A 61-Year-Old Underrated Horror Movie Inspired an Iconic Supernatural Film Just 10 Years Later

In 1973, William Friedkin introduced North American audiences to a motion picture that terrified them in a manner unlike any film ever before. That movie’s name was The Exorcist, and its release went on to influence countless horror pictures and filmmakers in ways that are still reverberating in cinemas all across the world today. But as much as The Exorcist influenced future films to come, it was itself influenced by what came before.

Specifically speaking, The Exorcist was heavily influenced by the little-known Italian neorealist horror film Il Demonio. Written and directed by frequent Federico Fellini collaborator Brunello Rondi, this seldom-seen brutal shocker sent ripples across the Italian film industry, mortifying audiences with its realistic depiction of a possible possession in rural Italy and leading to the Italian censor board banning the film outright. Ultimately, Il Demonio found its place in cinema history, influencing one of the scariest movies of all time in the process.

What Is Il Demonio About?

Not Every Possession Is the Result of Demons, Sometimes It’s Society’s Fault

Il Demonio tells the tragic story of a young woman named Purif, played by actress Daliah Lavi. In the Italian region of Basilicata, Puri has given her heart to a young farmer named Antonio (Frank Wolff). The problem is that Antonio, while willing to have some nocturnal fun with Puri, is unwilling to marry her. Moreover, he’s already promised to marry another woman from the town despite knowing how much he means to Puri.

Heartbroken and without recourse, Puri resorts to curses and witchcraft to make Antonio fall in love with her permanently. The townsfolk become aware of Puri’s plight and discover that she is practicing witchcraft to seduce Antonio. When a little boy named Salvatore dies from an illness, these superstitious townsfolk blame Puri and her “black magic” for the boy’s death, accusing her of being a witch.

After a horrifying run-in with the local town charlatan in an attempted exorcism that becomes a sexual assault, Puri begins to show signs of demonic possession, leading to a second exorcism inside the town’s Church, which quickly becomes one of the most frightening sequences ever devised for a horror film. Is Puri truly possessed or heartbroken and confused? The ambiguity of the answer to that question is what makes Il Demonio both difficult and enthralling to watch.

Is Puri Truly Possessed or Simply Heartbroken?

Il Demonio Largely Leaves It Up to the Audience to Decide

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, Il Demonio tells a story that transpires in the village of Lucania in Southern Italy. As the hub of Catholicism, followers of the Christian faith make up 80% of Italy’s population, which is why Puri’s instances of witchcraft are so often juxtaposed in the film with a healthy helping of heavily religious iconography. Puri’s fellow citizens are afraid of what she’s capable of simply because they don’t understand it, and her struggle is just as much against her community as it is against Antonio’s seeming indifference.

First and foremost, Puri is a woman who is in love. Unlike the other women in the town of Lucania, Puri is shown in Il Demonio to be passionate and fiery. When Antonio rejects her adoration for the first time, she wastes no time concocting a love spell to make him hers, driven by her desire for the man who continuously refuses her. But Antonio is in denial of his true nature and believes himself to be a “pious” man, one capable of marrying a local town girl, settling down, and living a normal, quaint life. What’s worse, even though he is clearly attracted to Puri, he, like the rest of the townsfolk, is under the impression that Puri is in league with the Devil.

Historically speaking, it was long believed that witches were servants of Satan and, should they give their souls willingly to the Devil, they would be beyond saving. There was, however, a second possibility. A woman could be possessed by a demon (not specifically the Devil), in which case, they could potentially be redeemed should they manage to survive an exorcism. With that context in mind, it helps understand what happened to Puri a little bit better.

The early part of Il Demonio puts Puri through the proverbial ringer in a manner few horror heroines have ever experienced. After being beaten by her father for practicing witchcraft, accused of cursing Antonio’s unborn first child, wrongfully blamed for the death of another child, and sexually assaulted by a shepherd, Puri has been abused in so many different ways that she believes that the only way to save herself is by convincing the townsfolk that she has been possessed by a demon, which would explain her erratic nature. And yet, somehow, the worst is still to come.

Puri’s family hands her off to the local village priest, a charlatan who tricks the townsfolk into believing he can rid Puri of her demon. Rather than help Puri, this man too sexually assaults her and then sends her on her way. Following this harrowing event, Puri begins to experience real manifestations of possession when her body becomes paralyzed and seemingly no longer under her control. More concerned than ever before, this time, Puri’s family takes her to a church for an actual exorcism.

It is during this sequence that Il Demonio’s ties to The Exorcist become clear as day (more on those ties in a minute). However, the long and the short of it is that the exorcism was a failure. The townsfolk don’t believe that Puri has been cleansed of her demon, and when foul weather arrives during Passover, Puri is once again blamed, this time being chased from her home. Eventually, she finds her way to a convent, but the nuns there do not accept her and cast her out as well.

Meanwhile, back in town, Antonio has begun to show welts on his body and believes them to be a manifestation of Puri’s dark arts. Both Puri and Antonio set out to find one another, and Antonio even saves her from an angry mob of townsfolk looking to end her life once and for all. It is, however, a short reprieve. After using Puri one last time for his own devices, Antonio stabs her in the heart in “Christ’s name.”

While it’s difficult to say that Il Demonio ever lands one way or the other in terms of how possessed Puri truly is, its ultimate meaning is to point out that overtly superstitious communities are even more dangerous than the type of evil that Puri is supposedly responsible for. Confronted by an incredibly patriarchal society, Puri’s strong-headedness, sensitivity, and self-sufficiency were always going to ostracize her from everyone else.

Puri is undeniably the victim of monstrous men whose power is codified by the Catholic Church and the town of Lucania itself. This villainization of not just a rural community but the Church that sits so prominently at the heart of Italy was a shocking act in Italian filmmaking in the early 1960s and led to widespread consequences for Il Demonio.

Who Made Il Demonio, and What Happened to It In Italy?

One of the Italian Neorealist Movements’ Most Prolific Writers Stepped Behind the Camera

Il Demonio was just the second film directed by little-known Italian filmmaker Brunello Rondi. Typically more well-known as a screenwriter and script consultant, Rondi worked with such legends of the Italian film industry as Roberto Rossellini on The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51. He then began to work alongside Federico Fellini as the screenwriter for the seminal film La Strada. By the early 1960s, Rondi had hit his stride, scripting other Fellini classics like La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, and City of Women​.

Brunello Rondi’s Screenplay Filmography
Year	Title	Director
1947	Last Love	Luigi Chiarini
1950	The Flowers of St. Francis (Uncredited)	Roberto Rossellini
1952	Altri Tempi	Alessandro Blastetti
1952	Europa ’51	Roberto Rossellini
1960	Era notte a Roma	Roberto Rossellini
1960	La Dolce Vita	Federico Fellini
1963	8 1/2	Federico Fellini
1965	Juliet of the Spirits	Federico Fellini
1968	Amanti	Vittorio De Sica
1969	Scacco alla regina	Pasquale Festa Campanile
1969	Fellini Satyricon	Federico Fellini
1969	Le sorelle	Roberto Malenotti
1978	Orchestra Rehersal	Federico Fellini
1980	City of Women	Federico Fellini

In 1961, Brunello Rondi made his directorial debut with the Italian drama Violent Life, based on the novel by the author (and filmmaker!) Pier Paolo Pasolini. While that film came and went without making too much of an impact, Rondi’s sophomore film Il Demonio had a much stronger influence on worldwide cinema, even as its own country’s rating board ostracized it.

When it was released in 1963, Il Demonio’s willingness to tackle controversial subjects like demonic possession and witchcraft and its criticism of the Catholic Church led to the film being condemned by the Vatican and outright banned by the Italian film censor. Doing so was a little bit like trying to put the genie back in the bottle, however, because Il Demonio’s fingerprints would soon be felt on the international stage.

How Did Il Demonio Influence The Exorcist?

Il Demonio Spider-Crawled So That The Exorcist Could Spider-Walk

As much as Il Demonio is a horror film, it’s also heavily rooted in the popular form of filmmaking known as Italian neorealism. This national film movement typically focused its narrative on the stories of the poor and working class, shooting on location with amateur actors. These creative choices all lend an air of authenticity to Il Demonio that, frankly, most horror films don’t have. Most, but not all.

Having come from the world of documentaries, when William Friedkin was hired to direct The Exorcist, he wanted to take advantage of a real-world aesthetic that would hopefully trick the audience into believing the story’s horrific events more easily. While The Exorcist is nowhere near as grounded in reality as typical Italian neorealist films, Friedkin’s demand for complete realism can be traced back to the roots of that genre, and, more prominently, The Exorcist straight-up lifted one of its most infamous sequences directly from Il Demonio​.

During Puri’s second exorcism inside a Catholic Church, she contorts her body so that she begins walking upside down on her hands and feet, mimicking the movements of an arachnid. In other words, actress Daliah Lavi became the first performer to create the now-infamous “spider-walk” from the Director’s Cut version of The Exorcist, which has arguably become the most well-known version of the film since its release in 2000.

The sequence is far more extended in Il Demonio than it is in The Exorcist, with Puri growling and speaking in tongues as the rest of her community watches on in stunned silence. Both sequences continue to hold up well today, more than half a century after they were released. But at the end of the day, you’ve always got to give credit where credit is due, and when it comes to the fabled “Spider-Walk” sequence (not to mention a willingness to condemn the close-minded), Il Demonio got there first.