Not quite a spoof, My Best Friend’s Exorcism is a horror comedy that pays almost pitch-perfect homage to the high-school and scary movies that dominated the 1980s. (It celebrates some of the decade’s other horrors too: the massive perms, Cherry Coke and bright pink eyeshadow.) Adapted from Grady Hendrix’s novel about teenage friendship and loyalty tested by demonic possession, it is superfun with a couple of comedy performances that nail it.
Elsie Fisher plays likable everygirl Abby, a plain, spotty self-conscious scholarship kid at a posh Catholic school. Her popular, beautiful and occasionally mean best friend is Gretchen (Amiah Miller). On a visit to a cabin by a lake, after a spin on the Ouija board, Abby and Gretchen dare each other to go into a creepy building in the woods. Gretchen emerges with lank hair and cracked lips (dead giveaways of demonic possession). Then she starts acting like a capital-B bitch, making her friends’ lives a living hell (truly, the point cannot be made too many times in horror movies that teenage years can be torture without satanic intervention).
As horror-comedy goes, what makes My Best Friend’s Exorcism more than just cheesy pastiche is how ingeniously the script deploys its 80s references. The most gruesome scene has a punchline involving an 80s urban myth about diet pills that came back to me in a flash. And the man Abby hires to perform an exorcism on Gretchen is a hilarious celebrity Christian bodybuilder called Christian Lemon (Christopher Lowell); director Damon Thomas has worked on episodes of Killing Eve and he has a blast with these scenes, as knuckleheaded Christian, with his mullet and cropped muscle T-shirt, turns out to be monumentally underqualified for the task at hand (“This is not your average puke and rebuke”).
My Best Friend’s Exorcism could perhaps do with one or two genuine scares. But for anyone old enough to remember Tiffany and advice columns in teenage girls’ magazines, this is going to deliver a pleasing shot of nostalgia.