Best Demonic possession Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of demonic possession cinema — measured across 1,487 indexed frames from 17 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Demonic possession films over-index on nun, nightgown and priest — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
The Conjuring 2 (2016)
James WanDP Don BurgessIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
In 1977 Enfield, the paranormal investigators, Lorraine and Ed Warren, travel to London to help the Hodgsons. After sensing her daughter to be possessed, and her four children haunted by supernatural happenings, Peggy Hodgson asks for help when a malicious entity takes possession of the second eldest child, Janet. However, there's something more threatening, not only for the inhabitants but also for the investigator-couple; something that they couldn't even imagine.
- 2
The Exorcist (1973)
William FriedkinDP Owen RoizmanIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →
A visiting actress in Washington, D.C., notices dramatic and dangerous changes in the behavior and physical make-up of her 12-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, a young priest at nearby Georgetown University begins to doubt his faith while dealing with his mother's terminal sickness. And, book-ending the story, a frail, elderly priest recognizes the necessity for a show-down with an old demonic enemy.
- 3
Annabelle: Creation (2017)
David F. SandbergDP Maxime AlexandreIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Doll manufacturer Samuel Mullins is a happy family man with his wife Esther and their daughter Bee--until she dies after being hit by a car. Twelve years later, Samuel and Esther welcomes a nun and six orphaned girls to his home. He tells them that only a locked room (that belonged to Bee) and Esther's room would be off-limits for the girls. The crippled girl, Janice, manages to sneak into Bee's room during the night and finds a doll locked inside a closet. After she plays in the room, she is haunted by an evil force. What has Janice unleashed in Bee's room?
- 4
The Nun (2018)
Corin HardyDP Maxime AlexandreIMDb 5.4TMDB 5.9See in full on FrameThrower →
When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows are sent by the Vatican to investigate. Together they uncover the order's unholy secret. Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of the same demonic nun that first terrorized audiences in 'The Conjuring 2,' as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.
- 5
The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)
Julius AveryDP Khalid MohtasebIMDb 6.1TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of the Vatican, investigates a young boy's terrifying possession and ends up uncovering a centuries-old conspiracy the Vatican has desperately tried to keep hidden.
- 6
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)
Renny HarlinDP Vittorio StoraroIMDb 5.1TMDB 5.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Stellan Skarsgårdas Father Lankester Merrin
Izabella Scorupcoas Sarah Lesno
James D'Arcyas Father Francis
Archeologist Lankester Merrin is asked to go to East Africa to excavate a church that has been found completely buried in sand. Merrin is also an ordained Roman Catholic priest who, still haunted by what he was forced to do during World War II in his native Holland, eschews any religion or belief. He's fascinated by what he finds and that it dates hundred of years before Christianity was introduced to the area. Accompanied by a young priest, Father Francis, to keep an eye on the religious elements of what they find, Merrin makes his way to the camp. There he meets a young doctor, Sarah and soon realizes there is an air of gloom that envelops the entire site. Workmen go mad and a young boy is mauled by a pack of hyenas while completely ignoring his younger brother Joseph. Inside the church itself they find signs of desecration. Merrin is forced to re-examine his lack of faith and come face to face with the devil.
- 7
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Roman PolanskiDP William A. FrakerIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →
Desiring to start their family, young Catholic homemaker Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling-actor husband Guy move into The Bramford: New York City's iconic building that brims with unpleasant stories of obscure dwellers and ghastly occurrences. The young couple is soon befriended by their eccentric next-door neighbors, Roman and Minnie and Castevet; shortly afterward, Rosemary gets pregnant. However, little by little--as the inexperienced mother becomes systematically cut off from her circle of friends--alarming hints of a sinister, well-planned conspiracy start to emerge, enfolding timid Rosemary in a shroud of suspicion and mental agony. Why is everyone so conveniently eager to help? And why is Guy allowing it?
- 8
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Lee CroninDP Dave GarbettIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →
A twisted tale of two estranged sisters whose reunion is cut short by the rise of flesh-possessing demons, thrusting them into a primal battle for survival as they face the most nightmarish version of family imaginable.
- 9
Hereditary (2018)
Ari AsterDP Pawel PogorzelskiIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.
- 10
Late Night With The Devil (2023)
Cameron Cairnes, Colin CairnesDP Matthew TempleIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
A live broadcast of a late-night talk show in 1977 goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into the nation's living rooms.
What demonic possession films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a demonic possession frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — nun is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- nun23.2×
- nightgown18.0×
- priest17.4×
- lantern7.0×
- girl5.6×
- candle3.4×
- teeth2.9×
- blood2.7×
How demonic possession films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate demonic possession from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 60%low keyvs 40% baseline
- 29%naturalvs 43% baseline
- 58%nightvs 43% baseline
- 31%dayvs 42% baseline
- 25%closeupvs 21% baseline
What breaks the pattern
A Haunted House (2013) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,487 frames from 17 films carrying the demonic possession label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/demonic-possession
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