The Exorcism of Gerasene

Description

On a stormy night, ‘The Physician’ battles a tempestuous sea in a rowing boat. Reaching land, he meets a Pig Farmer who has summoned him to help cure an outcast villager. As they scale a mountain, the Physician sees a village on the edge of a cliff and the woman cautions him to remain unknown to the townsfolk. They reach a cave on the side of the mountain and clear boulders to enter. The woman, holding out a lamp, refuses to go deeper, hinting that she knows the patient. The Physician ventures alone, the lamp casting eerie shadows. Inside, he hears banging chains and wailing in the darkness. Lighting up the cave, he finds: a beast-like, feral man, caked in mud, with faces painted on his skin. Shaken, the Physician retreats to a corner, exhausted and fearful, and falls into a restless sleep as the storm rages on outside.After a delirious night, the Physician is awoken by a sniffing pig. Disoriented, he stumbles out of the cave to a nearby pool of water. Suddenly, in his reflection: the demoniac! - broken free from his chains. The Physician attempts to communicate, and together, they walk into a grove of olive trees. There, the man, speaking in a guttural voice, reveals there is a legion of demons within him. The Physician negotiates with the demons and senses a breakthrough as the man briefly becomes lucid. But, just as hope glimmers, the demons reclaim control and the demoniac runs off into the forest. In need of sustenance, the Physician goes to the village where an unnerving encounter with a local hints at the village’s dark traditions of hiding the things they feel shame in. Famished and dehydrated, searching deep in the dream-like forest, the Physician finds the demoniac. He attempts to outwit the demons, but they cunningly deceive him, ensnaring him further in their malevolent grasp. The line between reality and the supernatural begins to blur, trapping the Physician in a nightmarish dialogue with the demons.In a desperate gambit, the Physician tricks the demons into a herd of pigs. The swine writhe and jerk before running off towards the village. The Physician makes chase. The enraged pigs stampede through the village wreaking havoc, trampling crops and smashing possessions. Farmers chase their pigs, in vain attempts to save them amid the chaos. The Physician tries to reason with the demons but in an act of spite, they throw themselves off the cliff, killing the village’s livestock in an instance. Broken, the Physician returns to his boat, where the formerly possessed man washes off his grime in the water. The original Pig Farmer joins him and they reunite as husband and wife. An angry mob of villagers gathers on the shore to force the Physician to leave. As the Physician rows into the mist, a demon appears in the boat, suggesting the nightmare is far from over.

Biblical Connection

When Jesus visits a possessed man in Mark 5:1-20, he asks the demon for his name, the reply: ‘my name is legion, for we are many’. The story then relates how Jesus casts the demons into swine and the subsequent relief felt by the man and simultaneously the fear and mistrust of the people at Jesus’s actions. This is one of the most exciting yet cinematically-unexplored stories from the bible which I will turn into an eerie and visually-stunning folk horror short. The story is rich territory to explore themes of the outsider, shame and blame within communities and perceptions of mental health. The film will be set in a folk-loreish world, translating Jesus into a Physician from another land, and the demoniac into an outcast villager. The story features haunted caves, transformations in forests, a town perched on the edge of a cliff and at its centre, demons, which I will bring to life with eye-popping live action puppetry. At the heart of the wild visuals, there will be a strong focus on the human aspect of the story; both in the Physician’s struggle to ‘cure’ his patient, and also of the demoniac’s journey from torment to