Few who have seen William Peter Blatty's classic film The Exorcist, which hit theaters in 1973 and quickly became the highest-grossing movie of its time, have ever forgotten it. Littered with horrific subliminal images, Blatty's shocking portrayal of a little girl possessed by the devil and the human price involved in man's eternal battle against evil captured the public imagination. Even more compelling were the rumors surrounding the movie: it purportedly caused mass hysteria in its original audiences, and Blatty himself claimed that the movie set was cursed by repeated catastrophes that couldn't be written off as coincidence, including three deaths and an accident in which a gaffer cut off his own fingers. The plot of The Exorcist was extrapolated from the true story of a thirteen-year-old boy who, in 1949, experienced a possession by evil spirits so powerful that it took priests four months to expel them. Two sequels and a prequel later, the film maintains its original power to terrify, while forcing us to reckon with some equally terrifying questions. Does the devil have an objective existence? Can evil literally take over our bodies and our minds?

According to M. Scott Peck, M.D., author of the international bestsellers The Road Less Traveled (1978) and People of the Lie (1982), the answer to both those questions is a definitive “Yes.” In his newest book, Glimpses of the Devil (2005), Peck divulges his experiences with real-life exorcisms for the first time, describing case studies of two separate women who came to him for psychiatric help. In both instances, Peck was unable to diagnose the patient's condition by conventional psychological criteria and finally came to the conclusion that the problem was of a graver spiritual nature—the women were possessed by multiple demons, and even Satan himself. Under the tutelage of his friend Malachi Martin, a controversial Jesuit priest and author who claimed to have conducted hundreds of exorcisms over the course of his life, Peck organized teams of priests and Catholic friends to aid him in the exorcism of his patients. He outlines the details of the proceedings with a methodical thoroughness, and although some of the descriptions are certainly worthy of a Hollywood script, he isn't seeking any movie options with Glimpses. His explicit aim is to aid in establishing a new branch of science—“demonology”—that will become “an incipient subspecialty of psychiatry and psychology.” But Peck acknowledges that demonology won't be accepted into the scientific field until the split between science and religion, or, as Peck describes it, the “350-year-old separation of the world of supposed natural phenomena from the assumed world of supernatural phenomena,” is “revisited and recognized by all concerned as having been a gigantic mistake.”

Peck's book has quickly attracted critics who balk at his literal interpretation of the devil. One Beliefnet reviewer wrote that Peck is simply resurrecting “macabre medieval ritualism,” and that rather than see a lurking devil behind all insanity, “we need a more subtle way of personifying evil and a more subtle way of dealing with it.” But surprisingly, statistics show that the majority of the public may be sympathetic to Peck's view of things. A poll taken in 2005 shows that sixty-eight percent of Americans believe in the devil, including fifty-five percent of people with postgraduate degrees. And the Vatican has been receiving an onslaught of global media attention over the last year, ever since one of their most prestigious colleges, the Aethenaum Pontificum Regina Apostolorum, began offering classes in “Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation.” According to the course syllabus, students learn about the anthropological, sociological, and scientific aspects of exorcism and study the newly updated Rituale Romanum, a pontifical text created in 1614 that both Martin and Peck used during their exorcisms. Perhaps most importantly, students examine the legal aspects of exorcism, an issue that is the subject of a new film coming to theaters in September 2005. Called The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the film is based on the true story of a court trial stemming from the exorcism of a German girl named Anneliese Michel.

In 1968, at the age of sixteen, Anneliese began to hear voices and experience what doctors diagnosed as grand mal seizures. The situation grew increasingly severe, and by 1974, Anneliese was violently abusing her family members, urinating on floors, and mutilating herself. Finally, in 1976, two priests were given permission by their bishop to conduct an exorcism. It lasted for eleven months before abruptly ending with Anneliese's death—caused, according to autopsy reports, by battery and starvation. Anneliese's parents and the two priests were brought to trial and found guilty of manslaughter through negligence (had they committed her to a psychiatric institution, they most likely would have been acquitted). Shortly after the trial, dozens of audio recordings of the exorcism proceedings surfaced, in which Anneliese could be heard screaming uncontrollably and speaking in the voices of six different “demons,” including Lucifer, Nero, and . . . Adolf Hitler. Despite this, a commission of the German Bishops' Conference would later deny that Anneliese Michel was possessed, perhaps to avoid any legal responsibility for her death. Yet the question of whether she was insane or literally under the control of demons has never been resolved. Analyses of the tapes consistently raise troubling questions—how could a young girl physically produce such inhuman sounds and such a wide variety of “personas”? But in this day and age, who wants to admit to believing in supernatural enemies that can't be seen? One thing is for sure—that's a reality that would be far scarier than any film.