Film review: The Exorcist (1973)
The Rev and the Reels, Part 3
We were at school talking about the scariest movies we had ever seen. I think I was nine or ten.
At 8, I saw Poltergeist and couldn’t sleep with my blinds open for months. The old tree outside my window reminded me too much of demonic branches reaching in to grab a little boy. What frightened me most about that scene was the horrible groaning sound the tree made as it attempted to swallow him up. Once the child was extricated, I also remember him being covered with mud, which at first glance looked like blood.
Did the tree have teeth? Or was it going to squeeze him dry?
UGH!
“For me it was The Exorcist,” my friend Phoebe said. She was a fascinating kid, often in black, with beautiful, wild, witchy blonde hair. “I was six. It was so scary it made me pee my pants.”
I can’t believe someone let her watch it! The film’s reputation began to coil up in a dark cobweb-addled corner of my brain.
One day I’ll watch it. I will, I thought.
But first, I read it.
I can’t remember how old I was, maybe twelve. And the book scared the crap out of me.
Finally, I decided, I was ready to watch it. And so my best friend Meghan and I did.
And honestly? I was disappointed!
Don’t get me wrong, it was terrifying. But since I had been “prepped” for some of the more disturbing scenes through reading the book, it didn’t feel like such a shock.
What I remember most of all was not the loud, dramatic moments of Regan’s self-abuse or even the exorcism itself. Those were frightening, yes, but it was just the same as the book. What I remember being most effective were the quieter scenes, particularly the one where Chris investigates unknown noises in the attic. No music, nothing to elicit responses other than pure experience alongside the character. Noises from the attic, much too loud to be rats, and a bizarre flash of her candle, with no known source, never explained.
Or perhaps Father Karras’s silent and cryptic dream, running toward his mother as she stands at the top of the subway steps, speaking his name silently and then descending as he runs to her.
The skin writing was pretty freaky too, and those few moments where Father Karras, alone with Reagan who for the moment looks only like a very sick little girl, suddenly hears the voice of his dead mother coming from her cracked lips: “Dimmy, why you do this to me?”
William Peter Blatty, the author of the original novel, based the story on the famous case of “Roland Doe”, a boy in 1940s Maryland who was said to have exhibited many of the same symptoms as Regan MacNeil. “Roland,” who has since been identified, was exorcised by a Catholic priest. The case was pretty controversial and has been evaluated by plenty of skeptics who cast significant doubt on the whole thing.
Blatty, who heard about “Roland” in university at Georgetown, supposedly wanted to bring people to the Roman Catholic Church with this book, exploring the nature of evil and sounding the alarm. Once it began a movie, famously, the demand for exorcisms, on a historic decline for decades, skyrocketed. So much of what we believe demonic possession looks like comes from this story.
William Friedkin’s film, which came out very quickly after the novel, is a masterpiece of horror, but like so many other films of this nature it tells us a lot about how Hollywood encounters God and the divine.
The Exorcist to me has an uneasy relationship with the idea of an all-loving God. This uneasiness is replicated in many other films which seem to privilege the power of evil over and above good. At the very least, these films regularly demonstrate that God is, at best, a) an idiot, b) a dormant clockmaker, or, at worst, c) a cruel sadist who demands suffering in exchange for salvation.
It occurs to me as I write that perhaps The Exorcist claims that goodness is imparted and shared primarily by human beings, while evil is upheld and spread by demons. While the relentlessness of Regan’s possession is certainly the prevalent expression of this, there are other, small moments. The pained face of a homeless man begging in the subway station (“Couldja help an old altar boy, Faddah?”). The evidence of Satanic ritual and desecration in the nearby church. The drunken bigotry (and perhaps more?) of Burke Dennings. There are echoes of goodness, but these are all mediated by humans: the housekeepers Karl and Willie, the PA Sharon, Lt. Kinderman, Father Merrin and ultimately Karras.
What I find most fascinating about this film is that, despite the fact that it is a Catholic film, no one has much to say about God or Jesus. Neither Chris nor Regan are Christian, and it’s not the church but psychologists that recommend the exorcism rite, believing it only works due to the placebo effect. Even the clergy are remarkably closed-lipped for so-called evangelists. Aside from one conversation between Karras and his friend Tom, we don’t even really know much about what brought Karras to God or ordination. He says he’s lost his faith, but we don’t know what his faith looked like in the first place. There is really nothing to recommend Christianity here, except that its archaic rituals might save you (if you can get access to them).
But even then, one can easily argue that they don’t! After all, Karras doesn’t succeed in freeing Regan because of the exorcism ritual, but because he dares the demon to enter his own body, and sacrifices himself to save her.
So do the rites of the church really work at all, or is it the goodness of one man, who counts himself a poor example of the faith, allowing himself to be taken over by the demon and then throwing himself out a window to...what? Presumably the demon departs Karras once he has died, off to find another kid playing with a Ouija board.
The film to me is a lot more about atmosphere and the complex nature of guilt and corruption than religion itself. And that’s fine! But it becomes problematic and even frightening to see its legacy over time, with so-called exorcists, particularly from charismatic communities, conducting rites of deliverance on people who exhibit the same symptoms as Regan.
When writing a paper on exorcism in seminary, I did some research on an American televangelist and exorcist named Bob Larson. It’s surprisingly difficult to figure out what church he’s connected to, which is only one of the things that make his exorcisms (of which I watched way too many) weird. Despite being a self-proclaimed evangelical, he uses not only Bibles but crucifixes in his work, holding them against people’s faces and bodies.
But of course he does. People saw it in the movie, so that’s what we have to do.
Sociologically, it’s sort of fascinating, but as a religious official, it’s just plain weird.
While Anglicans have varying ideas about exorcism, I did not grow up doing it or knowing much about it beyond what we saw in the movies. There is a persistent rumour that in my diocese there is one diocesan exorcist, whose identity is kept secret. I have no idea if it’s true...and if it were, perhaps no one would be willing to even tell me anyway.
I do have one story though.
So when I was a parish intern (in the strange in-between landscape after I graduated but before I was ordained) my mentor (who is now my archbishop!) called me into his office. He had a truly mischievous look on his face.
“You wanna go do an exorcism with me?”
“WHAT.”
He laughed. “Okay, not really. We’ll do a house blessing. But they started by asking for an exorcism for their house.”
So we hopped in his car and drove off to an apartment not far from the church.
A very sweet couple answered the door and took us around the house, explaining that there were strange occurrences in their home and they feared it was due to malicious spirits. They showed us videos of what they claimed were subtle manipulations of textured surfaces in the home, such as popcorn ceilings and velvet fabric surfaces, which they saw as evidence of supernatural activity.
I watched the videos and saw...nothing, really.
But as we spoke to them, we heard stories of deep psychic pain, PTSD, and the self-medication attempts that all too often follow those things.
My mentor and I performed the house blessing, dashing holy water against the doors of each room and offering prayers. The couple was extremely thankful to us and offered a donation for the work of the church, promising to come visit sometime.
As we left, I turned to him. “So...I didn’t see or hear anything.”
“Nope.”
“...There were totally demons there, though.”
“Yep.”
The truth is never so simple as we would like.
