Last month, a trailer for the new Exorcist film – the scariest trailer ever, apparently – was released. The Exorcist: Believer isn’t out until Friday 13 October – just in time for Halloween – but Hollywood movies about demons are legion. This one follows The Pope’s Exorcist (released on Good Friday), in which Russell Crowe is a maverick exorcist who doesn’t play by the book, but gets results – despite the pen-pushers at (Vatican) City Hall.
The Reverend Canon Dr Jason Bray, the Bishop of St Asaph’s ‘deliverance minister’, will not be watching either film. He hasn’t even seen the original Exorcist – ‘I don’t go big on horror movies, overactive imagination, probably’ – although the cover of his book Deliverance shows him in a black coat and trilby, holding a leather bag, looking into the unknown in the Max von Sydow pose. (He giggles when I point this out, claiming it was the photographer’s whimsy.)
‘If someone’s pleading with me to give them an exorcism, I can pretty much guarantee they don’t need it’
Every Anglican diocese has people like Fr Jason, whom you’re going to call when there’s something strange in the neighbourhood.
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