Kelli: Regular listeners of our podcast and readers of our blog will know that there are several things we’re deeply obsessed with, and one of those things is the novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. We even did a whole episode about it! So you can imagine that we were very, very pumped when we learned that the book was going to be adapted for the screen, and that we’ve been waiting on tenterhooks ever since.
Well, it’s finally here! My Best Friend’s Exorcism is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, and stream it we did. Sadly, Emily, our #1 MBFEvangelist, is out of town and can’t join us for this blog post, but Mary and I will do our best to live up to expectations.
(Spoilers to follow for My Best Friend’s Exorcism)
Mary, I want to start at a very obvious place when it comes to book-to-film adaptations: the cast. I think we were all pretty excited when we found out that Elsie Fisher, star of Eighth Grade, was going to play Abby in this film. How did you feel about her performance, and how did the rest of the cast play for you?
Mary: First of all, I don’t feel TOO bad for Emily, because she is in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Lol
Kelli: Yeah, enjoy Hawaii, bitch!!!
Mary: I was definitely excited to see how Elsie Fisher handled the role of Abby, and I think she did a great job. That said, I think some parts of the script weren’t too exciting, and it felt a little more hollow than the book. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but it felt different—maybe in the same way that all movies feel different from books. I love the book so much that it’s hard for me not to compare everything to it, you know?
Overall, I really liked the entire cast! More than anything, I appreciated that they looked like actual teenagers, which, you know, after Riverdale isn’t a guarantee.
Kelli: I definitely agree with you on that feeling of hollowness, which we can get into a little more later. But I think the cast was absolutely a strength, especially Elsie Fisher. I also thought Amiah Miller did a great job as Gretchen; I’d never seen her before but I look forward to seeing where her career goes from here. Chris Lowell was a total standout as Christian, but we can talk about that in a minute too.
I was glad that they kept in the skin stuff for Abby, which I feel like is something they easily could have taken out and a lot of adaptations would’ve in service of having a more perfect-looking lead. However, they did lean into it a bit more than I expected, like with the dunk tank scene. And speaking of that scene, one of the major and, in my opinion, kind of bizarre changes they made for the adaptation was giving Abby a crush on the teacher instead of Glee, which then freed them up to change Glee’s storyline around. I want to know what you thought about both of those changes, particularly the Glee and Margaret stuff.
Mary: Definitely—that changes the tenor of things considerably, especially considering it’s set in the 80s. In the book, Glee has a crush on the school’s chaplain, and Gretchen provokes her by faking love letters from the priest, but the movie has Gretchen out Glee as queer instead, telling Margaret that Glee has a crush on her. I feel like that has HUGELY different consequences than what happens in the book. I can only imagine that being out in the 80s had a very different set of consequences than it does now, and it’s often not great now! Alternately, having a crush on a priest, well, it’s weird and painted in a bad light in the book, but it doesn’t have the same kind of social weight being outed would. I’m not sure what the change added to the movie, either.
Kelli: Yeah, normally I’m all for having an explicitly queer side plot, but this really felt shoehorned in and I wasn’t a fan of it. Also, Margaret’s reaction is so nasty and it makes her much more irredeemable than she’s supposed to be. Like, Margaret is not the one possessed by a demon, nor is she supposed to be a villain, and watching her laugh in Glee’s face like that is really painful. I don’t think we get enough exploration of Glee’s queerness to make any of this worth it—it really just feels like making a character queer just to torture them with their queerness. And I mean, if they were going to add in some gay shit, make it between Gretchen and Abby, am I right? When they “fake kiss” in bed over their hands, Ang and I gave each other some major side-eye.
when u r just gal pals
Mary: Thinking about changes from the book, it’s also interesting to me that a Black actress was cast as Margaret. There’s no reason why Margaret shouldn’t be black, and the actress did a great job, BUT doesn’t it complicate Margaret’s storyline about conventional beauty if she’s Black? Doesn’t that give her another take on normative thin, white, WASP-y beauty standards?
Kelli: That’s a really good point. It’s super rare to see stories in popular media about Black women and disordered eating, so that’s another thing they could have explored but which felt, again, hollow. It was like they threw some concepts in that could’ve been interesting but then didn’t actually take the time to flesh them out.
Mary: Even though I griped about how the book is better than the movie, there are some parts of the movie that I think translated really well. If you didn’t have a very specific upbringing in the 80s or 90s, you probably didn’t know about the Christian weight lifting shows, and it’s hard to imagine what a spectacle they were. It was great seeing the brothers do their routine, but I do wish we’d gotten more of their story.
Kelli: Yeah, I really enjoyed those scenes, and I thought Chris Lowell really killed it in this performance. I think one of the issues I had with the movie was that a lot of the jokes kind of fell flat; I don’t know if it was the screenplay or what, but the dialogue all felt very stilted to me, which it didn’t at all on the page. That said, Lowell was hilarious as Christian and I feel like he brought a surprising amount of depth to that character.
Mary: 100%, I agree. Lowell was fun (although maybe less fun for me because I never watched Veronica Mars). The screenplay was definitely off, and, I mean, I get it. I think this would be incredibly difficult to adapt because the source text is just so good. Grady Hendrix has a very witty, yet emotionally deep way of writing, and it’s a delicate balance that didn’t completely translate to the screenplay. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it has something to do with the screenplay for sure.
Kelli: I didn’t watch Veronica Mars either, but I did watch Glow, and Lowell is delightful there as well.
But yeah, I think what this was lacking was a lot of the specificity of Hendrix’s writing. Emily and I were talking a little about how they cut out some pretty significant things, like the “Slave Day” section, and how they changed DBNQ (dearly but not queerly) to LYLAS (love you like a sis). Like, in a way I get why they changed those things because it can be tough to strike the right balance and make sure your material is coming off as a critique of something and not an endorsement, but it felt like the movie was too scared to dive deep into anything like that and so either kept stuff surface level or cut it out completely. It didn’t engage with the ways in which this book is questioning and picking apart the nostalgia we have for the 1980s.
Mary: I have to ask how you felt about the tapeworm scene, the most notorious part of a book ever.
Kelli: So, as listeners of the podcast know, the tapeworm scene in the book is the only time reading a book has ever given me a panic attack. Seeing it on screen was definitely terrifying and made me feel deeply uncomfortable! That said, it didn’t have quite the same impact as it did in the book, and I think part of that has to do with the build-up. I felt like the side plots with Margaret and Glee were really rushed, and I understand that it’s hard to pack an entire book into a 2 hour movie, but I think a lot was lost with the condensing of these storylines. What makes the tapeworm scene so horrifying in the book is that in the book you get a much more drawn out and closer look at Margaret’s eating disorder, and it starts to get really scary way before that scene in her room. Here, we really only get one scene between that and Gretchen initially giving her the powder, and I don’t think it gives us enough of a sense of that shift over time in Margaret. The emotional impact is lessened, and thus the horror is as well.
Mary: Yeah, I wish we’d had more time with Margaret and Glee in general, and especially Margaret just because I’m into her ED plot. If I hadn’t read the book, I’m not sure I even would’ve picked up on how drastically the powder was affecting her.
Also, there’s something about reading a scene that makes it more visceral and scary to me. I’m always going to imagine something as way worse than a producer can make it. I will say, though, when Abby said, “They’re still pulling them out of her,” I yelled in disgust. What a thought.
Kelli: Let’s talk about the exorcism. The movie spends a decent amount of time on this. How did you feel about the way it played out? And can we talk about the way the demon looked? Because, as my girlfriend pointed out, he was “just a lil guy.”
Mary: Tell Ang I ALSO said he’s just a lil guy. A little stinker! I was pretty disappointed by how the demon looked, and the exorcism in general. Like I mentioned, I wanted more muscle Christianity boys, mostly because I think the dynamic of all the brothers being exorcists but one being a newbie is really fun. That’s clear in the movie, too, but there’s just not enough time to get into it. The exorcism itself seemed pretty standard, which was fine, but showing the demon—really just showing he was a lil guy—was a letdown. I know that we can literally say Gretchen is possessed, but her possession is also shorthand (or…horrorhand? IDK I’ll workshop it) for sexual assault. Something happened to Gretchen in that house in the woods, but no one really knows what. She says it’s a demon eventually, but it could also be the demon of a trauma that’s stuck with her—and rightfully so. Yes, she’s been behaving evilly and destroying her life, but she might be lashing out because of something awful that happened to her, not a lil stinker in her head.
muscles for Jesus
I guess I’m saying that I like being able to read it both ways, and seeing a little dude hunched over and cackling ruins my ability to do that. It’s also been a while since I read the book, so I could be misremembering this!
Kelli: No, I think you’re right. From what I remember about the book, the demon spirit is actually in the shape of an owl, which could’ve been a really cool and gorgeous visual. Plus, we got shots of owls throughout the movie, which I assumed were leading up to that reveal, but I guess they were a nod to the source material instead. I totally agree about the sexual assault metaphor and that this choice takes away from that. It kind of trivializes it, and is also just super anticlimactic from a visual standpoint.
We’re also missing the ending—which, again, I understand why they didn’t decide to do it because an extended epilogue might be a bit much for a film, but it really is such a crucial part of what makes the book special. Here, they lean into the classic teen film trope of freeze frame shots telling us what happens to each character, but it’s more of a silly afterthought than the emotional gut punch of the book’s ending.
Mary: I agree, I would’ve liked more detail on the ending, too, but considering how we felt about the rest of the film, it felt fitting, I guess.
Kelli: Obviously, we’re being especially hard on this movie because of our love for the book. The movie isn’t bad, it’s totally fine, but I think that’s what’s so frustrating—it felt like an acceptable if generic entry into the straight-to-streaming horror canon, and the book is so much more special than that.
If you watched the movie and you haven’t read the book, we urge you to get a copy now!
Mary: Absolutely! It was a fine movie, and I enjoyed watching it, but the book is so much richer. If the movie leads people to the book, that’s a bonus, though!