As a queer couple, director Joshua John Miller and screenwriter M.A. Fortin found it disturbing watching certain segments of the Christian faith go after LGBT folks and women. “While we acknowledge the church is a source of great joy and comfort to many, it’s also proven itself to be a blunt instrument of abuse and shame just as often— kind of like Hollywood. When we first started writing this movie, there was a lot of terrible behavior being unearthed in both institutions— wounded people inflicting wounds on those around them. Out of this “meta” stew, The Exorcism was born.”
The origins of The Exorcism stems from Miller’s childhood spent watching his father, Jason Miller, playing the doomed Father Karras flinging himself out a window at the climax of The Exorcist.
Says Fortin: “If that wasn’t haunting enough on its own, Jason never shied away from telling Josh stories of just how “cursed” the movie was: the mysterious fires that plagued the production, the strange deaths, the lifelong injuries— the list went on and on. In one of many “making-of” specials, Josh’s father recounted a priest stopping him on the street out of nowhere to assert that “when we dare to unmask the devil, the devil retaliates.” Jason wasn’t even shooting that day, and wasn’t a recognizable figure yet, either. The moment haunted him, and the lore of any “cursed film” has captivated me and Josh ever since.”
“When we first wrote this movie in 2019, there wasn’t much that didn’t feel cursed anymore,|” says Fortin. “A particular strain of nastiness had been unleashed into daily life, seemingly granting permission to many people (public and private, sometimes in our own families) to be their worst selves. The changes we saw in some individuals were so extreme that we joked they seemed, well, possessed. Rage was contagious, and none of us were immune.”
“With The Exorcism, we wanted to update the possession movie formula (“Heroic man rescues woman from forces she’s too weak and simple to battle herself!”) for a world where no one group owns goodness and decency over another. We were gifted with an extraordinary cast and creative team to tell a story about how we’re all vulnerable to darkness, to perpetuating it, if we fail to face our demons. The devil may retaliate, but what other choice do we have?”
The concept of evil and malevolent forces lying in wait just below the surface of daily life is terrifying. That thin membrane between real and unreal is the location of the meta supernatural horror film, The Exorcism, a movie within a movie about a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a horror film. Tony Miller (Russell Crowe) was a big Hollywood star until the death of his wife and addiction rendered him unemployable. Cast as the lead in an exorcism movie, he has one last chance to rebuild his old life and family. It’s a total cliché to sell your soul to the devil for success and Tony would never do that. But what if the devil steals it anyway?
The Origin
Producer Kevin Williamson (Scream franchise, Dawson’s Creek) was with Joshua John Miller and M. A. Fortin, the director, and co-writers of The Exorcism, asthey were talking about looking for a project to follow their film, 2015’s The Final Girls. “In the moment,” says Williamson, “I suggested a possession movie.” Williamson was aware of Miller’s connection to The Exorcist. Miller’s father, Jason Miller, played Father Karras in the iconic film. Williamson was familiar with the stories and the legends attached to the making ofthe film. Knowing of Miller’s personal connection, Williamson thought Miller could bring something “really true and emotionally original” to such a film. “And so, I pitched a meta Scream version of this movie and the movie within the movie.”
Miller said no– at first. “Mark and I wanted to follow The Final Girls, essentially a love letter to my mother Susan Bernard, a former scream queen, with something that honored my Dad,” says Miller. “When Kevin brought up a possession story, it didn’t appeal at first, but in the midst of Trump’s presidency, Mark and I started to wonder whether maybe men being possessed was an untapped well.” Fortin, Miller’s co-writer, adds: “Often, possession movies feel sort of formulaic, so it didn’t register for us right away. It wasn’t until we started thinking about how to subvert the frankly sexist boilerplate possession narrative that we realized maybe we could make more of a character piece out of this.” Miller concludes: “I wanted us to make something more unsettling and uncomfortable than just jump scares. Mark and I told each other, “what if Cassavetes’ Opening Night had a demon in it?”
Miller returned to Williamson shortly after. Williamson relates, “He and Mark together came up with this emotional meditation on grief and intertwined that through this demonic possession movie. And then they added the clever meta aspect to it. It just had all these different layers. They took it to this brand new place, and I really loved it. And I was like, ‘Let’s do it!’”
The Exorcist, given Miller’s personal connection, acts as a point of reference for The Exorcism. The tale of supernatural demonic possession is as frightening today as it was 50 years ago when it was released. In October of 2023, Time Out magazine rated it as the #1 horror film of all time. Not to be overlooked are the many accolades it garnered, including 10 Academy Award nominations (it won two) and four Golden Globe Awards including Best Film (drama).
Producer Ben Fast works with Kevin Williamson and was immediately taken with Miller and Fortin’s pitch. Fast says, “This is a movie that goes behind the scenes of the making of a film. It is also combined with an emotional, powerful story about a broken family trying to come back together. For me, it had tremendous entertainment value in seeing behind the scenes and how the movie becomes this horrific thing that upends their lives and gets in the way of a father and a daughter reconnecting. The mix of emotional strength and horrific fun scares was a winning combination.”
Kevin Williamson is no stranger to the horror genre, having written Scream and some of its sequels as well as such films as I Know What You Did Last Summer, Sick and Cursed. Williamson explains, “What’s beautiful about the horror genre is when you write a really effective horror script, it’s usually a mirror to society and speaks to the human condition. In The Exorcism, an alcoholic actor has lost his way, and you watch him with his demons – demons that manifest externally, internally and every which way possible. He has a broken relationship with his daughter. They are two broken people, devastated by the loss of a wife and mother, and they sort of fix themselves and fix each other in the form of a demonic possession film. It’s a beautiful emotional tale wrapped up in a very terrifying possession movie.”
“It’s also just about the hell of making things in Hollywood,” laughs Fortin, Miller’s co-writer.
From Page To Screen
Part of the premise of The Exorcism is the making of a movie within a movie. The soundstage was a set and then there were the sets within the set. “We wanted the look of the movie to be engrossing, so we leaned into ‘master painting’ shots that would communicate the life and energy of a set,” says Miller. “The idea that movie sets are a space that carry a heightened sense of reality– we were inspired a lot by photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Phillip Lorca di Corscia. Co-screenwriter M. A. Fortin had seen Production Designer Michael Perry’s work in Under the Silver Lake and It Follows, two films in the mystery/horror/thriller vein. “Michael’s work is so elaborate and detailed, Josh and I were taken with his vision instantly,” says Fortin. Audiences will also be familiar with Perry’s work in Promising Young Woman. Perry relates, “What intrigued me about the film script was: it’s mainly stage sets, which for a designer doesn’t happen very often. We all jump at that.” Perry continues, “Shooting on location locks me into an architecture. While on a soundstage, the production designer locks the architecture. We create that entire world from where the electric sockets go to how big the room is.”
Perry also felt the story had many more layers than a conventional horror script. “I don’t look at horror movies as horror movies anymore because I don’t believe that is all that necessarily what goes on.” For The Exorcism, Perry actually used Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s classic play about addiction, fame and failed family relationships, as a touchstone.Perry explains, “The story was much more about the relationship between the daughter and the father, having fame that’s fading, him being addicted to whatever he’s addicted to. And that appealed to my theatrical background. I felt like that was a good solid kind of foundation to build a script on.”
Perry also took visual inspiration from the original The Exorcist. By chance, Perry knew Owen Roizman, the Director of Photography on that film. From a research point of view, “The biggest thing I looked at were the shots from The Exorcist and tried to take them into consideration,” says Perry. For The Exorcism, Perry continues, “Demonic possession had almost nothing to do with my design decisions. There were certain things that we had to do like the cold room. But all the horror things, they happen within the space, I don’t cater to them.” Perry’s priorities were giving a heightened sense of being behind the scenes of a movie and then keeping the real-life apartment scenes as realistic as possible.
Perry describes the framing of shots in the original as “beautiful”, but he was also well aware that the 1971 film took almost 200 days to shoot, a luxury he did not have. He created the sets to be a little bit larger which would give the filmmakers room to maneuver without having to strike walls, etc. And then there is the unusual “dollhouse” set – a three-story tall replica of a Georgetown townhouse with the back wall removed, exposing all the rooms on all levels of the house. “The dollhouse was inspired from seeing backstage stills of the film of The Diary of Anne Frank,” says director Miller. He continues, “There was some worry it couldn’t be accomplished at first, but we did it, and it’s one the most visually striking aspects of the movie. Not an easy battle to wage, but we felt it would be a signature feature of the story, literally a movie within the movie, an area where some of the darker and more fantastical events in the movie occur.” It is unmistakably a movie set and it is the first thing that Tony and Lee and the audience see when they arrive for work on shooting day #1. Perry’s favorite set was the cold room set. He says, “I like the cold set best of all because it’s sort of designed with widescreen. It’s really beautiful. And it’s darkness. I get a little frustrated sometimes with putting things on walls all the time. I like negative space, and that set definitely has a lot of negative space.”
For Joshua John Miller, having Russell Crowe in a horror film instantly elevated the entire project. “Mark and I grew up watching Russell from Romper Stomper,” Miller says, “and we knew he had the gravitas, grace and sensitivity to make you feel for a man who’s going to turn into a monster.”
For Russell Crowe, he found the script intriguing because it was a role within a role. Crowe plays Anthony (Tony) Miller, a big movie star at one point in his life but fading stardom, the death of his wife and ultimately addiction and drinking put him in a year’s long downward spiral. He is estranged from his teenage daughter who is dealing with a crisis of her own. By a fateful chance, a starring role in a movie comes up and it is an opportunity to get his career and his life back on track. Says Crowe, “For me, as an actor to play a man who has had these life experiences, carries these things, was quite complicated. It was a very challenging idea as a role, so it got my interest.”
JOSHUA JOHN MILLER (Director, co-screenwriter)
A Los Angeles native, Miller is an actor, writer and director. With his life partner M.A. Fortin, he co-created the hit Netflix series Queen of the South and co-wrote and produced Sony’s critically acclaimed The Final Girls. He made his acting debut at age eight in Halloween lll: Season of the Witch and was the lead in cult classics River’s Edge and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark.
While an undergrad at Yale, he published his first novel, The Mao Game. In December 2003, he completed his MFA in creative writing at the University of Iowa. He was awarded the Capote Fellowship and was also chosen for the Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship Award. He worked in journalism writing for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire, and recently completed his soon to be published second novel, I’ll Be Your Mirror.
Currently, he and Fortin are developing The Diaries of Anaïs Nin with Pablo Larrain/Fabula pictures and working on a film adaptation of his grandfather’s memoirs about his work and life with Marilyn Monroe.
M. A. FORTIN (co-screenwriter)
Born in Montreal, M.A. Fortin, along with life partner Joshua John Miller, co-created the hit Netflix series Queen of the South and co-wrote/co-produced cult classic The Final Girls. He is a graduate of Emerson College (BFA) and the ART Institute at Harvard University (MFA). He is currently at work on a true crime book set in 1980s Los Angeles.
Courtesy of Gravel Road Distribution Group
