The Signature in the Swarm — Hollywood

The Devil Was the Swarm

The one film that stops hinting and says the insect and the devil are the same thing.

Exorcist II: The Heretic — 1977. Sequel to the picture that taught America what possession looks like.

The Fly on Screen

In the other four films the insect accompanies the evil. In this one it is the evil.

The demon is named Pazuzu, and through most of the picture he is manifested as a swarm of locusts. The camera flies with the swarm. The swarm is what possesses. The swarm is what is finally driven out.

A flashback shows a boy in Africa named Kokumo fighting the locusts with a bullroarer, an old ritual instrument, and being possessed anyway. The grown Kokumo is a scientist still fighting locust plagues.

At the climax a plague of locusts descends on Washington, and the girl banishes the demon — who is, again, the locusts.

What the Fly Is Doing

This is the most open entry on the page. There is no interpretation required and no symbolism to unpack. The film states that the devil is an insect swarm and then shows it for two hours.

Pazuzu is not invented for the screenplay either. He is lifted out of Assyrian and Babylonian religion, where he was reckoned a king among the demons of the wind. The film borrows a real foreign god, gives him the locust, and puts him on the screen by name.

Then watch what the film offers against him. Not Yahuah. A ritual instrument in Africa, a hypnosis machine that links two minds, and a girl with psychic healing powers. The priest is the weakest man in the picture.

Underneath it sits a flat dualism — good and evil held in balance, each one needing the other to mean anything. That is not a minor artistic choice. It is the doctrine the whole film rests on, and it puts the devil on the same shelf as Yahuah.

The Name Behind It

Ahaziah, king of Israel, was badly hurt and sent men to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would live. Baal-zebub means lord of the fly. Elijah met the messengers on the road with a question and a sentence — is there not a God in Israel, and the king will not come down off that bed (2 Kings 1:2-4). He did not build the fly-god a temple. He asked him one question. That was enough. The same name is the title of the prince of devils in the gospels (Matthew 12:24).

Ekron's god was a fly. Babylon's was a locust on the wind. The film reaches past Ekron to the older address and comes back with the same insect.

What Scripture Says

The locust is Yahuah's, not the devil's. He sent it over Egypt and He took it away, and there remained not one locust in all the coasts (Exodus 10:12-19). It came when it was sent and it left when it was dismissed.

Even the locusts out of the pit are on a leash. They are given a limit, told what they may not touch, and told how long they have, and the king over them is named (Revelation 9:3-11). Permission, limit, and a term — that is a court's language, not a rival power's.

There is no balance. Yahuah says there is none beside Him, that He forms the light and creates darkness, and that He does all these things (Isaiah 45:5-7). A devil with an equal and opposite claim does not exist in this Book.

And the cures the film offers are the forbidden list itself — the ritual object, the linked mind, the psychic gift (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). The film's medicine and the film's disease came out of the same cupboard.

The Line

The film makes the locust a god. Scripture keeps it on a leash.

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