Hey there
friends. You remember me, right? Your old pal
Galzeekebull, the fear-eating demon? Today I'd like to talk to you a bit about
possession. And by that I mean
demonic possession.
You remember
what I told you once before about
horror movies? Probably not. So to give a quick refresher, I'm a fear-eating demon from the pits of the deepest dark, coasting through the human world dining on delicious moments of human terror, and this sometimes draws me (and others of my kind) to sit in on "scary movies" (hopefully only the good ones), soaking up all that the human watchers are exuding.
And, let's be honest, you can't watch tons and tons of horror flicks, sometimes the same one a dozen or more times, without becoming something of, well, a
film critic.
So here's my
observation. There are a great number of these that focus on demonic possession, and specifically have a narrative where a
demon has possessed some innocent and is making her (9/10 of the time it's a her) spout
dirty words and
pea soup. A
priest of the
Roman Catholic Church (or the like, but they love to bring in the robes and rosaries) shows up and they spend ninety minutes or so engaged in a metaphysical
wrestling match, before the clergyman, on the strength of his
faith, finally manages to wrestle the poor girl's soul from the grip of the demon. Usually at some great cost or self-sacrifice. And, look, even being a demon I don't actually know all that much about the practical aspects of an
exorcism from the
human point of view (I find exercisms more effective, where you get the possessed person in better physical shape through a solid workout routine, until they can kick out the demon on their own steam). And I must add that I have only rarely possessed a human, and never made one curse and puke, or otherwise let on that I was doing it at all, so I've never been exorcised myself.
But back to the
genre. So the
priest or
preacher or whatever-his-thing
clergy fellow is obviously invoking the
power of God there. But then, why is it always
such a battle? If we're talking about a person acting as the hand of a genuinely omnipotent deity, why isn't it enough to ask, "Hey God, can you do me a quick favor and flush this demon from this little girl for me?" And God goes "zap" and the demon is gone, right? And it's not as if God is thought to be entirely absent from the battle, because there will be moments all along in the film where the God-serving person is able to invoke juuuust enough of that power to suppress or momentarily get the upper hand on the foe, just for the fight to be renewed and carried on for a further time. Now, I'm
told that there are historical accounts of
real exorcisms following something of the same pattern, the religious institution sends out an expert and there's a lengthy and protracted fight to free the possessed, with the power of God being invoked bit by bit until it prevails to this end, and that makes no more sense in reality than in the movies.
Because what it surely
seems like is an evenly pitched fight, and one ultimately ending not with the demon being, you know, killed or destroyed or what-have-you, but simply
driven out. As in, "this possession is becoming too much of a hassle to maintain, I'm taking off, see ya." Believe me, the demons I know (the one's who aren't fear-eating demons) would have exactly that
attitude. A fear-eater would probably just hang out in the background and dine on all that priest fear while watching with mild
amusement as the possessing demon pulls his stunts, and maybe stick around afterwards for a
dessert of residual fear (some of the tastiest fear comes out when the
danger is gone and now you're just
thinking about it). And then wonder why it never occurs
to the priest that if they were really working in the service of an all-knowing and all-powerful being, their job wouldn't be quite so hard.
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