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What to Know About the Real Story That Inspired ‘The Deliverance’

A mother in Indiana claimed that she and her three children were bedeviled by shadowy figures and swarms of black flies — and possessed by demons. A Netflix movie tells their story.

“I gotta kill all you,” a young boy, limbs twitching in the throes of demon possession, eyes wild, growls at his mother (played by Andra Day) in the new Lee Daniels horror film, “The Deliverance.”

This is after he has recently walked backward up a hospital room wall like a demented Spider-Man after being nearly drowned in a bathtub by his older brother, who is also being targeted by a demon.

The film, which chronicles the saga of a family beleaguered by dark forces after moving into a new home, claims to have been inspired by real events, but the wall-scaling and demonic possession are Hollywood embellishments, right?

Maybe … not?

The seemingly supernatural occurrences, which were chronicled by the journalist Marisa Kwiatkowski in a 2014 Indianapolis Star article, “The Exorcisms of Latoya Ammons,” are portrayed much as Ammons originally described them in “The Deliverance,” streaming on Netflix.

Also represented onscreen: The swarms of unkillable black flies she claimed began plaguing her, her three children and her mother after they moved into a rental house in Gary, Ind., in 2011 (the film moves the action to Pittsburgh), and the exorcisms performed by a member of the clergy that Ammons credits with ultimately ending her torment.

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Source: Movies - nytimes.com


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