Sightlines · Horror course
The Devil in the Next Room: Possession, Rites and Bargains, 1968–2024
Faith as the battlefield — the possession film from the 1960s apartment to the Korean grave.
The films
- Rosemary's Baby (1968)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- The Omen (1976)
- The Evil Dead (1982)
- Drag Me to Hell (2009)
- The Conjuring (2013)
- The Witch (2016)
- Hereditary (2018)
- Talk to Me (2023)
- Exhuma (2024)
The Devil in the Next Room: Possession, Rites and Bargains, 1968–2024
Here is horror's longest-running deal: somebody, somewhere, trades something they shouldn't — and the bill arrives in the body of someone they love. For nearly sixty years, filmmakers have kept renegotiating that bargain's terms, and in doing so they invented most of what we now mean by "scary": the daylight dread, the documentary-real possession, the camera that is the demon, the rite staged like a heist. This course follows the contract from a sunlit Manhattan apartment to a rain-soaked Korean mountainside, watching each film inherit the clauses of the last and add fine print of its own.
Rosemary's Baby (1968) — dir. Roman Polanski
Everything starts here, with a gamble almost nobody had made before: that the devil would be scarier in bright, banal light than in gothic shadow. Polanski and cinematographer William Fraker shoot evil as casseroles, wallpaper and neighborly chit-chat, using wide lenses that warp the edges of rooms just enough that the apartment feels wrong without ever looking manipulated — watch how often Rosemary is framed through doorways and across thresholds, pushed to the margin of her own home. The film imported art-cinema precision into what had been drive-in territory, single-handedly inventing the prestige occult picture: A-list production, literary source, and a horror whose real engine is the terror of not being believed. Every film in this course is, one way or another, living in this building.
The Exorcist (1973) — dir. William Friedkin
If Polanski made the devil respectable, Friedkin made him reportable. Fresh off a gritty cop thriller shot on the run, he films possession with the same handheld, stay-out-of-the-way documentary grammar — and spends an astonishing stretch of the movie in hospitals, letting needles and humming machines fail before anything supernatural gets a word in. That clinical patience is the trick: by the time the impossible arrives, it looks like it is being covered, not staged. Add a sound design of layered whispers and animal noise beneath the human voice, and you have the template nearly every later possession film — The Conjuring, Talk to Me, Exhuma — will either copy or deliberately refuse. See it loud and in the dark; half the terror lives in the speakers.
The Omen (1976) — dir. Richard Donner
The third pillar of the seventies satanic boom turns the occult into an investigation. Donner directs with the sober polish of a political thriller — grey London parks, embassy interiors, damp churchyards, shot by Gilbert Taylor in cool institutional light — while David Seltzer's script unspools prophecy like a procedural, one witness and one document at a time. Where The Exorcist put the horror in a bedroom, The Omen scatters it across continents and stages its violence as grimly inventive "accidents" that land like thunderclaps in an otherwise stately film. And listen for Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score, Latin chant swelling under everything: the single most imitated sound in occult cinema, the moment the devil got his own choir.
The Evil Dead (1982) — dir. Sam Raimi
Then three friends from Detroit, with almost no money, threw the prestige playbook in the river. Raimi's masterstroke was to give the demon the camera itself: a lens bolted to a plank and carried at a dead run by two crew members, skimming the forest floor, through windows, over stumps — you ride inside the evil, looking out, and the shaking isn't a flaw, it's the monster. The film also sharpens the theme this whole course circles: here, possession spreads through media — a transcribed book, a recording, the fatal act of pressing play. Rough, grimy, gleefully excessive, it proved the occult film could be reinvented from the ground up, in the mud, far from any studio — and its ground-level demon's-eye rush became one of the most imitated shots in the genre.
Drag Me to Hell (2009) — dir. Sam Raimi
Twenty-seven years and one blockbuster career later, Raimi returns to his own invention — now with studio resources and a wicked moral engine borrowed from an old curse-passing tale, Night of the Demon: a hex with a fixed deadline, handed from person to person like a hot coal. The bargain here is brutally modern — a loan officer denies an old woman's mortgage extension to prove she can make "hard decisions" — and the film makes her pay in bright corporate daylight that curdles, scene by scene, into wind and shadow. Watch Raimi re-deploy the low rushing camera from The Evil Dead, now timed like slapstick: whip-pans, geysers of fluid, a séance that goes magnificently wrong, scares and laughs detonating in the same breath. It's the standing proof that a PG-13 rating can't declaw a director who frightens with craft instead of gore.
The Conjuring (2013) — dir. James Wan
Wan's film is a deliberate restoration job: back to the seventies "true case" possession picture, back to atmosphere over bloodshed, executed with a camera that prowls the farmhouse in long gliding takes until you know its geography by heart — which is exactly when the house starts using that knowledge against you. His scare architecture is immaculate: quiet setups that teach your eye where to look, then punish it; a children's game of blindfolds and clapping turned into pure dread; terror assigned to the empty parts of the frame. Where The Exorcist made possession clinical, Wan makes it domestic and almost warm — a married team of investigators whose sincerity anchors the supernatural. It worked so well it made classical scare craftsmanship respectable again, and minted the biggest horror franchise in cinema.
The Witch (2016) — dir. Robert Eggers
Eggers drags the devil's bargain back to its source: 1630s New England, where the occult wasn't a genre but a cosmology. He builds the period from primary documents — dialogue lifted from seventeenth-century texts, a farmstead raised with era-accurate methods — and shoots it in natural light and shivering greys, in locked-off compositions that feel like old Flemish paintings rather than modern horror. The camera barely moves; the danger doesn't arrive, because it was already there, in the treeline, all along. Against the kinetic tradition of Raimi and Wan, this is the counter-doctrine — stillness as menace — and with Mark Korven's scraped strings and choral shrieks, it opened the door for the slow, serious art-house occult film that defines the following decade.
Hereditary (2018) — dir. Ari Aster
Aster fuses the two great strands of this course — Rosemary's domestic conspiracy and The Exorcist's family tragedy — into a film about inheritance as curse. The opening states his method in a single move: the camera drifts across a wall of handmade miniatures, pushes into one doll-sized bedroom, and without a cut the toy room becomes a real room with a real boy waking in it — someone built this world, and the people in it were placed. The whole film sustains that dollhouse logic: static, symmetrical frames, dread accumulating inside shots rather than between them, a family drama about grief so raw that you can't tell whether the affliction is psychological or designed. Toni Collette's performance is the ferocious center; the sound design — including one small click of the tongue — will follow you home.
Talk to Me (2023) — dir. Danny Philippou
The Australian twins behind this one came out of YouTube, and they understood something no priest-and-ritual film had: for a generation raised on screens, possession would be content. An embalmed hand, a ninety-second rule, a circle of teenagers filming each session on their phones — the séance becomes a party drug, complete with the sociology of using, and the film is the first in this course with no exorcist, no church, no institution to call. Watch how the camera stays locked on faces during the possessions instead of cutting away, lit only by a candle and the glow of watching phones — the audience inside the frame mirroring the one outside it. It honors The Exorcist's doubled-voice trick and Raimi's possessed-friend chaos while relocating the whole tradition to grief-stricken, adult-free suburbia.
Exhuma (2024) — dir. Jang Jae-hyun
The course ends where the occult film goes fully global and fully professional: four Korean specialists of the uncanny — a young shaman, her scripture-tattooed apprentice, a geomancer who reads land like a body, a mortician — hired to move an ancestral grave that turns out to be the wrong one to disturb. Jang shoots their rites with the detail and swagger of a heist movie, the procedural inheritance of The Exorcist refracted through shamanic drums, blades and fire, while cinematographer Lee Mo-gae gives everything an earthy, overcast weight: wet grey-green hillsides, dark turned soil. The protective script inked across skin reaches back centuries into East Asian ghost lore, and the curse here is historical — wealth built on a collaborationist past, calling its diaspora descendants back to the ground. A blockbuster at home, it proved the devil's bargain travels: the terms are local, the debt universal.
What stuck, across six decades? Polanski's daylight — nearly every film here hides its evil in the ordinary. Friedkin's procedure — the long, patient, professional build to a rite. Raimi's camera — the idea that how a shot moves can be the monster. And underneath all of it, the same contract being signed again and again: a husband's ambition, a father's secret, a loan denied, a grave disturbed, a hand gripped at a party. The possession film endures because the bargain keeps updating its currency — career, family, property, content, history — while the collector at the door never changes. Watch them in order, and you can see the paperwork pass from hand to hand.