Prey for the Devil Director Breaks Down Connections to The Last Exorcism

By Spencer Perry

With Prey for the Devil, German filmmaker Daniel Stamm returned to some territory he'd previously trod in, the exorcism subgenre of horror. In 2010 Stamm stepped behind the camera for The Last Exorcism, a found footage movie that marked his first steps into this type of story. Speaking with ComicBook.com in a new interview for Prey for the Devil, we asked Stamm if he considered his two movies as being connected in any way. Thanks to different studios producing them they're not technically related but the same filmmaker being behind the camera means there could be some overlap, turns out, not really!

"I didn't really (consider them connected)," Stamm said. "Because The Last Exorcism was so different with the found footage and kind of based on this question, is this girl possessed or is she crazy, that we couldn't do any of the kind of supernatural possession stuff. Then Prey for the Devil was the exact opposite because it cuts off the first 45 minutes of 'oh, is this possession or not' and jumps right in and you have all this time for all these possession pieces. So then you suddenly have to go like how do we make this fresh and how do we make this different?"

He continued, "So then you go into the mythology, kind of of your world and your story and start reinterpreting things. We did this thing with contortions, so we don't just want to do contortions for contortion sake, we want to say there are two pilots fighting over the steering wheel, of the body of the possessed person and contortions are the expression of that. So we kind of did that with every little exorcism piece to reinterpret it for this world, and we didn't have that to do that with Last Exorcism. So it did feel like Prey for the Devil was kind of its own world and its own treatment of exorcism."

Now playing in theaters, Pray for the Devil is described as:  "Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers) believes she is answering a calling to be the first female exorcist... but who, or what, called her? In response to a global rise in demonic possessions, Ann seeks out a place at an exorcism school reopened by the Catholic Church. Until now these schools have only trained priests in the Rite of Exorcism -- but a professor (Colin Salmon) recognizes Sister Ann's gifts and agrees to train her. Thrust onto the spiritual frontline with fellow student Father Dante (Christian Navarro), Sister Ann finds herself in a battle for the soul of a young girl, who Sister Ann believes is possessed by the same demon that tormented her own mother years ago. Determined to root out the evil, Ann soon realizes the Devil has her right where he wants her."

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