Possessed Children

Stories of possessed children have a long history, dating at least as far back as the Bible, which describes several instances of Jesus exorcising children supposedly possessed by demons. ¹ However, it was William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist (1971) and William Friedkin’s 1973 cinematic adaptation of it that anchored the possessed child in the popular imagination. Together, these two texts—which I will from this point forward refer to as the Blatty-Friedkin model—formulated the blueprint for the possessed child narrative, establishing many of its key tropes and themes. ² In the most basic form of the narrative, a child essentially becomes a puppet to a demonic entity, which declares its presence by such tactics as contorting the child’s body into impossible positions, lowering the voice several octaves, ventriloquizing languages the child would not know, altering eye color into telltale shades of black or greenish-yellow, and forcing the child to engage in violent or sexual behavior. ³ Some sort of exorcism often takes place, usually but not necessarily in time to save the child.

Possessed child narratives, I argue, are parables about how failed parenting allows children to become vulnerable to dangerous influences. The specific types of parental behaviors that are targeted for criticism naturally change over time, shifting alongside the ideals of “proper” childrearing; just as the image of “good” parents morphs throughout history, so, too, do the quintessential markers of “bad” parents. ⁴ The evil beings that come to possess the child symbolize those negative influences commonly pointed to as taking hold of children when parents are not properly vigilant, and these obviously change over time, too. Dime novels, horror comics, music lyrics laced with Satanic messages, violent television programming and video games, and inappropriate sexual material and consumer products marketed toward children have all come under attack as dangerous influences. ⁵ Possessed child narratives are flexible enough to symbolically incorporate whatever parental flaw and bad influence seem most pressing in the minds of their creators and the larger culture.

The adaptability of the possessed child narrative arises from the fact that the stories necessarily begin well before the point of possession. This early stage of the plot allows for character development, frequently seen today by both critics and writers as an essential element of good horror: as the argument goes, horror is ineffective unless we care about the people to whom the horror happens. Possessed child narratives must spend considerable time developing character and establishing the family dynamics for another reason, too: this early information allows us to see just how dramatically the (typically female) child’s behavior while possessed differs from her normal conduct. Recognizing that difference helps us maintain sympathy for the possessed child in spite of her revolting, cruel, or violent actions, for we realize that the child is literally not herself; the possessing spirit is the true culprit.

Possession could simply occur because a cruelly capricious spirit selects a victim at random or perhaps chooses to afflict the especially virtuous, as in the story of Job. In other words, neither the parent nor the child need be implicated as blameworthy for the possession. However, in most possessed child narratives, the character development that occurs before the onset of possession typically reveals some sort of breakdown in the family unit. Although these issues are not the direct cause of the child’s possession, their inclusion in the plot encourages the viewer to associate them with the child’s possession: correlation just might imply causation, these narratives suggest. Thus, while possessed children do some pretty awful things, the narratives ironically work to preserve the idea of childhood innocence by encouraging us to transfer blame for the child’s wicked words and deeds to both the offending entity, which symbolically represents real-life “evil” influences, and the failed caretaking that left the child vulnerable to the influence in the first place.

Possessed Children and the Failed Family

Possessed children have not always been viewed as demonic vessels. Throughout history, they have also served as divine messengers and prophets voicing the word of God. Others were temporarily taken over by a spirit or ghost of a loved one in order to send a message to the living. Although the idea that children were especially sensitive to supernatural and spiritual realms was most pervasively emphasized during the Romantic period—perhaps most famously in William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in which he describes the newly born as “trailing clouds of glory… / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (65–67)—the image of the possessed child as prophet dates much farther back, as scholars like Anna French, Diane Purkiss, Alexandra Walsham, and Patrick McNamara have shown.

The supposedly natural link between children and the metaphysical was a key component of Spiritualism, which began in the USA in the 1840s, and other related movements of the nineteenth century. In her examination of mesmerism, for example, Katharina Boehm notes that the quintessential traits of children supposedly made them particularly sensitive to the powers of the mesmerist. ⁶ In Ghosts of Futures Past , Molly McGarry also shows how central children—especially young girls—were to the Spiritualist movement, often serving as mediums. ⁷ For example, Mary Lurancy Vellum, the so-called Watseka Wonder, supposedly channeled the spirit of another family’s dead daughter, an experience that gave comfort to that family and improved the well-being of Mary herself. ⁸ In other stories, the dead spoke to, rather than through, children. In her study of nineteenth-century American child hagiographies, Diana Pasulka describes one such child, Daisy Dryden, who just before her death at age ten began to have visions in which “she relayed messages from the dead” (2007, 51). The image of children, especially girls, serving as divine messengers continued long after the heyday of Spiritualism; Thomas A. Robinson and Lanette D. Ruff have shown that girl preachers were so prevalent during the 1920s and 1930s that they dub the era “the golden age of the girl evangelist” (2012, 5). ⁹ Children who either channel spirits or communicate with them to serve the greater good are still common in fiction today, as I discuss in Chapter 4 on “Ghost Children.” ¹⁰

In addition to providing proof of a spiritual hereafter, the possessed child could also function in the interests of divine justice. As French’s study demonstrates, the association between children and the providential revelation of guilt dates back at least to early modern England, “with God using children to solve crimes or to bring justice upon those who had done wrong” (2015, 136). ¹¹ This trope still operates today, driving the plot, for example, of Dorothy Mills (2008). The story is told from the perspective of Jane, a psychiatrist who is sent to investigate the case of Dorothy, a 15-year old accused of trying to kill an infant she was babysitting. Dorothy initially appears to be suffering from multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder. However, we discover that she is actually channeling the personalities of several teenagers, one of whom was raped and all of whom were killed by men in the town. A line in the film, “The Lord sees all and knows all, the righteous and the sinner, the guilty and the blameless,” suggests that although the symptoms of Dorothy’s possession may be disturbing to witness, she is clearly operating in the name of divine justice. ¹²

In stories where the possessed child serves as a sort of prophet figure, the family is not typically seen as having cultivated the child’s gifts in any way. The child is simply chosen to serve as a divine messenger and, in doing so, affirms the general godliness and innocence of The Child. In the evil possessed child narrative, however, parents are directly charged with having failed in their duties in some way, and this failure is the reason why a demon is able to infiltrate the sacred space of home.

In order to understand this ideological function of the possessed child narrative, I wish to build upon Carol Clover’s analysis of possession films in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). Clover argues that many possession films actually contain two narratives occurring in tandem. One details the travails of a possessed character—typically female. The other focuses on a man who is slowly converted from a purely rational standpoint that scoffs at the existence of supernatural forces—what Clover terms White Science—to a more mystical perspective that Clover calls Black Magic, a position that she claims is commonly held in film by ethnic minorities, women and “feminized” men, such as creative types who rely more on emotion, intuition, and imagination. Drawing primarily upon The Exorcist (1973) and Witchboard (1987), Clover argues that the possession plot is really a story of male crisis, an implicit call for a new masculinity that was “part and parcel of the social changes from the late sixties on, from feminism to the Vietnam experience and the new family” (1992, 100). “If action cinema mourns the passing of the ‘real man’,” Clover claims, then horror “urges it along, and occult films go so far as to imagine a new, revised edition” of masculinity (99).

Clover’s compelling argument certainly still holds true today, almost 25 years later. The Rite (2011), for example, follows the lead of The Exorcist in focusing on a young priest’s slow acceptance of the demonic and, in turn, the divine after he witnesses a series of exorcisms performed by an old priest, played by Anthony Hopkins. The possessed victims are secondary figures given little character development, mere occasions for the more important masculine transformation to occur. The Last Exorcism (2010) features a preacher named Cotton Marcus—a name that recalls a prominent religious figure involved in the Salem Witch Trials, Cotton Mather. Staged as a documentary in which Cotton will expose exorcisms as shams, the film initially shows him playfully boasting about the sway he holds over his disciples and performing unabashedly theatrical exorcisms purely for personal profit. However, his encounter with the truly possessed Nell causes him to rediscover his faith and literally take up the cross to battle a demon. The movie is as much, if not more, about Cotton’s slow return to religious belief as it is about the exorcism of a possessed teenage girl. Like The Rite, The Last Exorcism conserves the male rehabilitation subplot of the possession film.

The videogame Bioshock (2007) also participates in this tradition; in the game, the player character, Jack, frequently runs into Little Sisters, girls who have been genetically altered to harvest ADAM (a substance that gives people special powers) from corpses. The girls look possessed, the most telling sign being their glowing yellow eyes. The player has the option to either “harvest” the girls (take their supply of ADAM) or rescue them; choosing to do the latter results in a short cutscene that resembles an exorcism, after which the girl appears cured and thanks the player for saving her. The player’s treatment of the Little Sisters directly impacts the game’s conclusion: rescuing all the Little Sisters results in the happiest of endings, which confirms that this action is the preferred one. Bioshock casts the player character in the role of an exorcist who can cure possessed little girls and doing so leads the player toward his own sort of conversion.

However, Clover’s claims are also in need of some updating, for possession narratives have changed since the publication of her book over twenty years ago. For one, the transition from reason to mysticism is no longer a strictly male activity. ¹³ In addition, as we will see when we examine the possessed child narratives of the twenty-first century, the men who receive a masculinity makeover today are more directly connected to the possessed victims, typically occupying the position of father. Furthermore, if for Clover the possession plot is most prominently a narrative of male crisis, I would argue that it has increasingly become a narrative of parental crisis, a probing of the dynamics behind the failure of the family and a proposal for remedy. Possession narratives act as cautionary tales that warn viewers, in symbolic terms, that children are vulnerable to dangerous influences when traditional family structures are damaged and parents are negligent in their duties. These texts imply that “exorcism” requires not merely a formal religious ritual but an entire reconfiguration of the family unit.

In one of the earliest and well-known possession narratives, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), the raising of children by hired help leaves the children vulnerable to bad influences. James’s novella is narrated mostly by an unnamed governess hired by an attractive bachelor to care for his orphaned niece and nephew, Flora and Miles, in whom he has little interest. Shortly after arriving at the children’s home in a remote country estate, the governess begins seeing the ghosts of two former servants—the last governess, Miss Jessel, and the uncle’s former valet, Peter Quint—who are believed to have been involved in an illicit affair to which the children were exposed. The governess suspects that the children are in secret contact with the spirits of their former caretakers, who wish to continue to corrupt the children from beyond the grave. The story then traces what the governess portrays as her heroic struggle against the evil entities for the children’s souls, which ultimately results in Flora’s hysterical illness and Miles’s death.

The Turn of the Screw has generated a great deal of critical debate, much of which centers on the governess’s reliability. ¹⁴ Because she is the only person who actually sees the ghosts, many scholars approach the spirits as emblems of her psychological instability, possibly the result of repressed desire for the children’s uncle or of her need as an inexperienced young woman to prove her mettle by constructing for herself an epic battle against evil. Defenders of a supernatural interpretation of the novel claim that our resistance to this reading results from our skepticism regarding the existence of ghosts, a skepticism that James and his original audience members may not have shared. ¹⁵

The many adaptations of James’s novel have been similarly divided. The Innocents (1961) defends the governess by demonstrating that the ghosts are real and have nefarious effects on the children, and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” (1992) takes the point of view of the ghosts themselves, thereby affirming their reality, though doing so does not amount to a defense of the governess. A prequel, The Nightcomers (1971), on the other hand, spends its time depicting the corruption of the children by Jessel and Quint (played by Marlon Brando). Other more recent adaptations suggest that the governess is haunted by her own demons and as guilty of harming the children as the former servants. A 1999 PBS made-for-television version, for example, clearly imagines the governess as unstable and definitely responsible for smothering Miles in the end; similarly, In a Dark Place (2006) portrays the governess as a woman abused as a child, and it is suggested that she in turn abuses the children and that the ghosts are indeed a figment of her warped imagination. ¹⁶

My purpose here is not to take a side in this debate, for doing so is unnecessary to my argument. Regardless of whether or not the ghosts are real, The Turn of the Screw taps into fears about the potential damage that could be done to children raised by hired help; after all, there is no doubt that Jessel and Quint were immoral guardians when alive and that they had a pernicious influence upon the children. It is Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, who says that Quint was “definitely…bad” and “too free” with both Miles and everyone else (2010, 51). When the governess surmises that Quint was a “hound,” Mrs. Grose exclaims in response, “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished” (58). It is also Mrs. Grose who insinuates that Miss Jessel left her position because she was pregnant with Quint’s child. The governess may be imagining ghosts, but she is not imagining the effects of the children’s past exposure to immoral behavior.

Furthermore, there is no question that the two servants have tainted the children’s virtue. When Flora falls ill, her language becomes so shocking that Mrs. Grose is driven nearly to collapse: she reports that she heard “‘[f]rom that child—horrors.…On my honour, Miss, she says things—!’ But at this evocation, she broke down; she dropped with a sudden cry upon my sofa” (2010, 108). Similarly, Miles himself admits that he was expelled from school because he “said things” that were “too bad” for the schoolmasters to repeat in their letter announcing Miles’s dismissal (119). Even if the ghosts of Jessel and Quint are not real, they still “possess” the children in terms of a moral degradation that extends beyond the grave. And the children’s initial exposure to these sources of corruption occurred because they lacked proper parental figures to protect them from such influences. In Screw , the absence of vigilant parents allows the children to come into contact with what appears to be damaging sexual knowledge.

Possession by Entertainment Media and Consumer Products

While James’s text remains ambiguous about whether supernatural forces are really at play, other possession narratives offer definitive evidence that a supernatural entity is indeed at work. For example, William Friedkin’s cinematic version of The Exorcist gives us visual proof of Regan’s possession when her head turns a full 180° and she levitates above her bed. In addition, we see the devil in its actual form during several brief flashes. However, Blatty’s novel does not let us decide so easily, allowing for the alternative hypothesis that Regan is suffering from hysteria and that the others who participate in her exorcism are suffering from folie à deux —as Sara Williams has convincingly argued in her essay “‘The Power of Christ Compels You’: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist .” This interpretation is made all the more tantalizing because Blatty makes it clear that he is well versed in Freudian psychology, dropping in references to it throughout the entire novel.

And yet while the novel and film diverge slightly in terms of their willingness to confirm the involvement of the supernatural, both still suggest that failed family structures allow demons to sidle into the home. After all, Regan’s parents are divorced, and her father, like the uncle in Screw , has so shirked his paternal responsibilities that he doesn’t even bother to call his daughter on her birthday. Regan’s mother, Chris, is a successful actress who employs several people to care for Regan while she works, but it is clear that the girl is often left somewhat unsupervised. Chris only belatedly discovers that Regan has an imaginary friend, Captain Howdy, with whom she communicates via a Ouija board, a development that seems to have escaped the members of her staff. However, by then it is too late: the demon has already gained access to the vulnerable child.

Critics have argued that The Exorcist performs a misogynistic sleight-of-hand by subtly implying that the single, career-focused mother is the cause of her daughter’s degradation, and there is certainly evidence to support this interpretation. ¹⁷ After all, Regan’s possession ultimately forces her mother to resume duties as a full-time, stay-at-home mom, for her condition requires constant supervision and care. At the end, once Chris is “reformed,” having learned to put motherhood well ahead of Hollywood, Regan returns to a state of innocence, a transformation that by extension could suggest that possession can be remedied if the child is given “proper” parental attention in time. ¹⁸ In the novel, Regan-as-demon even condemns Chris for putting her career above caring for her child: “It is you who have done it! Yes, you with your career before anything , your career before your husband , before her ” (2011, 343), a passage cited by critics such as Herbert Gans as supporting a sexist reading of the text.

However, this claim is severely undercut by Father Merrin’s warning beforehand: “Especially, do not listen to anything he says. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us; but he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological” (2011, 332). ¹⁹ Nor is ex-husband Howard let off the hook for his noninvolvement; though most of the criticism of him comes from Chris, these attacks certainly are warranted. Chris worries that Regan holds her responsible for her absent father. When Chris discovers that the spirit that Regan first encounters through the Ouija board is named Captain Howdy, she thinks: “Why ‘Howdy’? For Howard? Her father? Pretty close ” (41). Then, when Captain Howdy responds unfavorably to Chris’s presence, Chris worries about this response: “Oh, what now? she fretted. Some unconscious hostility? She blames me for losing her father?” (41). However, it is more than obvious to the reader that Howard is willfully absent. After all, he forgets to call Regan on her birthday because he was “stuck on a yacht,” demonstrating his paternal apathy (100).

Furthermore, the period during which The Exorcist was created generated a great deal of discussion about the damage done by absent fathers, a conversation incited by the effects of male deployment during World War II. Experts exhorted the importance of paternal involvement in children’s lives, leading to the burgeoning of a “new father” image in the late 1970s and 1980s. ²⁰ Rather than viewing the Blatty-Friedkin narrative as blaming one parent more than the other, I tend to agree with Pauline Kael’s statement in her review of the film from January 1974: “we may not know why the demon picked on Regan, but we’re tipped that that broken home—the first step to Hell—gave the Devil his chance” (250). Family disruption is the reason why Regan is vulnerable to demonic influence and possession, and that disruption comes from both parents.

As I have argued, the demonic presences in these stories symbolize real-life influences frequently claimed to affect children in ways that could resemble a very pale form of possession: from their favorite forms of entertainment or pieces of merchandise, children may learn obscenities, gain knowledge beyond their years, discover sexualized or violent behavior to imitate, and—perhaps worst of all—develop more loyalty for the product than the parent. Nor is it surprising that demonic possession would come to symbolize the child’s captivation by such items—entertainment media and consumer goods have long been the subjects of moral panics, and their effects have been described by both supporters and critics alike as akin to possession by a demonic force that gains power over the child when parents are not paying proper attention. ²¹ Martin Barker refers to media as “the witchcraft of our society” (2001, 42), and Patricia Holland similarly argues, “Cinematic and video narratives of demonic childhood…have become interwoven with those narratives in the tabloid press which envisage a child audience caught up in their demonising influence” (1997, 80). Steven Starker even links panics over new forms of media to the very same Puritan influence that generated fear over witchcraft possessions and demonic visitations: “The idea that a single source of evil influence is the key to understanding much of human behavior perhaps derives from America’s Puritan religious heritage. Satan, father of all evil, is transformed into a contemporary form with which we can do battle” (1989, 6).

The Exorcist does not directly cite Satanic music (as Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places [2009] does) or violent films (as did the media after the murder of James Bulger by two ten-year olds in Britain in 1993). ²² However, Regan does first encounter the demon through a Ouija board, which she plays with when alone in the basement, unmonitored. Chris even expresses concern about the amount of time that Regan is left unsupervised, at one point asking her secretary to keep her typewriter down in the basement: “[T]hat way you can watch her when you’re typing. Okay? I don’t like her being alone so much” (2011, 64). In addition, Regan is frequently exposed to Chris’s friend, Burke, who spews vulgarities. In fact, when a doctor informs Chris that Regan told him to “keep [his] goddamn fingers away from her cunt,” one of the first explanations Chris comes to is that “[s ]he must have picked it up from Burke ” (59, 60). As a popular actress, Chris also represents celebrity and all of the media hype that accompanies it, which has also been cited as a harmful influence on children. One scene in the film shows Chris discovering a magazine in Regan’s bed, the cover of which features a photo of the two of them. Chris takes it from her, asking, “Regan, why are you reading that stuff?” Regan replies: “Because I like it.” Chris adds: “It’s not even a good picture of you. You look so mature,” suggesting that one problem of the media is a tendency to sexualize young girls.

In addition, Regan does appear to be caught up in the world of consumerism. Early on in both book and film, she begs her mother for a horse and, when that fails, manages to get her mother to take her out for a meal instead (2011, 23–24). Chris even acknowledges at some point that she has attempted to use material goods to compensate for the love that Regan is missing from her absent father; when Chris finds a dress that she bought Regan crumpled on the bottom of her own closet, she thinks, “Nice clothes. Yeah, Rags, look here, not there at the daddy who never writes or calls ” (30). Though neither the book nor the film focuses much attention on the impact of media entertainment or consumerism on Regan’s life, they do exist as potential influences. More important, however, is the broken family and particularly the absent father.

2013 was the fortieth anniversary of The Exorcist , and the occasion did not pass without notice. In addition to anniversary editions of the film and book—the cover of which proclaims it the “most terrifying novel ever written”—a stage performance of The Exorcist starring Brooke Shields and Richard Chamberlain appeared in 2012, and the story has been adapted into a series, which premiered on Fox in 2016. And Regan has had company: possessed youth have also made a comeback, especially on screen, appearing in a variety of movies including The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), Dorothy Mills (2008), REC 2 (2009), Exorcismus (2010), Apartment 143 (2011), The Rite (2011), The Last Exorcism (2012), The Possession (2012), and Sinister (2012). And if we include texts in which the child is not possessed so much as influenced by dark entities, the list would expand to contain films like The Shadow Within (2007), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010), and Paranormal Activity 3 (2011). The possessed child narrative of the new millennium still parallels disruption in the family with the arrival of a demonic entity, and the stories remain male-focused but for a new reason: the family member most in need of reform is the father.

This focus is somewhat surprising considering that fathers have never been more actively involved in their children’s lives, at least according to popular culture. Even criminal fathers—like Breaking Bad ’s Walter White and the eponymous Dexter—show a deep interest in the paternal, and men like Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead or Kit Walker in season two of American Horror Story remain intensely invested in fatherhood even though they are busy battling supernatural foes like zombies and aliens. Comedy, too, has lately given us films about well-meaning fathers, such as Delivery Man (2013), in which Vince Vaughn plays a man who discovers he has fathered 533 children as a sperm donor, yet still decides to play a part in their lives, and Daddy’s Home (2015), which centers on a competition between father and stepfather.

And yet even with all of this focus on fawning fathers, there apparently remains a cultural anxiety regarding absent dads and the effect of their absence, especially on daughters. In an era that decries the ever earlier sexual objectification of girls, one balm that has been prescribed is more active involvement on the part of fathers in their daughter’s lives, a relationship believed to build young girls’ confidence and help them to see that their value extends beyond the sexual. Such is apparently the reasoning behind the publication of gift books like Why a Daughter Needs a Dad (Gregory Lang, 2013) and 52 Things Daughters Need from Their Dads (Jay Payleitner, 2013); self-help guidebooks like Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know and its companion Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: The Thirty-Day Challenge (Meg Meeker, 2012), Becoming the Dad Your Daughter Needs (Rick Johnson, 2014), Be the Dad She Needs You to Be (Kevin Leman, 2014), and Dads and Daughters (James Dobson, 2014); and academic studies titled Father–Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research and Issues (Linda Nielsen, 2012), Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film (Hannah Hamad, 2013), and Our Father, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family (Peggy Drexler, 2011), all published in the last five years. The importance of father-daughter relationships is also articulated through the growing popularity of daddy-daughter dates (fathers stumped for date ideas can purchase a book named 88 Great Daddy -Daughter Dates [Rob and Joanna Teigen, 2012] for inspiration). There are also daddy-daughter proms and even daddy-daughter promise rings. ²³

One purpose of the possessed child narrative of the new millennium is to symbolize the importance of fathers on the development of their daughters, especially in preventing them from falling victim to the culture’s continuing objectification of women. In these narratives, girls whose fathers do not pay them the proper attention end up possessed by demonic forces, and what do possessed girls look like? They are foul-mouthed and aggressive, yes, but more importantly they are inappropriately sexual. Their crude language betrays a carnal understanding beyond their years. In addition, they are seductive figures, proffering sexual invitations to those around them. And what do the physical contortions of the possessed girl resemble if not sexual gyrations? The possessed girl is a perfect symbol of the deleterious effects of the raunch culture that Ariel Levy claims in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs defines American society today: raunch culture, according to Levy, not only celebrates the objectification of women but also encourages women to participate in their own objectification by presenting it as a path to empowerment. In the possessed child narrative of the new millennium, the inattentive father is the cause of his daughter’s uncontrolled and uncontained sexuality; his absence allows other rival influences to literally invade her body and transform it into a purely sexual vessel.

Recent possession narratives also critique the complicity of material culture in the sexualization of young women. ²⁴ The connection between consumer culture and the development of a problematic sexuality in girls has been given considerable attention of late: Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown’s Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (2007), Patrice A. Oppliger’s Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Culture (2008), and Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) are just a few of the texts that examine this issue. The main concern—as described by an article in the Monitor on Psychology— is that “[c]onstant exposure to commercials promising the world—beauty, popularity, peace-of-mind, self-confidence, great relationships—turns many young girls into insatiable consumers” (“Driving Teen Egos” 2004, 60). Furthermore, critics have noted that these advertisements spread the belief that “girls must build their identities through commercial concepts of the body, rather than being encouraged to develop notions of self-worth that extend beyond their skin” (Reid-Walsh 2007, 534). In other words, girls who lack a sturdy sense of self-value are vulnerable to the voices of a consumer culture that frequently tells them that happiness can only be secured by purchasing a hefty set of items guaranteed to ensure beauty and sex appeal.

Possessed child narratives of the new millennium are clearly responding to these issues. The Last Exorcism , for example, links one girl’s monstrous behavior while possessed to her need to feel attractive and sexually mature. In the film, a man named Louis contacts Reverend Cotton Marcus to perform an exorcism on his daughter, Nell. Marcus agrees, originally intending to use the experience in the documentary he is making with a woman named Iris, which intends to expose exorcisms as shams. The film leads the viewer toward a false conclusion—that the “possession” of the very religious and innocent Nell is merely a coping mechanism that allows her to avoid the shame she feels over becoming pregnant. However, as the ending of the film reveals, Nell is actually being used by a local Satanic cult to birth a demon child.

Like most possessed child narratives, the film associates Nell’s possession with family problems, namely Nell’s sheltered existence and stunted sexual development. Nell’s mother—whom Nell proclaims was her best friend—passed away two years prior, leaving Nell in the care of her overprotective and alcoholic father when, according to him, she was “fourteen years old. Just coming into womanhood.” Louis’s overbearing moral presence but simultaneous emotional absence both impede Nell’s sexual development. On the one hand, he has been so overprotective that Nell is stuck in an isolated girlhood. As Louis himself admits, “I’m not crazy about the influences that exist in the world today, and therefore I decided to home-school Nell.” Nell further reveals that Louis removed her from Sunday school because he felt it too risqué since “Pastor Manley didn’t only teach religious music.” But while Louis is omnipresent in his vigilance over his daughter’s virtue, he is emotionally distant from Nell due to his grief over his lost wife as well as his alcoholism.

The film suggests that Louis’s inability to have a healthy relationship with Nell has led her to seek male approval elsewhere and via sexual means. Marcus says that he believes Nell is possessed by Abalam, who “defiles the flesh of the innocent. And it is particularly bad when he is in young girls.” Although Marcus is only play-acting in this moment, he unintentionally taps into the truth: her identity has been reduced to a purely sexual role. At one point, Nell “drowns” a baby doll, as if symbolically attempting to destroy the child within—both the baby she is gestating as well as the little girl she is still forced to be. Nell is desperate to enter into womanhood but doesn’t know how, and so she simply relies on blatantly sexual behavior. During the first possessed state in which we see Nell, she tries to unbutton her nightdress, embraces Iris, and licks her shoulder. At another time, she is discovered in a state of undress standing over a sleeping Marcus. During the final exorcism Marcus performs, Nell drops into the splits and asks suggestively: “Reverend, how about a blowing job?” Nell’s malapropism leads Marcus to believe that her possession is simply a psychological mechanism that Nell is using to cope with her confused sexuality. Later, we learn that the demon threw Marcus this red herring so that he would believe he had solved the mystery of Nell’s possession and leave, thereby allowing the Satanic birth to take place without his interference. Supernatural elements of the plot aside, The Last Exorcism still suggests that fathers who police their daughters’ sexuality without offering them true affection and respect will produce overly sexualized girls, which the film symbolizes through the exaggerated image of the possessed Nell.

However, The Last Exorcism also hints at larger social causes of Nell’s problematic sexual behavior, specifically her desire for consumer goods as a means of expressing her sexuality. At the beginning of the movie, Nell conveys an interest in the short, red boots that Iris is wearing. Iris lets Nell try them on and, in response to Nell’s excitement, gives them to her: “You look good in them, and I’m sure you can’t find them in a 300-mile radius.” The boots are a symbol of city-slick consumerism as well as a fashionable declaration of sexual maturity, both of which awe a girl like Nell, who has been raised in a rural and religious area. Tellingly, Nell wears the boots for much of the remainder of the film. In fact, her wardrobe typically consists of only a nightgown and the boots. Even during a scene in which Louis has drawn her a bath in preparation for her first exorcism, Nell sits on the edge of the tub, clad only in a tucked towel and the red boots. Prevented a “normal” sexual development, Nell latches onto an accessory to express sexual agency. The story Nell (or the demon) makes up about the sexual encounter that got her pregnant also conflates material possessions and sexuality. She describes the boy she had sex with as driving a sports car, noting that “[i]t was old, but still a sports car.” Before they have sex, she claims that she asked him, “Am I pretty?” and he replied, “Yes. I think you’re so pretty,” suggesting that Nell believes that a sexual encounter with a stranger could give her the sense of self-worth and confidence that she seeks. That the story is invented does not change the message that the film sends: girls neglected like Nell will take on overly sexual behaviors; the actions of the possessed girl are merely exaggerations of those behaviors.

The 2012 film The Possession relies on similar symbolism. This film centers on a father, Clyde, whose career aspirations initially distract him from the needs of his daughters, whose custody he shares with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend. It is only when his youngest girl, Emily, becomes possessed by a dybbuk, which according to Jewish folklore is a malicious and unsettled spirit, that the father resumes his “proper” position as parent, husband, and protector. Clyde’s neglect of his family is apparent from the beginning: his actions have already cost him his wife, who now has a much more attentive boyfriend. She tells Clyde angrily, “At least he’s present. You know, presence, attendance, being in the moment as opposed to being absent. Absent like you were the whole time.” However, Clyde is slow to change: he considers taking on the position of Division I college basketball coach, even though doing so would relocate him to North Carolina and far away from his daughters. Even as a part-time dad, he is flawed: he is late to pick up his daughters, feeds them pizza even though his ex-wife specifically requests healthier fare, and misses his elder daughter’s dance performance.

And yet while the film correlates Clyde’s negligence with his daughter’s subsequent possession, it is not the only factor pointed to. As in The Last Exorcism , Emily’s possession is also connected to her coveting of material possessions, specifically a dybbuk box that her father unwittingly purchases for her; her obsession with it and its contents—in particular, a ring it contains—enables her possession by the inhabiting spirit. Even the title of the film, The Possession, plays on this potential double meaning: it is unclear whether the title refers to the box itself or to the ensuing spiritual possession that results from its ownership. Or perhaps the pun is the point: material possessions can lead to a sort of possession of the soul. The parallels drawn between Emily’s coveting of the box and her subsequent possession suggests that in this film demonic possession is partly a stand-in for the possessiveness and obsessiveness caused by consumer culture. At one point, for example, Emily tells her father that she doesn’t want him to go near the box and that she’s the only one allowed to touch it. The box is also linked to Emily’s sense of worth: Emily tells her father that the woman who lives inside the box tells her that she’s “special.” The box serves as an obvious substitute for her father’s love. At one point, Emily is shown conversing with the spirit. We can’t understand what the spirit is asking Emily because its words are either garbled or in a foreign language and not translated. However, one of Emily’s responses is especially suggestive: “Because my dad doesn’t like me anymore.”

Moreover, that the object with which Emily becomes obsessed is a box—one of the quintessential Freudian symbols for the womb and slang for female genitalia—links her consumer desire to female sexuality. In fact, during the scene in which Emily discovers the dybbuk box at a garage sale, she is wearing an elaborate floppy, white hat and long white ladies gloves that were also for sale. “Dad, look! Look! I’m a lady!” she yells over to him, trying to get his attention while he listens to a phone message regarding his future job opportunities. Emily is also frequently shown staring at herself in mirrors, both the one in the dybbuk box as well as others. Clyde’s other daughter is equally obsessed with her appearance, believing she needs orthodontics because she is “horribly disfigured.” Again, the suggestion is that daughters of negligent fathers may seek attention through their physical attributes.

Not all possession films of the new millennium are interested in the effects of consumer culture, though. Sinister is far more engaged with exposure to violence. In Sinister , true crime writer Ellison Oswalt, played by Ethan Hawke, constantly exposes his family to harm and hardship for the sake of his career; at the start of the film, he moves his family into a house in which an entire family was murdered, save one child, without even telling his wife. His desire to regain the fame he garnered with an earlier true-crime bestseller clouds his judgment regarding what is best for his family, which the film suggests would be to give up his aspirations for fame and fortune and “settle” for work that would be less meaningful for him but more secure for the entire household. The film establishes Oswalt’s behavior as selfish early on: as the family is unpacking the moving van, Oswalt enters the house carrying a single box. When his wife comments on the lightness of his load (“Just one box?”), he tells her: “It’s for my office. It’s fragile.” His precious writing career clearly supersedes all else.

This theme is emphasized elsewhere throughout the film. At one point, Oswalt’s wife suggests that his need to recover the success of his first book might be misguided: “What if that was your fifteen minutes? You can’t just spend the rest of your life chasing after it. If you miss out on these years with the kids, you won’t get them back.” But Oswalt doesn’t learn his lesson. He discovers a mysterious box of 8 mm films in the attic. Though innocently labeled with the names of typical family events, such as “Barbeque” or “Pool Party,” they are essentially snuff films, featuring happy family footage followed by the murder of all members of each family, except, in each case, one child who has been missing ever since. Even the murders that occurred in his house are included. Seeing the potential for a bestseller, Oswalt becomes so obsessed with solving the mystery of the murders and the missing children that he ignores the danger that the bizarre appearance of the box forebodes and neglects his family even more. He frequently stays up late, drinking and “writing.” When his wife tells him she is putting the kids to bed, he asks her to kiss them goodnight for him. When his daughter brings him coffee, he takes it from her and quickly closes his office door in her face when his phone rings. At one point, he even declares, “Writing is what gives my life meaning. These books are my legacy,” not realizing that this is the role his family should play. Oswalt clearly values his career far more than his family.

Oswalt eventually discovers that all of the murders are connected to a pagan deity dating back to Babylonian times: Bughuul, the Eater of Children. After discovering Bughuul’s face in each film, he begins to experience increasingly disturbing events: he frequently finds his projector playing the film of the murder that took place in his house, with no explanation of how it came to be turned on. After an especially disturbing encounter, Oswalt decides that he has taken things too far and quickly packs up his family, promising to bring them home and to abandon the writing project. However, he quickly breaks these promises. When an expert on Bughuul’s history emails information, Oswalt calls to learn more. He finds out that “[t]he ancient church believed that [Bughuul] would take possession of those who saw the images and cause them to do terrible things.…Children exposed to the images were especially vulnerable.” The similarity between the dangers posed by Bughuul and criticisms of violent media are obvious. And, when the same box of films mysteriously appears in his attic, complete with an additional collection of extended footage, Oswalt again lets his curiosity get the better of him. He splices the new clips together and learns that it is the missing children who are responsible for their families’ murders. However, his realization comes too late to save him: his coffee has been drugged by his daughter, who has become possessed by Bughuul. After tying up her parents and brother, she ominously says, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll make you famous again” while holding an ax. Later footage implies that she hacked her family to pieces, and in the last scene, we see her being carried away by Bughuul. ²⁵

If the expert is correct, then the possession of Oswalt’s daughter is caused by her exposure to images of Bughuul, which we can read as exposure to images of violence. Although we never see her in Oswalt’s office looking at any of the still shots of Bughuul that Oswalt captures from the films, it is implied that she easily could have. Son Trevor has obviously been exposed to the “grisly details” of his father’s work in the past, for Oswalt’s wife tells him, “I don’t want him walking in again.” And although he is supposedly protected from the murders his father is studying, Trevor finds out about them quickly anyway, for he draws a picture of four people hanging from a tree within his first few days of school. Trevor also has night terrors, and his wife is convinced that Oswalt’s project is the cause of them. Despite all of the obvious problems that Oswalt’s obsession with murder causes both him and his family, he continues to pursue his interest, exposing his children to terrible violence in the process. As a result, the children become troubled, his young daughter ultimately committing terrible violence herself. ²⁶

Gender in the Possession Narrative

As has likely become clear by now, the possessed child narrative focuses predominantly on girls, marking it as unusual since evil child narratives far more frequently involve boys. The true story upon which Blatty based The Exorcist was about a boy not a girl, but it wasn’t until the Showtime original movie The Possessed (2000) that the original case would be fictionalized for the screen (and for the small screen at that). Since the Blatty-Friedkin model was one of the first possessed child narratives, much of the gender bias within the genre could be due to its influence. After all, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), a rare example of a well-known possessed child narrative that predates Blatty-Friedkin, presents the possession of both a girl and a boy, and the details of their possession are largely similar. In fact, James’s novella focuses far more on the male child than the female. The fact that one of the few possessed child narratives written before the Blatty-Friedkin model is boy-focused and does not differentiate between the possession of boys and girls could suggest that the gendered aspect of recent possessed child narratives is simply a result of that influential narrative.

And yet evidence does suggest that the story of a possessed girl traditionally has had an emotional and ideological poignancy that the tale of a possessed boy has not. One antecedent for the possessed child narrative exists in the genre of child conversion narratives, collected in such books as James Janeway’s A Token for Children . First published in 1671, Janeway’s Token offers brief spiritual biographies of children who serve as miraculous examples of piety. At first glance, such angelic children would seem the farthest thing from the obscenity- and vomit-spewing lasses who usually people possessed child narratives. But when we look below the surface, some surprising similarities emerge. More importantly, these early child conversion tales diverge in terms of gender in the same ways that—as I will show—contemporary possessed child narratives do.

The general plot of the child conversion narrative shows the child demonstrating an early, remarkable interest in religious matters and a deep concern regarding the state of their soul in spite of their exceptionally moral behavior. When illness befalls them, they worry about their salvation for a time but eventually accept their deaths as God’s will and look forward to joining him in heaven. What is striking about the girls’ spiritual struggles is that they are often attributed to Satan. One girl, for example, is “taken very bad” in illness and suffers “great distress of soul. When she was first taken, she said, O mother, pray, pray, pray for me, for Satan is so busy that I cannot pray for myself” (1795, 10). Another girl expresses religious doubt, and when asked the next day why she spoke “so strangely,” she replies: “It was Satan that did put it into my mind” (97–98). A third is described as having “a great conflict with Satan” (42) before she dies while a fourth confesses to having been “much troubled by Satan” (154). Yet another claims that “Satan assaulted her” (168) and then later that she “had another combat with Satan” (174). These narratives even contain pseudo-exorcisms, for once the girl accepts God’s plan, she is freed from Satanic influence. Boys, however, are rarely if ever depicted as struggling specifically with Satan. Token describes one boy, for example, as “in grievous agonies of spirit and his former sins stared him in the face, and made him tremble” (65), but Satan is not mentioned.

Another noteworthy difference between the conversion narratives of girls and boys is that there is considerable emphasis in the boys’ stories on their extraordinary intelligence, most often emblematized by the ease at which they learn to read religious texts. One boy, for example, asks remarkable questions that suggest a more sophisticated understanding than could be gained by rote learning. After providing the reader several examples of his astonishing acuity, the narrator remarks: “By this you may perceive the greatness of his parts, and the bent of his thoughts” (1795, 83). Another boy is described as being able, at only “two years and eight months old[, to] speak as well as other children do usually at five years old” (122). The narrator adds: “He made a very strange progress in his learning and was able to read distinctly, before most children are able to know their letters” (122). Among boys, religious remarkableness would seem to be connected in some way with high intelligence.

Girls, on the other hand, are focused on for their concern for others, their obedience, and—most notably—their willingness to be taught. Tabitha Alder is described as “much instructed in the holy scriptures and her catechism” (1795, 95) while the story of Susannah Bicks notes that her parents’ “great care was to instruct and chastise…their child, and to present her to the ministers of the place, to be publicly instructed and chastised” (100). Yet another girl is portrayed as “ready and willing to receive instruction” (163). The disparity between the natural intelligence of boy converts—their ability to learn independently—and the educability of girls is a gender difference that persists in possessed child narratives today.

The focus on girls tormented by demons and other evil spirits continued into the Salem Witch Trials. Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), for instance, describes the case of the four Godwin children, who suffer symptoms much like possession. For example, the children are contorted into extreme body positions—Mather describes how at times they would “be drawn together as those that are ty’d Neck and Heels” and how, in a very Exorcist moment, “their Heads twisted almost round” (Sect. V). Although both brothers and sisters are affected, Mather ultimately chooses to take the eldest girl home with him to observe her in greater detail. Sections 17–32 of the document, a full 15 of the 33 sections, are devoted specifically to the tribulations of this female adolescent. These gender differences aren’t really that surprising considering the dramatically dissimilar positions of men and women in Puritan society. ²⁷ And recent research has even shown that gender still influences the ways in which conversion is described today. ²⁸

Stories of girls tormented by demons and witches retained an appeal that ensured their longevity, albeit in adapted form. One of the most evident offshoots are the deathbed scenes of girls that frequently appear in antebellum American literature. ²⁹ Two of the most celebrated of the slowly expiring misses of early American literature are Evangeline St. Clare (Little Eva) from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mary Morgan in Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There , an 1854 temperance novel by Timothy Shay Arthur. Little Eva’s deathbed sufferings prompt a series of conversions among those around her. Her aunt Ophelia, an abolitionist in name but a racist in practice, vows to truly love the slave girl, Topsy, whom she has been given by her brother. Topsy, the slave, allows herself to love and trust others, thereby becoming a “good girl.” Most importantly, Eva’s father is moved to free the titular Uncle Tom from slavery. Mary Morgan has a similar effect in her story, specifically on her father. Mary suffers a prolonged fatal illness, the result of a wound she received after being hit by a thrown glass when she entered the eponymous barroom during a brawl to fetch her drunkard father. On her deathbed, Mary secures her father’s promise never to drink again, an event that proves more motivational to his recovery than even the political act of prohibition.

In both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ten Nights , we thus see examples of how the bodily suffering of a young girl prompts an important transformation in the characters around her. Even though the supernatural influence on the girl is comforting and heaven-sent rather than from hell, these early works are otherwise quite similar to possessed narratives in the suffering the child experiences, its causal link to familial disruption, and the spiritual transformations it provokes in those around them. Although popular texts in their day, it is unlikely that such novels would have been direct influences on the possessed child narrative. Therefore, it would seem that the “openness” of girls to spiritual forces and the ability of their suffering bodies to inspire reformation might be a psychological phenomenon that has resulted in a cultural tradition as Carol Clover and Barbara Creed have claimed. ³⁰

This is not to say that possessed narratives featuring boys don’t exist, only that they tend to be far less well known. In addition, when one compares textual instances of possessed boys—as in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963), John Wyndham’s Chocky (1968), Victor Kelleher’s young adult novel Del-Del (1991), and Justin Evans’s A Good and Happy Child (2007)—to the far more prevalent examples of possessed girls, several notable differences become apparent. ³¹ First, while possessed narratives in general point to family discord as the symbolic cause of the child’s waywardness, boys are often additionally described as “chosen” for possession because of some remarkable quality, and they often become more special in the process. The inclusion of this subplot of giftedness somewhat undermines the parable of failed parenting at the core of the possession narrative, for the tale becomes as much a biography of an exceptional (male) child as a cautionary tale regarding the vulnerability of children with distracted parents. Second, while the possessed girl is consistently objectified, the possessed boy maintains a certain agency. If possessed girls are spectacles of horror, possessed boys often have the opportunity to describe their experiences for themselves and frequently overcome their possession through their own devices rather than relying on experts and exorcists, as girls must.

Finally, in addition to being objectified, the possessed girl is “abjectified”—to use Julia Kristeva’s terminology—transformed into a conglomeration of grotesque bodily behaviors and emissions. The possessed boy, on the other hand, is a violent creature but mostly maintains control over his body. Moreover, the girl’s possession is linked to her oncoming puberty, and much is made of images of menstruation, sexual awakening, and pregnancy, all of which are also abjectified. One need only think of the infamous scene from The Exorcist during which Regan violently masturbates with a crucifix, gushes blood all over her sheets, then mashes her mother’s face into her bloody genitalia. Although possessed boys are frequently the same age as their female counterparts, their narratives make no innuendoes about the “horrors” of male puberty; we find no errant ejaculate, no unbidden erections, nary a pimple or boil. ³²

One of the earliest depictions of a possessed boy is presented in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), a YA science fiction novel. Though the novel’s protagonist is Meg Murry, much attention is given to Charles Wallace, her younger brother, who at five years is a veritable genius. Charles Wallace has a very advanced vocabulary for his age; when asked if he knows the meaning of “compulsion,” he responds, “Constraint. Obligation. Because one is compelled . Not a very good definition, but it’s the Concise Oxford” (2007, 39). In addition, his knowledge of mathematics far surpasses most adults’. When asked to explain a tesseract—the means by which the characters travel through space—Charles remarks: “[T]o put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points” (88). Charles Wallace’s gifts go beyond high intelligence; at times, he even appears to be able to read people’s minds. It is precisely Charles Wallace’s gifts, however, that make him vulnerable to possession. When they visit Camazotz, a planet that has been conquered by an evil force known simply as the “Black Thing,” Charles Wallace is temporarily taken over by one of its minions, a man with red eyes. We discover that Charles Wallace was susceptible due to his giftedness: “Just exactly because of what you are you will be by far the most vulnerable” (114). Even the man with the red eyes admits this is true: “[I]t is only the little boy whose neurological system is complex enough” (142). Charles Wallace is one of many possessed boys who appear to be chosen for possession because of his remarkableness.

Wyndham’s Chocky (1968) offers another example of a possessed boy narrative. The author of several significant science fiction novels, including The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Chrysalids (1955), Wyndham is likely best known for his 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos , which inspired the Village of the Damned (1960), another text involving remarkable children, which I discuss in the chapter on changelings. The title Chocky refers to the name of an alien being which comes to possess the narrator’s 12-year-old son, Matthew. Alongside the increasingly alarming details of Matthew’s possession, a subplot of family dysfunction appears. Although the family seems to be doing quite well when the book opens, we soon learn that Matthew was adopted under circumstances that can be considered problematic; his mother, a member of a rather fertile family, has realized that adopted offspring matter less to her relatives than biological spawn, and, when she gives birth to a daughter years later, she becomes suspicious about Matthew’s origins. The narrator—Matthew’s father—is far more affectionate and trusting of his son’s character.

However, this subplot of family dysfunction is overshadowed by Matthew’s possession, which takes a standard male path. While Matthew is not gifted in the traditional sense and struggles greatly to understand the advanced concepts that Chocky relates to him, it is clear that he is special in other ways. Briefly communicating through an unconscious Matthew, Chocky tells his father that Matthew was chosen for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he has “the type of mind that was susceptible to her communications,” which is “by no means common” and because he has “a mind with a potential of development”—which, according to Chocky, “a surprising proportion have not” (1972, 145). Due to his possession, Matthew becomes genius-like, performing math problems using a binary system, producing award-winning art, and even instantaneously acquiring the ability to swim, which enables him to save his drowning sister from a powerful current and earn a medal from The Royal Swimming Society. Unlike possessed girls, Matthew also retains considerable agency in the story. Although not the narrator, Matthew is questioned about his relationship with Chocky by his father, and we are given Matthew’s responses almost verbatim. Although Matthew’s perspective is not privileged and the story never told from his point of view, Matthew does get to speak for himself.

Like Wyndham’s Chocky , Australian author Victor Kelleher’s YA novel Del-Del (1991) is also named for the entity that comes to possess a boy named Sam shortly after the loss of his beloved sister, Laura, to leukemia. Narrated by his other sister, Beth, the novel is divided into three parts, each of which proffers a different explanation for the identity of Del-Del. The first section suggests Del-Del is a demon, the second that it is an alien, as in Chocky , and the third reveals the truth: that Del-Del is a psychological coping mechanism, part of a game created by Laura and Sam to help Sam deal with the pain of her impending death. Although the most obvious disruption to the family has been the death of Laura, other problems are hinted at, such as parental detachment. In one scene, we learn that the children’s mother, an attorney, has just won a big case (16), work that must have certainly left her little time at home, and Beth tells us moments later that “Dad was dashing in and out of the kitchen, late again” (19). Later, their father begins to drink, loses his job, and doesn’t look for another one, which causes considerable marital tension.

However, as in Chocky , the possession is also seen as linked to Sam’s giftedness. Early on, Beth tells the reader that “the trouble” was Sam’s “cleverness” (1991, 1). Experts, too, confirm that Sam is exceptional: one psychiatrist blames the family for being overly bothered by Sam’s disturbing behavior, claiming that “[i]t’s quite common for parents with outstandingly gifted children to become disturbed” (27). Even Sam himself has an overinflated ego, saying things like, “All I do is sit around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for those dummies to catch up” (164). Rather than checking his ego, his mother simply scolds him for his insensitivity, reminding him, “Your sister, Beth, was one of those little kids” (164).

Although Sam’s interiority is explored less than Matthew’s in Chocky , he never becomes an abject creature as do possessed girls; in fact, the biggest loss of control that Sam experiences is an uncontrollable lisp when Del-Del is taking him over. At one point, narrator Beth even goes out of her way to differentiate Sam’s possession from the prototypical possessed child narrative. During his exorcism in Part I, Beth explains: “It was nothing like the horror films you see about exorcism and demon possession. In the movies, the people who are possessed usually appear bruised and swollen, and their eyes often change their shape and colour, so they look really evil” (1991, 66–67). However, this is far from the case with Sam, whom Beth tells us is “filthy and bloody, but that’s all” (67).

A Good and Happy Child (2007) demonstrates the same gender differences. The novel is narrated by a married man, George, who is terrified of touching his newborn son. Upon learning that George was also in therapy as a boy, George’s current therapist requests that he write about that earlier time, and the tale he tells comprises the bulk of the book. The son of two Ph.D.s, George is apparently intellectually gifted, having skipped several grades. He starts seeing the apparition of a boy who shows him visions as well as gives him disturbing information about his father’s recent death, claiming, for example, that his father’s best friend, Tom, is responsible. Once Tom learns about George’s “friend,” Tom reveals to George that he and his father used to perform exorcisms and takes George to witness one. Once possessed himself, George has little control over his actions and ends up committing several terrible acts of violence. However, throughout all, he does maintain the role of narrator, never becoming the object of another’s gaze. In addition, he is able to eventually overcome the demon himself. As the story closes, George approaches his son. He sees the spirit who plagued him in childhood in the window’s reflection but resolves to defeat it so that he can be a good parent: “I swear to him I will never leave him, that I will stay, that I will protect him. That’s how we will break the curse , I whisper. The figure in the window opens the void of its mouth and screams” (2007, 320). The book ends with the suggestion that George has finally defeated whatever spirit was haunting him.

The differences between possessed girl and possessed boy narratives suggest that the types of negative influences feared to affect children who lack proper parental attention are believed to vary by gender, as do the effects of those influences. While it is the violence of boys that creates the greatest anxiety, it would seem to be sexual knowledge and behavior that is most feared from girls. In addition, the ways in which possession narratives differ by gender suggest that divergent levels of rebellion are deemed appropriate for the sexes: boys, especially precocious ones, are frequently expected to break from “civilized” behavior from time to time as part of their natural development. In fact, as I discuss in the chapter on ferals, the notable psychologist G. Stanley Hall claimed in his pioneering work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Religion (1904) that healthy adolescents—boys especially—were essentially savages who would slowly become increasingly civilized as they matured. Hall’s ideas were obviously held by at least one contemporary: in Turn of the Screw , both the governess and housekeeper coyly agree that a boy “who never is—” (2010, 35) is not a boy, but the governess insists that he cannot be so bad as “to contaminate…to corrupt” (35). Clearly, boys are expected to show a little of the devil from time to time.

Conclusion

During the nineteenth century, the possessed child was frequently configured as divine, a vessel for God or other celestial creatures. However, since the twentieth century, the possessed child has more frequently functioned as a cautionary tale with a twofold warning: if parents are “neglectful,” however that is defined, children can fall under the influence of demonic forces; in fiction, those would be literal demons while in real life simply influences believed to have negative effects on the child. The most recent possession films appear to be most concerned about how girls who lack a solid relationship with their fathers will seek validation for their worth elsewhere and often through their sexuality, which an overly sexualized media and consumer market suggests is their prime asset. While girls are most frequently the subject of possession narratives, some texts do feature possessed boys, but these narratives follow a different pattern, which reveals how foundational gender is in the possessed narrative. It is girls who are most “open” to outside influences, and this openness leads to a loss of purity and overly sexualized behavior. The possessed child genre as a whole, then, demonstrates society’s desperate desire to believe that sexual modesty is the default state for young women.

Possessed children are not always saved and their sufferings are harrowing to watch, but the narratives about them are somewhat comforting in that they assure the audience that dutiful parents could have prevented the child’s corruption. The problem is, in other words, preventable. The possession narrative confirms that good parents have control over their children’s fates and that the moral degradation of children happens only in families that have failed to protect their children from the contaminating forces of the outside world. Moreover, while the actions of possessed children are reprehensible, the texts make it clear that they are, in Wheeler Dixon’s words, merely “vessels of evil” who are “absolved of responsibility for their actions” (1986, 78). ³³ The image of The Child thus remains unblemished.

Notes

1.

For a history of early cases, see William Coventry’s Demonic Possession on Trial , Adrian Schober’s Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film , Hans Sebald’s Witch-Children, and Jean La Fontaine’s The Devil’s Children .
2.

In earlier eras of history, possession already had a different but equally salient formula. Phillip Almond, for example, notes that the “discourse of possession was a common feature of the elite and ‘popular’ grammar of the supernatural in early modern England” (2004, 2), so much so that people talked about how to fake it for money.
3.

I’m using female pronouns purposely here. As I discuss in this chapter, possession narratives far more frequently involve girls than boys.
4.

As Peter Stearns notes in Anxious Parents , for example, there are some “clear points of transition” in the history of parenting ideals, such as the “advent of greater permissiveness and heightened school commitments in the 1950s or the turn in the 1980s to greater conservatism” (2003, 11).
5.

John Springhall’s Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics provides an especially useful history. Although not entirely focused on children, Steven Starker’s Evil Influences: Crusades against the Mass Media gives an excellent overview of the various media that have caused concern and shows that these concerns frequently center on children. See David Buckingham for discussion of the blame placed upon the film Child’s Play 3 for instigating ten-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables to kill two-year-old James Bulger in 1993. In 1996, the death metal band Slayer was sued by the parents of murder victim Elyse Pahler after one of the teenaged killers claimed that Elyse’s “sacrifice” was inspired by one of Slayer’s songs; see Weiner. See Leavy for an explanation of how and why the Columbine shootings in 1999 were linked to, among other factors, singer Marilyn Manson, the video game Doom, and the movie The Matrix (1999). The video game Grand Theft Auto has also been implicated in the trials of several child murderers; see Leung.
6.

Boehm argues that “a ‘moderately nervous and excitable organization’, mental simplicity and physical feebleness—characteristics commonly associated with children, women and adolescents—were preferred traits of mesmerist subjects” (2013, 19). Children were, in a sense, possessed by the mesmerist; as Boehm notes, some girls, when mesmerized, “acted like living marionettes and responded to [the mesmerist’s] every gesture, even if he stood behind their backs. They imitated his facial expressions, assumed uncomfortable poses, became rigid like corpses and fell to the ground at his prompting” (2013, 25).
7.

At least two books on the subject were published during the time: Zillah, the Child Medium (1857) and Nora Ray, the Child Medium (1878).
8.

Born in 1864, Mary began to show disturbing behaviors in 1877, many of which resemble the contortions typical of possession, such as “doubl[ing] herself back until her head and feet actually touched.” One spirit she embodied was that of a deceased daughter of a neighbor family; once reunited with the family of the dead girl, Vellum proved to be not only a comfort to those around her but also experienced a positive change herself, becoming “natural, easy, affable and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties, assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daughter might be supposed to do” (Stevens).
9.

The child evangelical remains an integral part of various religious sects, as the documentary Jesus Camp (2006) demonstrates and which Alissa Quart further confirms in her chapter on teen preaching contests in Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child .
10.

For example, in Child of Glass (1978), a Disney movie, a ghost is cursed to roam the world forever, but two kids intervene to bring her peace.
11.

In The Lady in White (1988), a boy manages to solve a murder and lay to rest the victims.
12.

A surprising twist at the end reveals that Jane, too, was killed when the villagers’ crimes were revealed because she threatened to bring the crimes to public attention. However, Dorothy channels her long enough for her to tell her story.
13.

In The Exorcism of Emily Rose , for example, the person who undergoes this transformation is female, a skeptical defense attorney, Erin Bruner (Laura Linney). Although Bruner decides to defend a priest who is being tried for the murder of a young woman who, the prosecution argues, died as a result of the exorcism her client performed, she initially takes the case purely for the potential advancement it offers her career; she has no belief in possession. But after she herself experiences frightening and seemingly supernatural events in her own home, she finds her faith. Another movie that focuses on a woman’s transformation from White Science to Black Magic is The Awakening (2011).
14.

In his 2011 book Critical Children , Richard Locke estimated that the number of essays on Screw stood at over 500. For a succinct and helpful overview of criticism on The Turn of the Screw , see “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw ” in the most recent Bedford edition of the novella, edited by Peter G. Beidler.
15.

Such critics point out that at the time of the novel’s publication, ghosts were taken so seriously that formal societies had been formed to study the phenomenon systematically. James’s preface to the 1908 edition of the story alludes to these “factual” reports of ghosts and describes the ghostly characters of his tale as supernatural rather than psychological entities. The pervasive belief in ghosts was not merely a background cultural influence for James: his brother William, the eminent psychologist, was an active participant in the field when the novel was being written.
16.

Other adaptations of James’s story include What the Peeper Saw (1972), The Haunting of Helen Walker (1995), and Presence of Mind (1999). Yet another adaptation is slated for 2018, with Steven Spielberg rumored as producing it (“Upcoming Horror Movie Releases” [2016–2017]”).
17.

See, for example, Ryan and Kellner, 57–60; Winter briefly makes a similar argument about Blatty’s novel on page 90.
18.

For these reasons, Gary Hoppenstand has argued that Regan functions “as a type of moral symbol warning of the dire consequences of an evolving family structure” resulting from a “rising divorce rate and the [putative] drawbacks of single-parent household” (1994, 38). Andrew Scahill, however, finds Regan to be a potential figure of liberation, for “it is only through possession that Regan is able to transgress and overcome patriarchal power, to turn its pathology against itself, and cover it with the putridity of queer abjection” (2010, 52). Schober takes a middle-of-the-road approach, arguing that “The Exorcist might be subverting gender role stereotypes, but underneath affirming woman’s more traditional role as wife/mother” (2004, 75).
19.

As Ellis Hanson notes, “[i]t is clearer in the novel than in the film that the devil can read the minds of the people in Regan’s bedroom and that he plays on their guiltiest fears” (2004, 117–118).
20.

In Family Life in 20th-Century America , Marilyn Coleman, Lawrence H. Ganong, and Kelly Warzinik argue that “[i]n the late 1960s and 1970s…the worries about absent fathers were broader” than they had been following World War II: “experts began to encourage father involvement to enhance the general well-being of children rather than to offset problems in development” (2007, 171). See also LaRossa’s chapter in Deconstructing Dads as well as his book The Modernization of Fatherhood and Ross D. Parke’s Fatherhood .
21.

In an 1840 edition of The Ladies’ Pocket-Book of Etiquette , for example, we find lines cautioning parents to take heed “before the demon of fashion has taken possession of her [their daughter’s] feelings” (66–67). Martin Barker similarly describes how a Victorian journalist portrayed “publishers as vampires preying on the innocent, and urged ‘careful parents’ to beware: ‘already he may have bitten your little rosy-cheeked son, Jack’” (2001, 155). Lisa Jacobson notes that one critic similarly referred to radio as a “curse upon your children’s minds” (2004, 199). Likewise, as Lynn Spigel points out, when Senator Estes Kefauver began investigations into juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, he ultimately blamed it “primarily on two separate but related causes—a bad family life and mass media. According to the popular wisdom, the splintering of families during the war left children vulnerable to outside forces that encouraged the development of immoral habits and criminal behavior” (2001, 191). Peter Stearns claims that concerns about new media and consumer products are only an adaptation of an age-old fear of people who are “bad influences” on children in a more direct capacity: “[W]orries about children being led astray were not new. Strangers and local degenerates had posed threats before. But new media and commercialized toys, reaching out directly to children, were far more pervasive than the Pied Pipers of old” (2003, 175).
22.

See Holland’s “Living for Libido.”
23.

Jessica Valenti talks about this at length in her book The Purity Myth .
24.

Nicole Burkholder-Mosco and Wendy Carse examine Turn of the Screw in terms of the extent to which it may be playing on the word possession as implying ownership of material things: “Allowing for the possibility of Miles and Flora being in possession of their own subjectivity—and their own home—grants them all the horrific power of the Gothic narrative itself” (2005, 205).
25.

Kimberly Jackson argues that Oswalt’s demise is a fitting punishment for treating all of the crimes he witnesses “as part of a ‘case’, that system of generalization and psychological cliché that reduces individual trauma to just one in a series” (2016, 121). In the sequel, he’s become just another case himself.
26.

It’s a surprising turn that it is the daughter who turns to violence rather than the son since he is the child who has shown the most interest in the crimes his father studies. While this twist is likely included because it is unexpected, violence committed by a younger child—and a girl—is often presented as more shocking. However, the particular sensitivity of girls to such influences is not without precedent. As Colleen McDannell notes of The Exorcist , “[c]iting the film’s ‘strange effect on adolescent girls’, the British Board of Film classification refused to allow recordings of [it] to be distributed in Great Britain until 1999” (2008, 202).
27.

In Female Piety in Puritan New England , Amanda Porterfield argues that depictions of female piety differed “as a result of the great limitations imposed on women’s leadership and the expectation that women’s social roles should coincide more exactly with the submissiveness characteristic of female piety” (1992, 7). Juster also notes that “[b]y 1800 two distinct models of conversion, one male and one female, existed side by side” (1994, 181). See also Epstein 1981, 47.
28.

In their article “Gender Differences in the Communication of Christian Conversion Narratives,” David A. Knight, Robert H. Woods, Jr., and Ines W. Jindra discovered that “[t]he majority of men used adventurous metaphors, while the majority of women used peaceful metaphors.…It was also found that the majority of men focused on themselves as the central character while most women focused on someone else. And, men described themselves as clever whereas women described themselves as foolish” (2005, 113).
29.

Laurence Lerner claims that “[t]he child deathbed is what literary historians call a topos—a widely used theme, accompanied with a more or less fixed set of details. Once a topos has established itself, it recurs from author to author with remarkably little change; and literary history, if conscientiously done, can therefore grow very repetitive” (1997, 129). Karen Coats has a rather cynical view of the functions of these idealized dying children in Victorian fiction: “It is as if to maintain the illusion of a child’s innocence and desirability, one must be unburdened by the more complicated presence of the child itself, who will never measure up to any ideal representation” (2006, 12).
30.

As Clover puts it, “where Satan is, in the world of horror, female genitals are likely to be nearby. The word vulva itself is related to valve —gate or entry to the body—and so it regularly serves for all manner of spirits, but the unclean one above all” (1992, 76). Barbara Creed also argues for the cultural appeal of the possessed girl. She claims that “[p]ossession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject—and perversely appealing” (1993, 31) and that “it is this stereotype of feminine evil—beautiful on the outside/corrupt within—that is so popular within patriarchal discourses about women’s evil nature” (1993, 42).
31.

Chapter 6 of Schober’s Possessed Child Narratives focuses on the possessed child in children’s literature, making the interesting point that such a figure is far less common in American texts than in Commonwealth countries, for example.
32.

The horror genre that does examine male adolescence would be the werewolf film, an argument put forward as early as 1973 by Walter Evans. That an increasing number of girl werewolves have appeared, in Gingersnaps (2000) and its two sequels, a brief chapter in Trick ‘r Treat (2007), and the Danish film When Animals Dream (2014), suggests that female bodily change might no longer be so taboo.
33.

As Antoinette Winstead points out, the devil also acts as a scapegoat, removing free will from the child.

5. Possessed Children

Possessed Children and the Failed Family

Possession by Entertainment Media and Consumer Products

Gender in the Possession Narrative

Conclusion

Notes