Upcoming exorcism movie Prey For The Devil follows Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers), who believes she is answering a calling to be the first female exorcist and seeks out a place at an exorcism school reopened by the Catholic Church.
However, until now these schools have only trained priests in the Rite of Exorcism – but a professor (Colin Salmon) recognises Sister Ann’s gifts and agrees to train her. Thrust onto the spiritual frontline with fellow student Father Dante (Christian Navarro), Sister Ann finds herself in a battle for the soul of a young girl, Natalie (Posy Taylor) who Sister Ann believes is possessed by the same demon that tormented her own mother years ago…
Prey For The Devil’s director Daniel Stamm is no stranger to exorcism movies, having previously directed The Last Exorcism and we sat down to speak with him about what makes this movie stand out amongst the exorcism crowd…
How did you first get involved with Prey For The Devil?
I got the script and really loved it because of the whole angle of the female exorcist, of the school – all that was just fascinating. It’s so hard to do something new in horror, and in exorcism, there’s such a narrow field in what you can do. After The Last Exorcism, I’m reading every exorcism script ever and I never got one where I was like ‘this is worth making, the world should have this movie available’.
This was the first one in 10 years or something where it’s like ‘oh, there’s something in here that goes beyond horror – there is drama, and a character that I really care for’. So I immediately responded to the script and I prepared this huge presentation for Lionsgate. I felt really good about it and everybody was like ‘oh, I think you’ve got the job’. Then another director got it and I was so crushed. I didn’t hear about it for half a year and suddenly I got a call: ‘Can you be in Romania on Friday? Our director quit, can you make this movie?!’
Suddenly I’m making the movie and I hadn’t even read the script in half a year! And because of the time crunch, there wasn’t much time to work on the script. So then we prepped the script as was, as the other director had developed it with the writer, and then Covid hit. Suddenly we went on hiatus for half a year and suddenly there was all the time in the world to develop the script.
What elements of the script did you change?
In the original script there was a certain reverence for the church, which you never read. Normally, it’s so easy to poopoo the church and to have a cynical take on the church. The script had that but it also conveyed the church and the more modern lives. That they have an atheist psychiatrist on staff, and they are very much working with science and technology. I thought that was really interesting. The original draft was so full of research, it was fascinating. It was like this documentary, which was great [but] I wanted to make sure that the character stuff and the set pieces kept up with that. There’s always stuff that reads great and then you shoot it and you go, ‘oh my god, it’s so much exposition’. So I wanted to make sure that that balance was there.
Why do you think audiences enjoy exorcism movies so much?
For believers, I think it works on a visceral level that you don’t get anywhere else. All the groundwork is already done for you and you just have to play on these fears. But even for non-believers, to meet the idea that the enemy is within, that there is a victim, you can’t just destroy the body… With Michael Myers, or Jason or something you hack their heads off and the threat is over. Here, you can’t hack anything off. You really have to get in there. You have to be a doctor as much as a warrior. That combination to me is really interesting.
What makes Prey For The Devil stand out against other exorcism movies?
Usually, in exorcism movies, there are priests that are screaming a lot of Latin at a demon and then stuff flies around and then the demon has left. Our mantra was basically ‘no latin chanting’. Keep it to an absolute minimum because yes, it sounds cool for a minute, but then it’s so boring, because there is no room for character. With someone that recites someone else’s text – God’s words in this case – there’s no room for character. We said ‘okay, we have a female protagonist, why don’t we for once try to really rise up to the occasion and make that matter?’ Because you have so many movies that are talking about the feminist approach but in the end, it’s a female character that does exactly the same stuff that a male character would have done.
So we basically said okay, the male approach is personified in the Arch Angel Michael, and the big image that everybody knows is him stabbing the dragon with a lance or sword or whatever, which obviously is the more male approach. We just go into battle. But really secretly, it’s all about us because we see ourselves as warriors and equals to the demon and should be able to assault the demon.
So I was really excited when we came up with the idea of, what if she takes the therapeutical approach? Why don’t we listen for once rather than scream at the demon? Why don’t we go in there and empower the victim to fight the demon from within?
That to me was a more intuitive and more female approach. That she would, of course, bump up against the church that has been doing it differently for millennia, and she has to fight for the right to fight demons.
She has a more personal connection to all of this and yet, she is kept out because she is a woman, she can’t fight demons. So that to me was new and fresh.
What kind of scares can we expect from Prey For The Devil?
First, there’s hopefully a lot of eerie atmospheres, and the jumpscares… it’s interesting because I sat down with The Conjuring, (which I find one of the scariest movies ever) with a notepad and I said ‘I am now going to learn all the scares and all the techniques that are being used here’. I watched the whole film, enjoyed it immensely, (as always) but my paper at the end had exactly two notes on it! It was to take one of the senses of the audience away, to not allow them to witness something and to have to fill in that gap with their imagination.
The other thing was sound. Your goal is to create a moment that motivates an opportunity for sound to do its thing. But you want that to feel organic and earned, but unexpected at the same time. So that’s how we constructed our jumpscares.
We had Tom Elkins, the editor who did Chucky and Annabelle – he is such a craftsman when it comes to creating jumpscares. He’ll take two frames away and suddenly something works that didn’t work beforehand. Some stuff we downgraded to ‘chills’, so there are jumps and there are chills.
What we didn’t want to do is to try to attempt something that we then couldn’t fully deliver. You’re so aware that the scares are your bread and butter that you put in a scare every five minutes because you’re so insecure about the whole thing.
So we allowed ourselves to say ‘we believe in the story, we believe in the characters, we believe in the atmosphere, and we believe that the audience (if we keep the pace crisp), will follow us there’. We don’t have to insecurely throw random scares at them. So we actually pulled a lot of stuff out and edited a lot of things into a chill that we shot as a jumpscare so we ended up with a good balance.
How closely did you work with Jacqueline Byers for the character of Sister Ann?
The movie really is Jackie! Jackie is to me the biggest discovery about the entire movie and it’s the only part I had nothing to do with because she was cast by the old director [haha!].
They gave me the tape and said ‘here’s an actress’. I’ll never forget the next sentence because I loved it so much: “We would love it if you loved her”. That’s what they said when they sent me the tap and of course as a director, (egomaniacs that we are!) I was like ‘I haven’t even seen the tape and I already don’t like her. I will cast my own actress thank you very much!’
Then I press start on that tape and it was breathtaking. It was so subtle and so interesting. She was so impressive that after that tape, I was like ‘we’re done casting. I’d be crazy to look for anyone else’. The movie basically is Jackie.
On set, Jackie literally can do absolutely anything. I never asked her for something that she couldn’t immediately deliver. It became this running joke on set – when we couldn’t figure something out, be it blocking, be it motivation, be it a line of dialogue, it was always like ‘oh let’s have Jackie have a go, she’ll figure it out’ and she would!
The other part of it all is that she is just such a great human being to be around – she’s up for anything, always joyful. She became this mother figure for Posy [Taylor, who plays Natalie] our 10-year-old actress – it was not only the first time Posy was ever on a film set but the first acting she had ever done. So to really have Jackie take her by the hand and become her best friend and rehearse scenes in their hotel rooms at night… I could not have asked for a better companion in all this.
Prey for the Devil is in cinemas 28 October