Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon's R-rated Nefarious (2023), which I watched last night, is an interesting paradox—a beautifully acted and written, absolutely top-notch demonic possession horror film with wide genre appeal, written with a primarily Christian audience in mind.
You can easily imagine youth pastors all over America solemnly arranging viewings in church basements for their older teenage congregants, warning them grimly that while what they're about to see may frighten them, it's all scripturally sound and a dire warning about the state of worldliness, but it's still "just a movie," and reminding them that it was made by Christians, "so you're safe."
What makes it a paradox to me is that while Evangelical and Catholic audiences will doubtless have their "aha!" moments with predictable, near-epileptic regularity, any sophisticated horror viewer will be able to settle back into the exquisite writing, and particularly into the occasionally terrifying performance by Sean Patrick Flanery (whom I had not seen since he broke my heart as the eponymous star of 1995's Powder) as the possessed death row inmate Edward Wayne Brady.
The film is set at a prison in Oklahoma on the afternoon before Brady's execution for multiple murders. A psychiatrist, Dr. James Martin (Jordan Bell) has been brought in ascertain whether Brady, who claims to be a demon, is actually insane, in which case he would spared execution. All of which is a pretty standard death row horror movie setup.
What followed was extraordinary: an extended dialogue between the two men—the death row inmate with the odd twitch and the rough, bulky mannerisms of a dockworker speaking in perfectly crafted sentences, exhibiting a vast knowledge of theology and Christian mythology, while never once breaking character and becoming pompous and artificial, and the avowed atheist psychiatrist, exhibiting a brittle intellectual and clinical disdain for Brady's "delusion," at one point taunting Brady's demon to enter him—a moment that doubtless brought both the Evangelicals and the horror fans in the audience together in a "you fucking idiot, don't do that!" moment.
Having known nothing about very publicly Catholic filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon's cinematic oeuvre before this film (you can look them up), I didn't make the connection until a throwaway line by the demon, explaining how he began to enter Brady's body when Brady was a child who'd received a Ouija board from his grandmother, tipped me off
Evangelicals and Catholics are obsessed with "gateways" to "demonic possession," and they've always been quite excited about Ouija boards and Dungeons and Dragons in particular. I paused the film and did a quick Internet check, which confirmed my suspicious. But I was enjoying the film so much that I went back to it, and was not disappointed that I did.
As I said, the writing was stunning, and a viewer knows that he or she is in beyond competent hands when a film that is basically a set-piece of two men talking can be that frightening (of course the cast expands later in the film, but by the time I does, the horror die has been well and truly been cast.)
If did force me to examine something I hadn't really thought of before: we have been absorbing Biblically-founded horror for centuries, much of it written by believers of one kind or another, from Dante, to Milton's "Paradise Lost," to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," to The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and even The Devil's Advocate (1997.)
The films that came to mind while watching this were, in particular, The Seventh Sign (1988) and, oddly Exorcist III (1990), film with which it shares some thematic overlap.
A devoutly Catholic filmmaker can bring what William Peter Blatty brought to The Exorcist—an "insider" view of the darker side of Christian mythology, as offered by someone who literally believes in the possibility of what he's writing. If done by a gifted writer, you get something like Nefarious. If done badly, you get a Chick tract.
Part of the horror of this film came from the shape of the demon's sadism and hatred towards its human host —some grotesqueries that I won't share in this note, but even things like making sure it requested the electric chair for its host to die in, knowing it would be more painful for Brady than lethal injection. Or even the scene where it allows Brady request his final meal as himself, then cancels it when he repossesses him, and leaves Brady to wonder, when the time comes, why he isn't being fed in the hours before his execution.
The magnificence of Flanery's performance derives in no small part from the moments when the demon let its tormented, wretched human host show through—the murderer who doesn't remember his crimes, and who is aware of being dominated by a malefic force against which he is utterly powerless.
The film has been criticized for using the demon as a mouthpiece for the filmmaker's fundamentalist beliefs, but to that I said, so what? They do it seamlessly. It's a horror story about exactly those themes.
The things the demon says to the atheist psychiatrist are exactly the sort of things any demon worth its brimstone would say to an atheist psychiatrist, and the lines are delivered with a deadpan matter-of-factness that is genuinely chilling.
And to their credit, they resisted the temptation of making Dr. Martin into an Evangelical caricature of "an atheist."
Only a clunky, pedestrian info-dump second-to-last scene—an interview between Dr. Martin and Glenn Beck—threatened to sink the entire film, but miraculously did not—perhaps the truest evidence of the endless war between good and evil in the film.
There were two natural places in the third-to-last scene of the film where it could have ended on near-Wagnerian note, but populist American Christianity is to art what a hidden vine stretched across the forest path is to joggers: if there's a way to trip and fall flat on their faces, they'll find it.
But at the end of the night, even that couldn't ruin Nefarious, a film which I recommend highly, particularly for anyone with a basic grounding in religious thinking, mythology, or imagery. It adds to the film's punch, but is in no way a requirement.
I'm reminded of the difference between the way The Exorcist affected Catholic friends of mine vs. how it affected Protestants, Jews, or atheist friends. The Catholics took the film personally. And that's powerful.
As I said: while it will doubtless give religious fundamentalists a tingle in their trousers in the same way Mel Gibson's gory Renaissance pietà The Passion of the Christ (2004) did, a more sophisticated horror viewer will see a masterclass in mortal relativism, supernatural suspense, and psychological sadism, and they may even occasionally jump, as I did more than once.
