah, I'm gonna say Treasure, too, and I was really kind of on the fence. It does a lot of really good things. It does, and it's one of the first Exorcism movies to really, like, say, fuck you, the Exorcist. Let's do our own thing, and let's not hop on that bandwagon and just do it all again the same way. And they didn't go all stupid Hollywood with it either, right? They kept all that shit down to a minimum, which helped. Did a good job of letting people know about the real story, too, which is important. For Father Moore wanting to tell the real story in the movie, it makes people want to know about the real story in real life, which is kind of neat. Which is, you know, the whole purpose of Father Moore's testimony in the movie. So, and then it brings it to real life as well, right? So, it does tell her story. So, if you want a possession movie that's completely different than the Exorcist, and you want something that you can still think about, because it still makes you think, right? So, check out 2008's The Exorcism of Emily Rose. And until next time, keep drinking. Looking forward editing this episode.