See the Real Anneliese Exorcist Tapes on March 1st
The tragic story of the late 1970’s exorcism of a young German girl named Anneliese Michel was the basis of the 2005 horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Previously only a few photographs and audio tapes of Anneliese’s exorcisms existed. Now, out of the blue, word comes that alleged footage of the Anneliese exorcisms is coming to DVD on March 1st.
Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes will be released on March 1st. The company releasing the DVD: The Asylum. Yep, the same company that mockbusted The Exorcism of Emily Rose with its own Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers now claims to have possession of actual recorded footage of the incident that inspired both films. Here’s the statement from The Asylum’s website that just went up this weekend announcing the release of the DVD just barely two weeks from now:
Not long ago, one of our German colleagues told me about a story I’d never heard before: Anneliese Michel (real details here) was supposedly the true-life inspiration for The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which we, of course, ripped off), who died after going through dozens of exorcisms for demonic possession.
Intrigued, I searched the internet for details about the story and stumbled upon this site. The owner of the site, Dixon Engle, claimed that he had footage of Anneliese’s actual exorcisms from the 1970′s. I contacted him about the tapes, but he told me he’d already given them to another producer in Hollywood.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that this producer was Jude Gerard Prest, who has produced several TV documentaries (and also acted in a number of our movies). Jude showed us the footage he had compiled and we were just blown away. We have no idea if it’s is really Anneliese… but it’s absolutely chilling.
When I was in Germany last week, I tried to see if I could track down someone involved in the original case, but I don’t speak German, and couldn’t spend enough time on it to find anything out.
In the meantime, we made an agreement with Jude and Dixon to let us release the footage before anyone else does. We’ll be rushing it out on DVD on March 1, 2011 and you can decide for yourselves whether or not it’s real.
The site they reference in the press release can be viewed by clicking here. That site also features a couple of brief snippets from the alleged Anneliese tapes that have been uploaded to YouTube, three of which have been included below. Do not adjust your speakers; most of the clips have no audio to begin with.
I was genuinely intrigued by all this until I actually watched some of the footage. Not sure what it is that leads me to suspect that this just might be an elaborate hoax on The Asylum’s part. Could be how the footage all looks too clean for cheap film stock shot in the Seventies. Might be because I have a hard time believing this possessed girl actually climbed out of bed to walk down the stairs in a manner reminiscent of a certain scene from The Exorcist. Or it could really be because “Anneliese” doesn’t look much like the Anneliese Michel one can easily find photographs of on the internet.
I will say this for The Asylum: If this is just their newest fake footage flick, they’ve at least done a much better job trying to sell it as the real deal than they have with some of their past fake footage flicks.
Decide for yourselves when Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes is in your possession on March 1st.
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