Director Osgood Perkins is
slated to direct the new film, “Incident at Fort Bragg,” which will tell the story of the very real Irish Priest Malachi Martin that conducted a government-sanctioned exorcism of a young soldier on the North Carolina base. While Martin, and his career as an exorcist, are both entirely real, the incident this movie is based on is much harder to pin down.
By now, we all know what it means when a movie says that it’s “based on a true story.” More often than not, it means that we’re in for a blatant exaggeration (or outright fabrication) of events surrounding one or two real people, with the excuse that the truth wouldn’t make for as quite an engaging a movie. While this is true for
all genres of films, few are more guilty of departing from evidence-based fact that “true stories” about the supernatural. From “The Amityville Horror” to the recent slew of “Conjuring” movies, it usually only takes an internet connection and ten minutes of googling to start poking holes in the stories we see on screen — but that’s where this mysterious Fort Bragg incident may set itself apart (or to be honest… may not).
Attempts to contact
Fort Bragg’s Religious Services representatives and other public affairs contacts, regarding the possibility that Uncle Sam called in an exorcist for one of his soldiers, doesn’t produce any noteworthy results (unless you count “no comment” as noteworthy). While this certainly isn’t a ringing endorsement, it also doesn’t dismiss the idea outright. Martin himself also never mentioned conducting any exorcisms on a U.S. military installation, despite writing a number of books on the subject that have drawn both public interest and even the approval of scholarly theologians. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, for instance, called Martin’s book “Hostage to the Devil” “the most authoritative and convincing” look into the world of demonology published to date (back in 1976 anyway).
sofrep.com