In Amsterdam, a school animator forced children aged 7 to 9, for whom he was responsible, to see “The Exorcist”… Traumatized children, parents alerted, he was fired. Legal proceedings have also been opened against him.
48 years after its release in our region, The Exorcist by William Friedkin remains more than ever a monument of raw terror. On a history of possession whose millennial challenge is based ultimately on the eternal struggle between the forces of Good and those of Evil, the filmmaker delivered a truly traumatic visceral experience for the public who discovered him in dark rooms at the time.
This posed, it is therefore easy to imagine the absolute trauma experienced by about forty children from a primary school in Amsterdam, aged 7 to 9 years. According to information reported by the Dutch news site Bnnvara, a school substitute teacher forced the children in his care during the lunch break to watch films prohibited for children under 16, including The Exorcist and District 9.
The father of a student, whose testimony is reported by the site, says that the children fled screaming in the halls of the school, in tears, logically terrified. Other children complained of nightmares; and some even outright refused to go back to school…
During the lunch break, educational films are shown to the children in this school. Perfectly sadistic, this animator had anticipated his blow well: he had also planned to watch The Pink Panther to be ready to change channels in the event of interruption of his torture session… What’s more, he had made the children to keep secret the films they were forced to watch.
The person concerned was dismissed, and legal proceedings were opened.