Andra Day plays a mother fighting her drinking, her debts and a demon in her children’s new house, with Glenn Close as her mother, in a horror film loosely based on the Ammons case in Gary, Indiana, that reached number one in the United States on Netflix in its first week.

The Deliverance is a 2024 American supernatural horror film directed by Lee Daniels and written by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum. Andra Day leads the cast as Ebony Jackson, alongside Glenn Close, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Mo’Nique, Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, Omar Epps, Tasha Smith and the young Anthony B. Jenkins. The film opened in a limited number of American cinemas on 16 August 2024 and arrived on Netflix two weeks later, on 30 August. It runs 112 minutes and is Daniels’s first horror film, made for the streaming service after a seven-bidder auction.

A mother, three children and a new house

Ebony Jackson is a single mother living in Pittsburgh with her three children: Nate, the eldest, played by Caleb McLaughlin; Shante, played by Demi Singleton; and the youngest, Andre, known as Dre, played by Anthony B. Jenkins. The family has just moved house for the third time in a short period, and Ebony’s mother, Alberta, played by Glenn Close, has come to live with them. Alberta has cancer and has recently converted to Christianity. She does not know that her insurance no longer covers her treatment, and Ebony is paying for it in secret, which has left her behind on her bills and chased by debt collectors.

Ebony also carries her own history: a criminal record that included a prison sentence, years of alcohol abuse and episodes in which she hit her children while drunk. That history has brought in child protective services, and a caseworker, Cynthia Henry, played by Mo’Nique, has been assigned to watch over the family. Soon after the move, Dre starts talking to an invisible presence he calls Tre, which he says lives in the basement and in a bedroom closet. A dead cat turns up in the basement, along with a large hole in its unfinished concrete floor, and Dre keeps being drawn down there.

The other two children start to behave strangely as well, and all three suffer unexplained psychiatric episodes at school, are taken to hospital and are discharged when doctors find nothing wrong. A woman who has been watching the house from a parked car turns out to be a Pentecostal pastor, Reverend Bernice James, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. She tells Ebony that twenty years earlier a mother living in the same house killed her family and then herself, and that a demon is now after the Jacksons. From there the story turns to Ebony’s conversion and to the deliverance of the title, a prayer rite against the demon carried out inside the house.

From Gary, Indiana, to Pittsburgh

The film is inspired by the Ammons haunting case, also known as the Demon House. In November 2011, Latoya Ammons, her mother, Rosa Campbell, and her three children, then aged seven, nine and twelve, moved into a rented house at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana. Over the following months the family reported swarms of flies, footsteps in the basement, a daughter lifted above her bed and a son thrown across a room. In 2012 the Indiana Department of Child Services became involved, and newspaper reports claimed that staff had seen the youngest boy walk backwards up a wall. A Catholic priest, Reverend Michael Maginot, performed three exorcisms, two in English and one in Latin, and the family moved to Indianapolis that same year. The story became national news in 2014, after the Indianapolis Star published it.

The case has always had sceptics. The family’s doctor, Geoffrey Onyeukwu, recorded delusions and hallucinations in his notes. The landlord, Charles Reed, said that neither he nor the tenants before or after the Ammons family had experienced anything unusual, and called the events a hoax. The investigator Joe Nickell reported that the boy who supposedly walked up the wall had been holding his grandmother’s hand the whole time. In 2014 the paranormal television host Zak Bagans bought the house for $35,000, filmed a documentary there and had it demolished in January 2016; his film, Demon House, was released in March 2018.

Lee Daniels has said that he spoke to Latoya Ammons on the phone twice, watched Demon House and read the court documents, but chose to tell his own version rather than a faithful reconstruction. The biggest change is the family: in an interview published when the film came out, he explained that he made Ebony a biracial woman with a white mother, Alberta, and built the story around what that household looks like. He also moved the action from Indiana to Pennsylvania. Daniels, who was born in West Philadelphia, wanted to shoot in his home city, but could not get the tax benefit there; the Pittsburgh Film Office offered him a deal he could not turn down, and the film was shot in Pittsburgh in mid-2022. Philadelphia still appears in the story: it is where the family ends up.

A seven-bidder auction and a reunion with Mo’Nique

The project was sold in January 2022, when Netflix won an auction against six other buyers, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Miramax, with a deal reported at more than $65 million, covering the budget and buyouts; the net budget was estimated at $30 million. The cast announced at that point was not the one that reached the screen. Andra Day, Glenn Close, Caleb McLaughlin and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were attached from the start, but so were Octavia Spencer and Rob Morgan, and during development the film was known as Demon House, like the documentary.

In April 2022, Mo’Nique replaced Octavia Spencer, and the casting closed one of Hollywood’s best-known feuds. Mo’Nique had appeared in Daniels’s first film as a director, Shadowboxer, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2010 for his second, Precious. She later said that she had been blackballed for refusing to do extra promotion for that film, and named Daniels among those responsible. The two made peace in public at the beginning of April 2022, when Daniels turned up at her April Fools’ Day show and apologised to her, and The Deliverance became their first film together since Precious.

The rest of the cast was filled out the same spring and summer. Tasha Smith, who had already worked with Daniels on his television series Empire, joined in April, and in July Omar Epps, Demi Singleton, Miss Lawrence and Anthony B. Jenkins completed the line-up. Several of the actors arrived with recent award attention: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor had been nominated for an Oscar for King Richard (2021), in which Demi Singleton played the young Serena Williams, and Glenn Close came to the film with eight Oscar nominations, the most recent for Hillbilly Elegy (2020). Caleb McLaughlin is best known as Lucas Sinclair in Stranger Things.

Lee Daniels’s first horror film

Horror is a new genre for a filmmaker whose career has moved between independent drama and network television. Daniels started as a producer with Monster’s Ball (2001), which won Halle Berry the Academy Award for Best Actress, and The Woodsman (2004). As a director he followed Shadowboxer with Precious (2009), which earned him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Picture, then The Paperboy (2012), The Butler (2013) and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021). That last film was also Andra Day’s acting debut: the R&B singer won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and was nominated for the Oscar for playing Billie Holiday, which makes The Deliverance her second lead role for the same director.

Daniels has been open about the trade-offs of making a horror film for a streaming service. He has said that he holds final cut on the film, that he spent around two years in the edit and that his favourite films are The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen. He has also said that Netflix kept asking for tension, while for him the real tension in the story was whether Ebony was going to hit her children again, not what was happening in the house. He described the result as a compromise: in his words, it is a Lee Daniels film, but it is also a Netflix film.

Behind the camera, the film was shot by the cinematographer Eli Arenson and edited by Stan Salfas, with music by the Spanish composer Lucas Vidal. It was produced by Daniels with Todd Crites, Jackson Nguyen, Tucker Tooley and Pamela Oas Williams, through Lee Daniels Entertainment, Tucker Tooley Entertainment and Turn Left Productions.

A haunted-house story with a social backdrop

The Deliverance arrived in a horror landscape that had changed since 2017, when Jordan Peele‘s Get Out won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and turned horror built around race and class into a mainstream proposition. Daniels’s film works with the oldest material in the genre, a family, a house and a possession, but the script fills the background with very concrete problems: medical insurance that no longer pays, debt collectors, a mother with a prison record, and a caseworker who can take the children away. The exorcism sits on top of a story about whether a family can stay together under official supervision.

Four weeks in Netflix’s Top 10

On Netflix the film found a large audience quickly. According to the platform’s own weekly figures, it entered the global ranking of English-language films at number three in its first week, with 14.5 million views from only three days of availability, and was the most-watched film in the United States that week. In its second week it climbed to number two, with 21.8 million views, behind another Netflix original, Rebel Ridge. It stayed in the global Top 10 for four weeks, adding up to about 46.4 million views, and appeared in the national rankings of 92 countries.

On paper, The Deliverance brings together a lot of what defines Lee Daniels’s cinema: a family under pressure, an alcoholic mother written without excuses, a cast full of actors he has worked with before and a real case reshaped to fit his own concerns. What the film cannot do is settle the question that has followed the Ammons story since 2014, whether anything supernatural ever happened in Gary. Daniels has said he believes it did, and the film is built on that belief; the doctor, the landlord and the sceptics who looked into the case never came to the same conclusion.

Tags: Netflix, horror, mystery, Jordan Peele