for the movie?
For simplicity purposes?
Basically all the characters are italian-american except for the Priest which seems to be South american.
The three soldiers, the family with the corpse, Sarchie and his wife.
Basically there were only catholics in this movie, possibly not to offend a majority protestant audience?
Does the real Sarchie have italian origins or was it changed for the movie?
I'm curious why you would care if a name is ethnically accurate? Did it ruin the movie or something for you?
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Seriously, is it that freakin hard to reply to the right thread instead of any random one?
I'm curious too, hence the post.
It is a weird name and sounds like a cop nickname, like an abbreviation for Sarcinelli or Sarciello or Sarcietti or similar italian names.
I'm also curious as to why you would feel compelled to ask me that?
Anyway, I discovered real life Sarchie's mother is italian, named Rizo/Rizzo, hence technically he already makes sense for his character to claim to be, especially if also his wife was.
As far as the Sarchie surname goes, it could also derive from mispelling/mixup at the time of entering the country, especially if it was the late 800s/early 900s, when literacy levels were pretty low for immigrants and the populace in general. An anglicised rendering of the proper surname. Not unheard of.
Possibly Sarci.
Entering which country in the late 800s/early 900s?
shareA lot of the time, it was either based off of how the immigration officer heard the name, since the Italian immigrants didn't speak much English usually, they couldnt ask them how it was spelled. Could have also been a possession they had on them with a name on it, since there was no other way to ask the name, they just took that as the name. There was such a large amount of them coming in that they didn't have time to spend on one person figuring it out.
In my families case, my great grandfather changed our last name from porco to what it is now. Porco means pig. In his village, most families were named after animals and plants. He didn't want to be called a pig by Americans, so he adopted the maitre' d of the ship he was on, which is a much nicer sounding name. Means courteous.
There are loads of different scenarios that could contribute to his last name being spelled the way it is. His ancestors may have just americanized it over time.
Sarchie is the name, however he came by it, of the author (prime source and subject as the the book was probably written by the co-author because Sarchie was not technically up to writing it himself) of the book, Beware the Night (2001) also now reprinted under the movie title, on which the movie is based. It is not a screen writer's made-up blunder.
Sarchie purports that this is an account of actual work he did, as a cop or closely connected to actual police work, in New York, fictionalized reality, near-autobiography. He makes himself out as the go-to guy for Satanic crime for the NYPD, as if there were an official demonologist right along with the other NYPD crime specialists. He claims that certain heinous crimes are (clearly and obviously) of Satanic origin, that such crimes are increasing as we approach some sort of coming confrontation with Satan, and that the NYPD quietly acknowledges this as real, even if one never hears Guiliani or any other mayor boasting about his grip on the Satanic crime problem. At the end of the book there are a few appendices with detailed instructions for his prescribed forms of Catholic ritual, in particular his own extended and enhanced form the rosary whose regular, complete and detailed use he regards as essential.
It is all Catholic as you noted. He doesn't care how that might offend anyone. He regards himself part of the one true church and anyone who isn't has no chance whatever against the Satanic crime wave washing over us with ever increasing volume. Roger Ebert, a former parochial school student himself, used to wryly note that when it came to things Satanic (see his review of Carpenter's Vampires for example) there is no substitute for the Roman Catholic Church. For Ebert and reasonable people, even most Catholics, it remains just a movie. Sarchie presents himself as dead serious about it and expecting this account to accepted as fact.
I have not read the book (as it is not my brand of *beep* but a book I would only read in order to better call it out as *beep* but only looked it over a bit when I found it on the new book shelf at the library. It was classified as non-fiction by the way with call number 133.426 SAR that puts it under Philosophy and Psychology specific topics in parapsychology & occultism, in the Dewey decimal system. Apparently libraries are willing to humor Sarchie and his publisher. (That makes it all real, right?).
It appears that the movie, Deliver Us From Evil, is a faithful adaptation in the respects noted in the posts.
CB
Good Times, Noodle Salad