"The Exorcist" (1973)

It is customary around Halloween to watch scary movies.  Before the pandemic, theaters showcased horrific first-run releases and revived old classics.  Still, supernatural stories and creature features of every level of quality, and from every decade, are shown all month on television. 

In this year of horrible political and social strife, along with the worst health crisis in 100 years, people are generally anxious, if not terrified of what awaits just around the corner. Even on cable TV, Turner Classic Movies used an apt tagline to promote its annual Halloween offerings: “2020 feels like a horror movie!”

In the nearly fifty years since its notorious release, “The Exorcist” has been called the scariest movie ever made.  It seemed like the right season, and the right moment in our history, to take another look at this horrendous work of cinematic fiction.   Maybe it would distract me from actual events that have become, to quote “The Exorcist’s” promotional trailer, “almost beyond comprehension”.

Based on the sensational best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty, loosely based on a purported true incident in 1949, “The Exorcist” is an account of the ghastly demonic possession of twelve-year-old Regan McNeill, and her physical and spiritual degradation.  Her mother, Chris McNeill, an actress filming a movie on location in Georgetown, slowly comes to the realization that Regan’s darkening mood, supernatural strength, blasphemous obscenity, violent self-abuse, murderous behavior, and grotesque physical transformation are well beyond the reach of psychiatry.

She appeals to a local priest, Father Damien Karras, who is naturally skeptical of her request.  Karras, a Jesuit psychiatrist, whose aging mother is near death, is in the midst of his own crisis of faith.  Regan’s episodes of shocking and disgusting behavior, especially her speaking in tongues, provide Karras with enough proof for the Church to approve the archaic ritual known as exorcism, used to expel demons. To help Karras, The Church sends for the powerfully faithful elder, Father Merrin, as the exorcist.  The film’s mysterious prologue suggests that Merrin has encountered extreme evil before.

This is certainly prime material for the darkest of horror.  The book was long and graphic, with enough character development, and meditation on the nature of good and evil, that the shocks, which took hold of readers and physically sickened some of them, were somewhat justified.

When rumors began that the film would be released late in 1973, helmed by director William Friedkin, who won an Oscar for 1971’s edgy, documentary-style thriller “The French Connection”, public interest grew.  When word came out that the book’s bizarre episodes would be graphically depicted---things that had been banned as obscene even in a new era of permissiveness—the buzz was irresistible. 

I think it is more interesting to consider “The Exorcist” in retrospect, when the stories surrounding its exhibition and its unprecedented audience reaction became legendary. Anticipation about what the film was willing to depict, and what lines of decency would be crossed, created initial long lines of curious people who waited several hours to get into theaters.  The shock value of the film was in large part due to viewers’ hyped, heightened expectations going in.  Audiences were already anxious before the opening credits; those who came totally unprepared must have felt the same primeval, gut response that those who read the book had experienced (especially those with an aversion to the sight of blood, or other bodily fluids).

The word-of-mouth about the movie’s effects-- green vomit spewed on priests, the infamous masturbation with a bloody metal crucifix, the 180-degree head-spin, the levitations and the eerie voices shouting depraved language from the mouth of a once-innocent child—brought mobs of audience members eager to see for themselves. 

Stories about people becoming hysterical, passing out from fright or disgust, or staggering into the lobby physically ill, were the stuff of news headlines for months, and helped make “The Exorcist” one of the biggest moneymakers of all time. 

While some called into question the ethics of involving a minor in this brutal spectacle, even with the use of a body-double in some scenes, it was not a hot-button issue in 1973. Many critics appreciated the technical skill and visceral nature of the movie, which went on to earn 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

I have my own strange affection for the movie, for reasons that have little to do with what’s on the screen.  As an aspiring high-school filmmaker, who was equally fascinated and disturbed by the stories I was reading (it would be months before I actually saw the film), I grabbed my super-8 movie equipment and made my own version, titled “The Exorcism”.  A projector that I had received as a Christmas present, which allowed dubbing of sound and dialog directly through the projector on a magnetic strip applied directly to the film, let me have fun and experiment with visuals and sound effects alike. 

My 14-year-old sister gamely portrayed the possessed girl and her mother; and two classmates agreed to portray the priests.  It was hard work, but we enjoyed every minute, setting up lights, creating effects, and using bad jokes and puns instead of obscene dialog, and humorous effects instead of terrifying ones.  The result was hilarious, and made me a celebrity for the first and only time at school.

Seeing “The Exorcist” today from the comfort of my living room, as the pandemic surges across the globe (without the giddy energy of crowds primed to be scared, or even sickened, by the experience), the film seems less an exercise in carefully mounting horror as it does a masterpiece of physical and psychological audience manipulation.

The movie is an unpleasant experience, frequently ugly, with few lyrical scenes, and little attempt at beauty, or even the comfort of spirituality.  It is meant to shock and leave you shaken, and it is effective; but mostly because it is aggressively loud and intermittently repulsive, not scary in any sustained way.

“The Exorcist” is structured, oddly enough, like some grisly Hollywood musical. We go to musicals to see the song-and-dance numbers; viewers watch “The Exorcist” for the shock sequences.  There are long stretches of exposition, punctuated by brief but potent episodes of shock and horror. Whether it’s a shaking bed, a string of guttural language, or an unspeakable act of evil, each episode is more intense and grotesque than the last one.

That’s how the film maintains a sense of dread, leaving us in fear of what outrage the film will depict next. The moments of shock do not, for the most part, develop the plot (nor do many interludes in Hollywood musicals).  The final exorcism scene, 20 minutes’ worth of darkness and noisy terror, functions like a dream ballet from a Gene Kelly dance sequence, but a foul and demented one.  We aren’t meant to feel sympathy with the girl or her mother. (If anything, the story belongs to Father Karras, who is often overshadowed by supernatural events.) 

We are meant to witness a phantasmagoria, and in that sense the movie delivers; but the material is full of opportunities to provide more depth, to give us more to take away from it, which the movie mostly squanders.

As unbelievably intense as these scenes are visually, I believe what makes “The Exorcist” such a terrifying experience is its use of sound to manipulate the viewer in a physical sense. There are many scenes of sustained, unpleasant noise, a barrage of sounds we cannot escape (screaming, medical testing, and supernatural voices) which build tremendous tension, which stop with a cut to the next, completely silent shot.  We feel the physical effects of the noise when it suddenly stops: the heart pounds, our blood pressure rises, the anxiety intensifies in the same way as it would from listening to a deafening, broken car horn. 

There are also numerous “boo” effects, like a sudden, loud ringing telephone, an unexpected flareup of a candle in a dark attic, or the scream leading out of an uneventful sequence.  These make us jump, in a fight-or-flight response, before we are confronted with a visual horror that might repulse us.  One cannot block out the experience by averting the eyes, because it takes us too much by surprise, and the sound effects are almost always worse.

If one studies the film closely, we are exposed to all of its cinematic fright techniques during the movie’s 15-minute prologue with Father Merrin in Iraq. All of the manipulations of the movie are here: the sustained noise, the mysterious visuals, the sight of a metalworker’s milky white eye (foreshadowing Regan’s frightful white pupils), his escape from a fatal collision with a fast-moving carriage containing a woman with a demonic visage, and a supernatural appearance of a hellish statue, accompanied by  sounds of dogs growling, slaughtered pigs squealing and bees buzzing menacingly.

These and other subliminal visual and auditory tricks affect the viewer unconsciously, and leave us thinking we have witnessed something utterly terrifying.  The truth is, we have been manipulated into thinking so.

Something else disturbed me in my recent viewing: the film’s assumption that audiences, unconsciously or otherwise, fear Islam.  As the movie’s opening credits begin, sinister music, like a piano wire being scratched, sets up a tone of mystery.  As the film’s title cuts in, blazing red across the screen, we hear on the soundtrack the voice of a man in Islamic prayer. While it establishes the location of the prologue, it also makes an unfortunate connection between Islam and evil, arousing our ingrained, unconscious suspicion of The Other, especially in a film in which Christianity plays a central, heroic role.

Even with the objections the film raises decades after its release, there are a couple ideas within “The Exorcist”—both metaphorical and tangible—that make it a perfect movie for the era of coronavirus and the political circus it created.

The most obvious parallel is the idea that a mysterious “illness” has invaded an innocent child.  The transformation is frightening, just as the sudden onset and deadly symptoms of covid-19 fill most of us with fear.  For believers, the possibility of demonic possession remains remote but nonetheless real; the possibility of contracting this novel virus is also real, but not so remote. Thus far, medicine has not produced a cure, although many of us look to science for hope, if not pray for a miracle.

In a bigger way, Regan’s transformation is a perfect, metaphoric image of our culture’s malaise.  The ugly effects of decades of ignorance decaying our ideals, of insults hurled about with no apparent consequence, the defiance with which people behave with harmful effects to themselves and others, and the hope that someone or something might come along to make things better…all of these feelings are aroused by watching “The Exorcist” today.  Rather than help avoid the problems outside, “The Exorcist” illustrated different ways to feel anxious about them!

One monolog, delivered by Father Merrin as a warning to Karras prior to the ritual, is prophetic, and pertinent to our current state of misinformation about our political and health dilemmas:

“…He is a liar. The demon is a liar.  He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, and powerful. So don’t listen to him! Remember that. Do not listen.”

There has never been another film like “The Exorcist”, even though it has been endlessly imitated, and influenced countless horror movies since.  Like many films of its era, it could never be made in today’s Hollywood.  Whether you appreciate (let alone actually enjoy) it or not, everyone involved gave the best of their talents to create a convincing, technical marvel of shocking impact, if not a lasting work of art. 

Best of all are Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, whose presence alone lets us breathe a little easier; Jason Miller as the troubled Father Karras; Ellen Burstyn as the volatile, concerned Chris McNeil; Linda Blair, who suffers the torments of the damned, as little Regan; and veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge, whose distinctive husky voice provides the demon’s voice, and the most memorable shocks in the movie.

William Peter Blatty did an admirable job paring down his novel into a workable screenplay, managing to give cinematic life to things that would never have been dreamed possible.  He sparred with director Friedkin about the inclusion of quieter moments of dialogue that lent some meaning to the infernal goings-on.

If “The Exorcist” lacks substance for contemporary viewers, especially non-believers, it rests on Friedkin’s shoulders for eliminating that substance.  (Blatty ultimately prevailed; an “extended cut” released several years ago restored at least one crucial dialog between Merrin and Karras that gave the audience some guidance into what it all meant.)  The final cut was approved by a director who assumed that audiences would be impatient to sit through too much exposition before the horror began.

If you enjoy being scared, or even brutalized, by a horror film, then give yourself over to “The Exorcist”, and let it work its evil magic on your psyche.  On the other hand, I don’t think any movie can capture the terror of this election year as the pandemic rages on.