Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Deliverance.
Opening with a title card that claims its story is “inspired by true events,” The Deliverance chronicles the plight of the Pittsburgh-based Jackson family as they contend with a demonic possession that threatens to destroy them from the inside out.
Directed by Lee Daniels (Precious, The Butler) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Elijah Bynum (Magazine Dreams) and David Coggeshall (Orphan: First Kill), the new religiously-fueled horror, which received a limited theatrical release on Aug. 16 before arriving on Netflix Aug. 30, is a dramatization of the alleged haunting of the Ammons family that took place in Gary, Ind., in 2011.
The movie stars Andra Day as Ebony Jackson, a fictionalized version of Latoya Ammons, a mother of three who began experiencing what she claimed were supernatural occurrences—from infestations of flies to the sounds of footsteps and doors opening in the night—after moving herself, her mother (played by Glenn Close), and her children (played by Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, and Andre B. Jenkins) into a rental home in Gary that has since come to be known as the Demon House of Indiana.
What was the Ammons haunting case?
An investigation into the Ammons family’s alleged haunting published in 2014 by the Indianapolis Star detailed how Ammons supposedly came to believe that she and her children, then ages 7, 9, and 12, had been possessed by demons that were residing in their newly-rented home on Carolina Street in Gary. While Ammons spoke to the Star on the condition that her children not be interviewed or named, she signed releases that allowed the newspaper to review medical, psychological, and official records that were not open to the public and described as “not always flattering.”
Ammons claimed that the strange occurrences at the Carolina Street house began in December 2011, when the family noticed that, despite winter temperatures, swarms of black flies were infiltrating their screened-in porch. “This is not normal,” Ammons’ mother, Rosa Campbell, told the Star. “We killed them and killed them and killed them, but they kept coming back.”
Things reportedly escalated over the next few months, with Ammons describing increasingly bizarre and dangerous episodes during which the kids allegedly levitated, were thrown across rooms, and spoke in deep, unnatural voices. The Gary Police Department, Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS), and local hospital all became involved in the case, with officers, medical staff, and social workers reporting they’d witnessed incidents of the nature that Ammons was perpetuating.
Others were skeptical that the origin of the problem was paranormal. In April 2012, an unnamed complainant filed an official report with DCS asking the agency to investigate Ammons for possible child abuse or neglect. The source reported that they believed Ammons was suffering from mental health concerns and that the children were performing for their mother and she was encouraging the behavior. Shortly after, DCS took emergency custody of the kids without a court order. The agency was then granted temporary wardship of Ammons’ children.
Following an evaluation of Ammons’ youngest son, a clinical psychologist concluded that the child’s stories about the possession were “bizarre, fragmented and illogical” and changed each time he told them. “This appears to be an unfortunate and sad case of a child who has been induced into a delusional system perpetuated by his mother,” she wrote. Another psychologist reported similar findings about the older two children.
Eventually, in June 2012, Rev. Michael Maginot, the priest at St. Stephen, Martyr parish in Merrillville, Ind., performed three major exorcisms on Ammons at his church and blessed her new home in Indianapolis. After moving to the new house and working to meet the objectives of DCS’ case plan for her family, Ammons regained custody of her children in November 2012.
The landlord of the Carolina Street house said there were no issues with the home before or after the Ammons family lived there. However, the house later became the subject of Zak Bagans’ 2018 documentary Demon House and was demolished in 2016 as part of the film’s production. Bagans is best known as the host of the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures.
How The Deliverance changes the story
Like most possession-fueled horrors that purport to be based on real-life events—think The Conjuring and The Exorcism of Emily Rose—The Deliverance takes significant liberties with the facts of the case, especially when it comes to the exorcism, or deliverance, portion of the story. However, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Daniels made it clear that he was approaching the film as a “faith-based thriller.”
“We had never seen this story, through this lens of this African American woman, onscreen, and I just felt we’re in such dark times, and I don’t think people really know how dark of times we are in. And I felt like I needed to get reconnected to my higher power,” he said. “I’m scaring you to Jesus—for me. It could be scaring you to Allah, it could be scaring you to Buddha, it could be scaring you to whomever it is that you have faith in, but it’s scaring you to a faith.”
When asked by the Reporter whether he spoke with Ammons while making the movie, Daniels stated that he talked to her “once or twice” at the beginning of the process. “It’s my interpretation of her life story. I purposely didn’t want to meet her because I was nervous,” he said. “But I spoke to her… And she’s lovely. She was at peace.”
The director went on to elaborate on specific details of the Ammons case that he chose to tweak. “What I’ve changed a little bit is I made her mother white because I have so many mixed-race friends and [I wanted to talk about] what it’s like to have a white mother and live in a Black girl’s body,” he said. “And the deliverance person was actually a guy and not a girl, [like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s Rev. Bernice James in the movie]. But there are so many women that do this work too, that don’t get recognized, so I changed that a little bit. And of course their names and such.”
The film also shifts the setting and nature of the religious rite that took place, changing it from an exorcism at a church to a so-called deliverance at the family’s home. As for what the difference between the two rituals is, Day told the Boston Herald that, to her understanding, a deliverance is “less about just exorcising a demon from someone.”
“It’s more about the whole deliverance of the person,” she said. “Not just getting rid of the demon, but actually ushering them into a relationship with God. Or with Christ. It’s a whole transformation thing.”