Let’s be honest about this, sometimes a movie is made in the image of another simply because the filmmaker might admire what they’ve seen and want to see if they can do something similar with their own twist on it. In other cases, they might be seeing if they can do something that is essentially a ripoff without trying to call it what it really is. The Exorcist is just one of many movies that have managed to inspire a great number of copycats that have tried to come up with their own take on the possession angle that might be seen as unique and special, only to realize that people are going to call them out on their nonsense when it’s finally noticed. Fans of The Exorcist have been notoriously hard on a lot of movies over the years that appear to have taken straight from the main gist of the movie when trying to come up with their own idea. The trick, unfortunately, is that a movie might appear to be every bit the ripoff that people accuse it of being, but there are times when it might be a coincidence.
Here are a few movies that some might believe are ripoffs of The Exorcist.
5. Stigmata
The funny thing about this movie is that while it deals heavily with religion, it’s also focused upon a character that doesn’t buy into religion as much. It was revealed in an interview that it was actually tough for Patricia Arquette to play this character and admit that she doesn’t believe in God, since in real life she is very much a believer. But the difference in this movie is that while the main character is being possessed, it’s not by the devil, at least not entirely, as the spirit of a recently deceased priest and scholar passed over to the body of the main character and began to show signs of the stigmata, the wounds that Jesus Christ incurred before his death.
4. Child’s Play
The child angle is certainly followed in this movie, and the fact that a doll is being used to carry out the evil acts of a deranged serial killer that transferred his soul into the toy is definitely supernatural. But apart from that, the child is a scared little boy that doesn’t know what to think at first but eventually starts to work against the deranged doll and ends up lighting him on fire at one point. How this would be a ripoff is hard to say since it goes from the old-school possession to a premise that caught many people by surprise and left them praising a new type of movie rather than comparing it to an older one.
3. Abby
So really, this movie did take a different spirit and place it in the body of a young woman who started to act in an erratic and strange way. But the point is that the spirit apparently wasn’t the deity known as Eshu, who sounds more like a chaotic but non-evil deity that’s more trickster than a demon. Calling this a ripoff of The Exorcist feels like a knee-jerk reaction since if one is going to argue the idea of possession as being a qualification for being called a ripoff, then there are a lot of movies out there that might be described in the same manner since like it or not, possession is a popular theme in a lot of movies.
2. Seytan
There’s no attempt to even hide that this is the Turkish version of The Exorcist, but the budget for this movie was so low that it came out rather grainy and low quality. Plus, the fact that the affected individual was using an Ouija board for one reason or another is why the actual devil of Christian legend was allowed to come and inhabit her body. From that point on it was basically point for point on par with The Exorcist without any attempt to disguise it. The idea could have been that many felt no one was going to watch it or even take notice of the fact that it was similar to the American-made movie.
1. The Antichrist
In terms of sheer, disturbing acts, this movie almost feels like a contender for The Exorcist rather than a ripoff, since the acts that woman in this movie commits are kind of beyond words that can be adequately used to describe the kind of horror that was unleashed during the making of this movie. Just writing about it would be bad enough, but watching it would be enough to make a person’s stomach churn even with the knowledge that it’s not real. When a horror movie can go the distance and then go further than this in depicting something that would bring to mind images of the kind of chaos that makes The Exorcist feel tame, yikes.
Some movies are ripoffs, but some are just, well, attempts at something different that look the same.
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