No, not mine. John Zmirak’s – described in a Godspy piece.

If it does provoke a demonic possession scare, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (read my review here) would be following in the footsteps of Richard Donner’s The Omen, the classic supernatural thriller which wrecked a solid year of my life. When this movie depicting the birth of a cuddly, handsome little Antichrist came out, it reportedly caused countless parents to rush home and check their children’s scalps for birthmarks that spelled out "666." My guess is that those kids weren’t demonic, but simply ADD; then again, I’m no theologian.

On a 13-year-old like me, the film had a slightly different effect. It sent me scrambling after every book I could find on the Antichrist and the "end times," most of them written by Protestants—but that didn’t stop me, because I didn’t know what Protestants were, had never knowingly met one, and pretty much assumed that all "religious" books were the same. They quoted the Bible, didn’t they? One time I brought a parish priest a pamphlet I’d ordered from television which called the papacy the Whore of Babylon, and asked him to explain it.