Şeytan

• Producer Hulki Saner cranked out Şeytan the same year The Exorcist was tearing up box offices worldwide, with zero permission from Warner Bros. or William Friedkin. Warner never bothered with a cease-and-desist, the film was too obscure to register on their radar, like most of Yeşilçam's unlicensed remakes.
• The score is The Exorcist's score. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells is lifted straight off the original print, badly recorded, none of it licensed. Reviewers note it's actually restrained by Yeşilçam standards, recurring only about three times across the runtime instead of being hammered nonstop.
• Friedkin's 1973 theatrical cut left the spider-walk staircase descent on the floor; it wasn't seen publicly until the 2000 reissue billed as 'The Version You've Never Seen.' Şeytan copies nearly every famous beat but skips that one, because in 1974 there was no print of it to copy from.
• It swaps Catholicism for Islam wholesale: the Father Karras role becomes a secular psychiatrist named Tugrul Bilge, the Father Merrin role becomes an aging imam, and the crucifix-and-Latin climax becomes a recitation invoking Allah from the Quran.
• The hire was a genuine flex. Metin Erksan had directed Susuz Yaz (Dry Summer), the first Turkish film to win the Golden Bear at Berlin, in 1964, so a celebrated festival director slumming it on a knockoff was unusual even for the rip-off-happy Yeşilçam machine.
• Şeytan went into Turkish release on November 1, 1974, smack in the era's flood of unlicensed remakes that later produced the so-called Turkish Death Wish (Cellat, 1975) and the Turkish Star Wars (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, 1982). Producer Hulki Saner himself had already done a Turkish Star Trek the year before.

Strip the religion off and Şeytan plays as a film about secular Turkey hedging its bets. The story spends most of its length on doctors, scans, and the rational psychiatrist before it caves and reaches for the Quran, mirroring a modernizing nation that wants science to have the answers but keeps faith on retainer for the moment the machines fail.

The film works as an accidental document of cultural borrowing eating itself. Possession here is a foreign American story crawling into a Turkish child and speaking in a stolen voice, Oldfield's pirated bells, Friedkin's pirated blocking, and the exorcism becomes the act of forcing that foreign thing back out using purely native tools, the imam and the holy book.

Gül's possession reads as a high-society household's worst fear made flesh. The mother's wealth and status buy the best specialists in Istanbul and none of it touches the problem; the real horror isn't the Devil so much as the discovery that money and modern medicine stop at the bedroom door, and the only authority left is the religious one the family had quietly outgrown.

A 12-year-old Istanbul girl named Gül starts acting wrong after she fishes a ouija board out of the attic. Doctors strap her down, run their machines, and find nothing the body can explain. Her mother, then a skeptical psychiatrist, watch the child curse, convulse, and crawl toward something none of them want to name. When medicine runs out of answers, an imam arrives with the Quran and a single conviction: the thing wearing the girl's face is the Devil, and only faith will make it leave.