"The Exorcism of Emily Rose"

A week ago or so, I saw "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." It was a great movie and everyone should see it. It was pretty scary, but if you're a catholic, you know whats happening and why. Although very supportive of the catholic point of view on the subject of exorcism, the movie never really seems to come to a concrete conclusion. However, it probably, and hopefully will bring many people to realize that beings besides ourselves do exist, and play extremely important roles in our lives.

There were a number of details that were very interesting. Its kind of hard to remember them now, but one of them was when she was being exorcised, the house shook so much that the crucifix downstairs became loose and hung upside down, signifying the inverted nature of the devil. Also, the fact that 3 AM is prime time for the devil because it is the opposite of 3 pm, when Our Lord died on the cross. In addition, she was possessed by not one, but SIX devils! During the exorcism, they were forced to identify themselves, and they ranged from Satan himself to the devils who resided in Cain and Judas.

As to the story itself, it seems that it was taken from the case of a girl in Germany in the '70s. More or less the idea is the same, but the details are a little different. Her name was Anneliese Michel and the incidents started in 1968. Her parish priest started the exorcisms in 1975, and until her death in 1976, she supposedly was exorcised dozens of times with no success.

I'm not definite that all the information that I found was true at all, knowing the nature of the internet, but there should be some kind of truth to it. Heres a link for one of the stories that I looked at.

There are also a few books that have been written about the case; heres 2 of them:

• The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel, by Felicitas D Goodman (this one is older and probably more accurate)
  
• Casebook: A Rose for Emily, by Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandell (this one is newer and may refer more to the movie...)
  

One interesting fact that I would like to note is about the medical side of the story. If you've seen the movie, you know that her possession was attempted to be attributed to a kind of epilepsy. After some research, I found out that in one half of epilepsy cases today, the cause is NOT KNOWN!! It cant be known for sure, but it may very well be that those unknown cases are cases of demonic possession.

Mike wrote a more review of the movie in his movie review blog, and made a bunch of interesting points in addition to giving a more complete summary.

In conclusion, I hope that this movie will scare the hell out of many people and make them realize not only that are there devils out there, but also that God DOES exists.