In 2014, the highly talented Aussie actorEric Banaappeared in an unfamiliar role. It came at a time when the actor was being showered with adoration as a heartthrob with oodles of charisma and a terrific acting range after proving himself a decade earlier through standout roles like Bruce Banner inHulkand Prince Hector in Troy. The film in question was the supernatural horrorDeliver Us from Evil, and it was Bana’s first and last appearance in a horror movie.
While it performed decently at the box office, the movie was panned by critics — only mustering a paltry 29% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site’s consensus labeling ittoo cliche-laden. For many hardcore horror fanatics, this was a harsh assessment since the film was terrifying at times and featured a terrific atmosphere that crept under the skin in some seriously disquieting ways. Bana also did a great job in the movie, bringing some depth to a more nuanced role than initially meets the eye.
As a well-executed horror film, it featured everything from demonic possession to a former heroin addict turned priest, and a cop turned demonologist at the center of it all. Given those highlights, it’s easy to imagine that this was all a work of typical Hollywood fiction. However, what truly gave the film a tantalizing edge was that much of its fascinating background wasbased on a true story.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!
The Plot ofDeliver Us from Evil
Deliver Us from Evil
The film starts with an eerie scene in which a four-man team of marines in Iraq encounters something terrifyingin a cave before their body cam goes dark. Gripping and immediately providing a spooky edge, the film thenmoves to New York. There, Bana plays its lead — a special ops sergeant who works for the NYPD’s 46th precinct in the South Bronx. As Sgt Ralph Sarchie, Bana portrayed a tough-as-nails cop battle-hardened by the job, carrying the harsh burdens of his work with him wherever he went.
Given the times for his shifts, as he usually worked nights with his partner, Butler (Joel McHale), Sarchie often had to be away from his wife and daughter, who were played by Olivia Munn and a then nine-year-old Lulu Wilson, respectively. By responding to crimes in progress in a very violent city throughout the night, Sarchie and Butler face it all, from picking up the bodies of dead babiesto domestic violencecalls in the dead of night when a former marine badly beats his wife before fleeing the scene.
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When they later investigate the case of a woman who mysteriously throws her own toddler son into the moat in the lion enclosure at the Bronx Zoo, she’s treated as deranged, arrested, and ends up in amental health facility. A dark and twisted plot follows that slowly unravels the story behind the Marines from the opening scene. Sarchie is later approached by a Jesuit Priest named Mendoza (Édgar Ramirez), who tells him what’s really going on. He tells Sarchie that he has a gift for detecting evil, something Sarchie used to call his ‘radar’ and mistook for a heightened policeman-honed instinct after many years on the job.
As Sarchie begins seeing the truth for himself,he encounters evil first-hand and has to face his own demonsto defeat a supernatural entity. Terrifying at times and creepy throughout, the film culminates ina disturbing exorcismscene before it later ends on an even scarier note — detailing the fact that Sgt Ralph Sarchie is a real person who claims to have encountered demons and other dark entities in the real world.
The Real Ralph Sarchie in Deliver Us from Evil
While much of the film’s supernatural elements and plot were fiction or exaggeratedto extreme levels at times, much of what we see about Sgt Sarchie and his background in the movie as a cop is true. The end of the film mentions that Sarchie, having been galvanized by what he experiences in it,later becomes a “committed Christian” and a demonologist.
The real Ralph Sarchie, who is now 62,truly underwent this remarkable change in real life. After working for the NYPD for 18 years, things he claimed to have experienced on the job led him to devote himself to investigating paranormal events and assisting inreal-life Christian exorcisms. Some of his career highlights include writing a book called “Beware the Night,” in which he details his paranormal experiences with demons and other evil entities, as well as working with the real Ed and Lorraine Warren (the true-life demonologists played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga inThe Conjuringfilms) on many of their cases.
Other Chilling Aspects of Deliver Us from Evil
Many horror fans loved the movie because it featured some nuanced aspects that were just as chilling as the scary scenes. Sure, the scares were sometimes ridiculously overdone, but other layered aspects provided its depth. For one, what Sarchie thought was his cop ‘radar’ was explained by Mendoza as a spiritual gift and an ability to sense evil.
This is why, as a cop, he was often drawn to the most unimaginable crimes and had a penchant for sniffing out perpetrators by sensing their inner darkness. Though made up for the film, Sarchie also carried arounda dark secretthat he had once beaten a pedophile to death because he somehow knew if he got away, he would re-offend. This meant he had to first overcome his own demons of guilt before embarking on his new vocation as a demonologist.
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Sarchie would come to believe that many of the most heinous acts committed by human beings were because of a spiritual darkness they held inside. To him, unspeakable crimes like murder and child molestation occurred when people became consumed by the darkness that lived inside them. Whatever the truth, Eric Bana’s role was memorable in a film where a truly frightening plot was constantly bathed ina terrifically executed atmosphere. In an interview withCollider, Ralph Sarchie described his beliefs:
“There’s a correlation between evil. There is a primary evil that comes directly from the Devil. Even though all evil stems from the Devil, the Devil sometimes interacts with people in the physical world and the spiritual world, and sometimes there’s just plain evil that people do to one another. And I’ve seen plenty of that over the course of 20 years.”
