Video, color, sound, 4:57, 2023

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In the American horror film The Exorcist (1973), a young white girl from an affluent family is depicted as being possessed by the Devil. The possessing entity is revealed as Pazuzu, an apotropaic deity whose likeness was used as a protective charm in ancient Mesopotamia. The film draws on otherizing associations with the Middle East and Africa as imagined sources of demonic presence, and culminates in its infamous climax, where the girl is bound to her bed and violently exorcised by two male priests.

 

The true terror of the film lies in the perceived unlikeliness of possession for an upper-middle class, white individual in Georgetown in modern America. Kevin Wetmore Jr. points out that "[the] horror of exorcism films is that an African or Middle Eastern entity has ownership and control over the body of a Western individual," which inversely mirrors the horror of colonialism where "the imperialist state has ownership and control over the bodies of all of the indigenous peoples."1 

 

In this video, the possessed female heroine is removed from the film's climax and concluding scenes, which are then temporally reversed and spatially mirrored. Without the presence of supposedly absolute evil, the priests appear disoriented and withdraw themselves endlessly from the scenes of sadistic purgation. This gesture attempts to undo the Western demonology narrative and refuse the fantasy of heroic expulsion and salvation. In the absence of the spectacle of the afflicted female body, I cast a spell that rewinds the forward momentum of modernist mythology. 

 

As the priests are pulled back into a mirrored loop of retreat, a ritual song from Jindo Ssitgimgut 진도 씻김굿 (the shamanic mourning ritual of Jindo in South Korea) calls the afflicted spirit back and offers washing of their spite and tears. Rather than driving out what is unwanted in horror, it invites its grief to be mourned with care and gravity.

 

This tension between the visual and sonic layers of the work also turns toward the history of American missionaries entering Korea in the late nineteenth century and casting Korean shamanism as a site of demonic presence—a misreading that produced scenes of forced exorcism and spiritual displacement. That history continues to echo in contemporary South Korea, where Judeo-Christian frameworks of absolute good and evil still work to demonize Indigenous spiritual traditions that do not submit to their cosmology.

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1. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., "Colonial Possessions: A Fanonian Reading of The Exorcist and Its Sequels,"Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 4, Winter 2014, pp. 883-896.