The Exorcist Horrorgami

- The MacNeill Residence -

Each Horrorgami is sold as a limited edition of 13. For purchase enquiries please click here to visit Gallery One and a Half

“Your mother sucks cocks in hell.”

I don’t think I’ll ever experience the anything quite like the effect The Exorcist had on me before I’d even watched it. Growing up in deeply superstitious, Catholic town in Northern Ireland, the film was a hot topic and there was frightened speculation about its contents not only amongst my generation but within entire parishes and communities. The fear it struck in people was something you couldn’t make up. And you couldn’t rent The Exorcist: it was outlawed, mostly on the advice of local priests.

It became known that a local video shop had a copy of it kept in a plain box hidden under the counter. Only those within a clandestine circle of trust knew of its existence, which, come to think of it now, could have just been a clever marketing campaign on the part of the shop. One evening, it must have been in the early 90s, a few of my friends and I put together our pennies and sent the eldest looking one of us into the shop to see if they could acquire this tape, which had by then acquired something of a mythical status within our community. Later that night, with curtains drawn and sofa pulled up close to the TV, our teenage hearts pounded as I pushed the tape into our the top-loading VHS player.

Needless to say we all survived the night. But the next day Elaine Pollock was the first to feel the full effects of the curse. She had taken the tape to her house, and in the morning, when her mother found it in her bedroom, she went mental. I mean really mental. And not unlike a woman in the grip of satanic possession she screamed “GET THAT THING OUT OF MY HOUSE, IT’S CURSED, JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH!!” She then doused the house, the tape and her daughter in the holy water kept on standby for such emergencies.

Fantastic.

Poor Elaine. This one’s for you.