Alfonso Herrera (Sense8, The Chosen) and Ben Daniels (House of Cards) have been cast as the priests in Fox’s pilot inspired by William Blatty’s 1971 book, The Exorcist. Daniels will play Father Marcus Lang, “the intense holy warrior” who the church “no longer acknowledges in public.” He teams up with Herrera’s Father Tomas Ortega, a “warm, selfless and compassionate” priest of a small congregation. Inspired by The Exorcist’s creepy shenanigans, we revisited cinema’s clergy who get under our skin.
Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood
Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is the underhanded pastor of a local church in Little Boston, California who exploits his congregation and demands a handsome sum from shifty prospector Daniel Plainview to give up his family’s land in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The men are more alike than they first realized, but the way the hypocritical Eli perverts the bible to denounce Plainview for his gross familial blunders, and later gives in to Daniel’s humiliations for a fast buck, is a special kind of smarmy.
Urbain Grandier in The Devils
In Ken Russell’s The Devils, Oliver Reed takes on the role of the real-life Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century Roman Catholic priest executed for witchcraft in France. The philandering clergyman keeps his sex life secret. Once exposed, Grandier’s flings incite jealousy in a sexually obsessed nun, leading to a hysterical revolt by the sisters at large. Creepy bonus: Oliver Reed in his sheer Jesus nightie ready to get his f on.
Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter
Reverend Harry Powell, a serial murderer on the lam, becomes a phony preacher with a penchant for hard-knocks knuckle tattoos, woman-hating, stolen money, and switchblades. A cool and cruel Robert Mitchum plays Powell in Charles Laughton’s expressionist chiller, set in the Deep South during the 1930s.
Kane in Poltergeist II
“Are you lost, sweetheart? Are you ‘fraid, honey? Well then, why don’t you come with me?” hisses Julian Beck’s Reverend Kane in Poltergeist II. He’s the only reason to see the sequel to Steven Spielberg’s horror classic. The credit for the effectiveness of the insane preacher all goes to Beck, whose background in avant-garde theater and skeletal visage pushed the character to its creepy limits.
Gracián in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Writer Ed Howard on the pedeophilic priest in Jaromil Jireš’s 1970 film Valerie’s Week of Wonders:
As Valerie hovers on the cusp of womanhood, she is beset with multiple possibilities, multiple incarnations of her oncoming sexual awakening. As befits this unstable, uncertain transitional phase, her exposure to sexuality is sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrifying, sometimes merely puzzling. She is pursued by the priest Gracián (Jan Klusák), another religious hypocrite who promises her he’ll tell her all about her father and mother but instead merely tries to seduce her, dancing towards her baring his grotesque teeth and pulling his robe down from around his neck to reveal the necklace of bones at his throat. The veneer of normality is very thin here, and the priest might become an animalistic rapist at a moment’s notice, just as the “missionary” in the pulpit, lecturing about the sanctity of virginity and the way innocence is spoiled by sex, might be Weasel barely in disguise, his white face painted dark blue beneath his robes.
Father Michael in To the Devil a Daughter
Christopher Lee’s ex-communicated priest Father Michael Rayner has some unusual preaching methods, particularly with a young nun in his secret heretical order. He prays to a golden Satanic statue instead of Jesus Christ and performs bloody black magic rituals with his followers.
Father Xavier Meldrum in House of Mortal Sin
From the Digital Fix on Pete Walker’s 1976 film about an unhinged priest who becomes obsessed with a troubled girl at his church and goes to murderous lengths to make her his:
Father Meldrum is one of the most memorable characters in Walker’s work. Anthony Sharp, taking on the role after several other actors including Peter Cushing declined, is magnificent. He’s a familiar actor to television viewers, usually playing a retired colonel or benevolent vicar, and his basic solidity is used to devastating effect here. It’s genuinely unnerving to see this most gentlemanly of men killing people and this adds a definite kick to some of the murder scenes, especially the ones which Sharp himself apparently found distasteful – the murders by poisoned communion sacrament and a strangling with rosary beads. The risk here is that Walker’s own hatred of Catholicism, based on his childhood in a Catholic school, could have overpowered the character but Sharp’s believably tormented performance ensures that Meldrum emerges as a credible character. There’s obvious pleasure being gained by Walker from having a go at Catholicism and blasphemising left, right and centre and he was evidently disappointed when the film failed to raise the expected controversy.
The monks in Prime Evil
Sexploitation legend Roberta Findlay made this 1988 schlocky horror film about a coven of Satanic monks in New York City who sacrifice young virgins to the devil in order to maintain their immortality.