ComingSoon editor Tyler Treese spoke with Prey for the Devil director Daniel Stamm. Stamm explained why he returned for a new exorcism film and his method for creating a strong female character. Prey for the Devil is now playing in theaters.
“Sister Ann believes she answers a call to be the first female exorcist… but who, or what, called her? In response to a worldwide increase in demonic possessions, Ann seeks a place in a school of exorcism reopened by the Catholic Church,” reads the film’s synopsis. “So far, these schools have only trained priests in the rite of exorcism – but a teacher recognizes Sister Ann’s gifts and agrees to train her. Pushed to the spiritual front line with fellow student Father Dante, Sister Ann finds herself in a battle for the soul of a young girl, who Sister Ann believes is possessed by the same demon that tormented his own mother years ago. Determined to root out evil, Ann soon realizes that the Devil has her where he wants her.
Tyler Treese: You already did The Last Exorcism. What about the storyline of Prey for the Devil that made you want to return to this specific subgenre of horror?
Daniel Stamm: I never wanted to do another exorcism movie because I felt I had done everything. All the ideas I had in mind about exorcism, I put them in this movie, and I never received any other exorcism scripts because my agents knew about it. Then 12 years later, Prey for the Devil appears, and I call them saying, “That’s a mistake; it’s an exorcism movie. And they said, “Yeah, but this you should read,” and that’s so true because The Last Exorcism was very specific in that it was a movie about “is that girl is she crazy or is she possessed”, and it takes 90 minutes until you get the answer. So we could never do anything supernatural that revealed she was possessed. Whereas Prey for the Devil strips all of that and cuts to the chase and says, “We don’t have to spend 45 minutes with the audience wondering if he’s in a possession movie or not. They are in a possession film; let’s go from there.
So suddenly you have a completely different movie that has time for story and characters and settings and putting it all together. Then obviously having a female character in there changes everything because she doesn’t just have to fight the demon – she has to fight the patriarchy for the right to even be allowed to fight the demon. Then she introduces this whole new approach which she basically says, “Okay, it’s time for the patriarchy to change its ways. It can no longer be the priest as a knight in shining armor. We have to focus on the victim. We cannot simply treat them as a battlefield. We can’t just shout the same Latin Bible verses at the devil, no matter what the demon is. We need to see ourselves in a whole different position and be a coach for the afflicted who are fighting for their souls. It’s totally different.
Making school such a big part of the movie was really interesting. It shocked me that they do classes and lectures on exorcisms. What type of research did you do for this film?
Our screenwriter, Robert Zappia, is a practicing Catholic and has a deacon friend. I guess the whole movie started with that, with a dinner between him and the deacon. The deacon set him up with a real exorcist and they had dinner, and the exorcist told him all these things, everything he was allowed to say to him and still pulled the line and said, “C is all I have the right to say to you. But everything in the script is totally true, we didn’t have to make anything up. The first draft I read was so full of information and so full of facts and we had to clear that up a bit for the final version of the movie. But there is nothing invented there. The Vatican did open exorcism schools in 2018 all over the world. We live in the golden age of declared possessions in all religions – in Christianity as well as in Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism. Exorcisms are performed all over the world. It’s crazy.
You talked about having that time to spend with the characters and I thought this movie had such great themes of coming to terms with your trauma and coming to terms with it. Can you talk about this theme of the film and what you are able to do with Sister Ann?
It was from this desire that we wanted to make a film with a strong female character, which is so fashionable, you know? “Oh, feminist icon,” and movies rarely deliver that. So we said to ourselves: “we want this label. We think it’s a valuable label, but we have to earn it. What are we doing? So it was important that she came up with a very different approach to all of this.
So we said, “Okay, her approach is that she has a therapeutic approach and she focuses on the victim. So what is it about the victim that they can actually work with therapeutically? And because we wanted to stand out from films like The Exorcist by reinventing and redefining the details of our mythology. So we basically said, “Okay, the way the demon gets into a victim is through their shame and their guilt. It is through the black spots and their psyche that they dare not bring to light. So suddenly we were in this world. Then, of course, the circle should be the one that goes directly back to our protagonist. You don’t want it to be a procedure where a cop walks in doing the job and leaves. You want the personal connection, which immediately raises the stakes so Sister Ann might think for a long time that she’s just working on the victim, but of course the demon is always one step ahead of her. He very quickly returns this to use against her.
All the possession scenes are so intense. What was your approach to raise the tension and provide these thrills?
It’s such a detailed thing. I always get asked, “Was it scary shooting this and that?” ” The answer is no. It’s never scary because every fear is made up of so many layers of so many departments coordinating and trying to do their best and it all comes together in an instant, that it’s just a lot of detail work and a lot of pride. We worked with an excellent Bulgarian team where everyone was excellent at their job. Then the basis of all this is just acting. This is something people often misunderstand. Genre film doesn’t mean “I’ll do scares instead of acting”. Acting is what makes you care about the characters and then you do scary things to them. It’s scary because you care about these characters.
If you just cut off someone’s head but don’t care, that’s not scary. But if you’re terrified for someone, then that’s a whole other thing. If you watch the movie now, we start with Sister Ann in a psychiatrist’s office talking about her backstory. This is a scene that originally happened on page 80 of the script. So technically 80 minutes in the script. And that’s when I was like, ‘She’s so vulnerable at this time. We need to give that to the public right away. First minute. We had to restructure everything that needed to be restructured about the film, which is months of work, basically, to reorganize a complete and total film. But I was like, ‘this is the moment when the audience clings to this character and falls in love with her, ideally. If you don’t, then I can’t tell you anything more about the character that will make you fall in love. love with her. So that’s our only plan and we have to give it immediately to the public because they will experience every moment of this film differently. So really, it’s the human connection that’s the basis of it all.
Everywhere we see the trauma and grief of Father Dante’s family. Can you talk about the importance of having a male character in the film who is quite open with his vulnerabilities and insecurities?
It’s amazing that you point that out, because that’s exactly what was most important. If we have a strong female character, we can’t have a strong male character who is superior in physique or courage because we don’t want her to hide behind all of that. She has to be on top of it all. So what we were looking for in Father Dante was empathy, friendship and intensity. Christian Navarro brings this stuff without any fear, you know? It’s such a brilliant performance. You just care about his character, and then you care about his sister so much that he suddenly becomes a team with Sister Ann that you could never have done with a bit of a male character that we could have put in there.
The ending sets up a tease for more possessions for Sister Ann. Would you like to continue working with the character?
The sequel, to me, is always very dangerous because if it forces you to hide things from the audience in the original movie, then that’s a mistake. I’m still yours, “99% of the time, you won’t get a sequel. Put everything you have in the original movie and process it if it ever happens,” and that’s what we did with this movie. But of course, at the same time, we’ve tried to make such an iconic exorcist – as hopefully Sister Ann is – that ideally the audience comes out of the movie wanting more of that character and that he is told more stories about this character. So that’s always been our goal, but not necessarily to literally make it a sequel. I hope first of all that the public will like it so much that they will want to hear more. Then I would love to tell more stories with her for sure.