The horror film The Pope’s Exorcist, starring Russell Crowe, is currently in theaters, and has drawn mixed reviews for different reasons. The International Association of Exorcists is upset that the film “distorts and falsifies” the reality of exorcism. The movie is a fictionalized account based on the association’s founder, Father Gabriele Amorth, who became the assistant to the the chief exorcist of the diocese of Rome in 1986, and then succeeded him as chief. Amorth wrote a couple of books about his experiences as an exorcist, which inspired the movie. The priest claimed to have performed 70,000 exorcisms, although that includes multiple rituals performed on the same person. Amorth also claimed that the vast majority of cases in which he was approached for help involved mental illness instead of possession. Amorth’s life (he died in 2016) was not a horror story, at least entirely. Read about the real man behind the movie at Smithsonian.
For those who have seen The Pope’s Exorcist, History vs. Hollywood breaks down the incidents portrayed in the film and compares them to incidents from history and from Amorth’s books.
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Source: neatorama