Fallen

They are similar. Fallen may have stole the idea but it's still better, in my opinion.

Walking through the cow pasture of life you are bound to step in some truth

I have seen Fallen half a dozen times on TV because I am a big fan of both Denzel Washington and also "horror" movies (I agree with the writers who said that TFP was more of an action movie and I thought that Fallen was a suspensful police procedural.) Obviously, I thought that Fallen was a very good movie. I saw TFP for the first time last night on DVD in my hotel room on my little personal DVD player. I thought it was the scariest movie I had seen in a long long time, which is my test for a horror movie. Given the conditions under which I watched it, I think that it had to be REALLY frightening. I will grant you all that it had some weakenesses, which I think reflected a low budget status. I did think that LDP's clothing, sunglasses, boots were all weird affectations which emphasized that we were in a different "time zone"
to say the least. Main point: I think that there are many many movies that are as similar as these two without raising any controversy. And these two movies are very very different...in tone and approach and in the solutions and denouement. Fallen is much more cerebral and intellectual. Denzel does not seek for solutions in the same way LDP does. Fallen's devil never appears as himself and so on. Compare the Matrix, Dark City and the Thirteenth Floor all of which generally deal with the question of the nature of reality and posit a
world in which akk the humans are actually being manipulated by others and all they believe to be true is an illusion.

Wasn't that the basic idea in Exorcist 3 as well? The demon could move from body to body? It's been years since I've seen it so I could be wrong.

How is it the same? Patrick was a devil worshipper that can't be killed, his spirit can move from body to body. In Fallen, a demon possesses a guy (Elias Koteas) and has him go on a killing spree. He's captured and given the gas chamber and dies. The spirit leaves the body and begins to mess with Denzel's head. Killing someone, leaving their body and killing that same person whose body it left just fvck with DW's head. While I LOVE both films, Fallen's a better film, some parts of TFP are a little over the top but both films are definetely scary.

Other than a guy getting the gas chamber and dying in it only to return and torment the cop, nothing else is the same, there is a woman that helps DW but she isn't a psychic. Both films are different, almost like comparing Angel Heart & Devil's Advocate, both films have voodoo, right? Or Sixth Sense & Stir of Echoes, both main kids see ghosts, right?

"I am the ultimate badass, you do not wanna `*beep*` wit' me!" Hudson in Aliens.