The Exorcist

THE EXORCIST

(1973)

Dir - William Friedkin

Overall: GREAT

 

What more can be said about a seminal horror film, (perhaps the MOST seminal horror film), that has not already been said time and time again?  The Exorcist is considered a major game changer in its genre, a genre that both its director William Friedkin and star Linda Blair have gone on record as saying does not belong in that genre.  While such a sentiment may seem fundamentally eyebrow rolling, pretentious, and contrarian for the sake of it, there is something to it.  Ironically considering its persistently lauded reputation, The Exorcist does not adhere to the typical horror trope formula.

 

To understand this, one must put it into the correct historical context.  At the time, horror films were seldom if ever done in such a grounded manner.  The term "horror" was a naughty word of sorts for any filmmaker who wished to be taken seriously, especially a freshly established New Hollywood auteur such as Friedkin who was hot off The French Connection.  Horror movies were generally cheap B-pictures by major or minor studios, or even more disparagingly, low-end regional ones made by nonprofessionals and with local crews and inexperienced actors.  They were often meant to be disposable crap that filled drive-in double bills while teenagers lost their virginity or desperately tried to while sitting in their cars with their dates.  Whether shown in conventional theaters, dingy grindhouse theaters, or those aforementioned outdoor drive-ins, horror properties were rarely taken seriously by either the people booking them, watching them, or making them.

 

Just picture this, except the cars are bumping up and down and Godzilla is on the screen.

Of course there were always exceptions to this; horror movies that were done with professional care and made a critical splash if not also a lingering influence over the genre.  After all, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead arrived four years before The Exorcist began shooting and set the template for the type of grim, social critique horror movie that threw the happy ending out the window and presented an inescapable scenario the mirrored the types of hardships and upheaval that people during the late 1960s were going through.

 

The Exorcist's saga of good and evil and the mystery and struggle of faith may not have directly spoke to a disenfranchised public who were fed-up with the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's unsavory shenanigans in the Oval Office, but it was a horror film done by a hotshot director, based off a hotshot novel, and put into production by a major studio that wanted a major success to make good on the type of films that were such successes at the time.  American Graffiti, Serpico, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Detail; these were the other major works done that year which garnished award nominations and got butts in the seats.  In other words, The Exorcist was not meant to be played along with José Ramón Larraz' Vampyres or Larry Cohen's It's Alive! or Peter Walker's House of Whipcord.  Considering the fact that Warner Bros. brought in Friedkin to direct and allowed for the novel's author William Peter Blatty to serve as a first time producer signifies that enough faith was given to the production to make it a worthy successor to The French Connection, a movie that won Best Picture in 1972 as well as granting Friedkin a trophy of his own for directing it.

 

Little did anyone know, this little Chicago-born pipsqueak was going to be the new face of horror.

One has to remember that this was that all-too-brief era where A-level money was put into "risky" properties that young filmmakers were making.  The New Hollywood produced Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, and of course William Friedkin.  Giving these young bucks the creative freedom to take chances and either adapt or concoct boundary-pushing stories in an unflinching manner that was previously unheard of during the censored studio system had proved profitable by the time that The Exorcist was underway.  Yes Warner Bros., Friedkin, and Blatty were telling a story about a twelve-year-old girl possessed by a demon who was going to spit pea soup, spin her head 360 degrees around, fuck herself with a crucifix, and speak in a bowl-churning voice, but they had no intention of exploiting the subject matter.  They had no intention of making a William Castle camp spectacle.  They had no intention of doing what Blumhouse and David Gordon Green would do with it fifty years later.  Now let us never speak of THAT again.

 

So in this context, NOT considering The Exorcist a horror film is not such an outrageous prospect.  If Friedkin would have adhered to the tropes that were already common within the genre, (incessant scary music, melodramatic performances, a complete lack of subtlety in place of pedestrian sensationalism, etc), the results likely would have been forgettable at best, wretched at worst.  Oddly enough, it was what the film DIDN'T do that ended up influencing what the horror film WOULD do from there on out, to the point of self parody.  The Exorcist established so much in the lexicon of horror that it quickly got copied, recopied, and copied again.  Modern audiences may scoff and laugh at many of the heightened moments that occur during it, but that is both because those moments have been duplicated ad nauseam and because the movie was such a staggering hit and a cultural phenomenon that the initial shock value quickly evaporated into the pop culture ether.  We now say "The power of Christ compels you!" as a joke.  When the movie was being made though and initially seen, a joke was the last thing that it was.

 

Behold, The Exorcist's true legacy.

William Friedkin may have had some dubious directorial methods like firing a live gun on set to shock people and practically crippling Ellen Burstyn, (plus he would eventually turn into the hilarious epitome of old boomer yells at cloud), but he deserves the credit for many choices made in The Exorcist which bypassed how terrible it could have been.  No one involved debated the fact that Blatty's initial script based off his own novel was an overblown mess the heightened the horror elements to schlock proportions.  Also consider that the original score by Lalo Schifrin was rejected for cluttering up intimate scenes with the type of typical ruinous bombast that many, many movie scores suffer from.  Also also consider that they had cast Stacy Keach, (an established and known actor), as Father Damien Karras before Jason Miller, (a playwright who had never acted before on screen and whose work Friedkin just so happened to be familiar with), lobbied and got the part.  Then consider that seemingly everyone involved with the production wanted the prologue in northern Iraq omitted.  Even Bernard Herman who Friedkin allegedly showed a work print to in order to potentially score, said that he should get rid of the opening.  Billy stuck to his guns on all of these decisions though, stripping out the nonsense in Blatty's script to get it back to what worked so well in the book, omitting the score, hiring Miller, and keeping the Iran introduction in order to establish the ideal mood of slowly encroaching doom.

 

There is a level of intimacy to the movie that enhances each aspect of it.  What incidental music is used is used sparingly, usually only between transitions.  When characters are talking, that is all that you are hearing.  When characters are not talking, you are hearing what they are hearing, whether it is the subtle clicking of a clock or all the objects in Regan MacNeill's room flying all over the place, poltergeist style.  Moments of stillness have a gradual tension to them, and they are generally interrupted by bursts of chaos.  This is never done in a tripe "jump scare" sense where a first time audience member will see the loud noises coming a mile away because the music stopped and the camera is lingering on a character looking around slowly.  Since so little music is featured and none during dialog scenes, we witness the characters contemplating their unbelievable situation in the most intimate context.  We panic when they panic; when any brief reprieve that they get is interrupted by demonic fate.

 

You could cut the tension with a knife during this coffee break, per example.

There is a moment during the actual exorcism where Miller and Max von Sydow are taking five, sitting exhausted, confused, and terrified on the steps of the rented MacNeill residence.  Why is this happening to this young girl specifically?  What is the point?  Sydow's Father Merrin proclaims that he believes the idea is to make them despair.  The possession is not about a twelve-year-old girl.  It is about making those who care for her to lose their faith in a higher and better power that would otherwise intervene on her behalf and defeat the forces of darkness wreaking havoc.  The film is asking both the characters and the audience to believe in two things simultaneously; the existence of pure evil and the existence of pure good to combat that evil.

 

This is a profound question for a horror film to ask, and one that has been asked going all the way back to the silent era when the bad guys were almost always defeated by the good guys.  Yet The Exorcist presents the question uniquely in how sobering it is, how quiet, how contemplative.  We have seen a combination of over-the-top possession sequences along with many more minutes of these people living in a world that is palpable.  This was at Friedkin's insistence, to strip the movie of as much cinematic artifice as possible so that we could immerse ourselves in what is going on.  The fact that he was still able to do this while also having a Linda Blair dummy rotate its head all the way around is a testament to how goddamn good of a job he did.

 

Pictured: stripped cinematic artifice.

While horror is a varied genre that can be enjoyable in its many facets, what it often does best is what The Exorcist does best.  That is to ground us in the real world while presenting a scenario that is otherworldly.  If this was merely a movie about a single mother working as an actor who had a daughter struggling with an absent father, cross-cut with a psychiatrist priest struggling with his lack of faith due to the guilt he feels after his mother died, cross-cut again with a different and much older priest struggling from a type of psychological impending doom, it would still be an engaging movie.  There is so much there to examine, so much that could and in effect IS wonderfully portrayed here.  We get all of that in The Exorcist.  Yet we also get an actual demon thrown into the mix and more to the point, we then have to come to terms with what that demon's existence means in this real world.

 

This is also what the characters have to come to terms with.  How does it affect Burstyn's mother, a nonreligious woman who is at her wit's end and going through a nervous breakdown as her only daughter is suffering beyond the means of what science can fix or even diagnose?  How does it affect the story's most innocent player, Blair's Regan who becomes the unwilling vessel of evil in order to break the spirit of those around her?  How does it affect Miller's Karras, a man who is devastated by the loss of his own mother and feels as if his faith has left him when he needs that faith the most to save a child that he has never even met?  How does it affect Sydow's Merrin, a man who knows that he is not long for this world, has done battle with this same demonic entity before, (implied but never directly stated in the film), and yet is determined to vanquish this evil again, falling victim to it instead?

 

"Christ, not this shit again" - actual line of dialog.

Friedkin said that another theme of the movie was that of ritual.  The exorcism itself of course is a ritual, specific phrases and mannerisms passed down in the Catholic faith in order to call on the name of a higher force so that a human body can be rid of a demonic presence.  There is also the ritual of science, when doctor after doctor examine and perform tests on Regan in order to determine what is causing her alarming and increasingly volatile behavior.  They put her through all types of contraptions, resulting in the film's most disturbing sequence where she undergoes an angiography procedure that can still make audience's wince, (Blatty included).  None of these medical "rituals" produce any satisfactory results.  Instead, their purpose is to push Burstyn to the breaking point where she reaches out in desperation to the only avenue left for her, that of the spiritual and in effect, the "unbelievable".

 

Both Billy's, Blatty and Friedkin, are believers in their respected religious faiths.  Blatty was a devout Catholic and was coming from such a place when he wrote the novel, presenting a story where biblical good triumphed over biblical evil.  Friedkin was raised Jewish, labeled himself an agnostic, yet also fully adhered to various teachings of Jesus Christ.  He too was coming from a place of belief in a higher power that would win out when up against the nefarious opposite of that power.  One can read the ending of The Exorcist in different ways, ways in which both Blatty and Friedkin differed.  The former insisted on Father Karras resorting to his "normal" facial features after temporarily becoming monstrous, signifying that he makes the leap out of the window based on his own accord once inviting the demon inside of him.  Friedkin adhered to the author's wishes, yet he also saw it as a compromise and took issue with it.  Why would Karrass willingly commit suicide, (a grave sin in Catholicism), as his final act?  More to the point, why would the demon bother to adhere to his invitation in the first place and even if it did, why not just jump right back into Regan's body after Karras tumbles down all those steps to his demise?

 

Demonic constipation be like.

So, who is right?  Did good win because Karrass welcomed the demon inside of him and then curtailed it out the window, committing a selfless act that in turn would doom him in the afterlife according to his own faith?  Was that enough to sway the demon not only out of Regan, but also out of the entire situation since it failed to cause the level of despair that it set out to?  Did the demon just have its fun and skedaddled, or was Karras' final act the one thing that the demon could not return from?  Perhaps in Friedkin's mind, this would not be enough.  Perhaps to him, it is too far-fetched in a story that is already asking a lot of its audience, a lot of supernatural bologna to buy into.  Since Regan survives, one can view the film as having a "happy" ending in that respect, but both Karras and Merrin meet their doom at the hands of the demon.  So, who wins; good or evil?

 

Though it is not necessary, many a great story has an air of ambiguity to it.  The Exorcist may seem cut-and-dry in some respects, but there is a level of uncertainty here.  This makes it a more weighty film.  We do not even have to take into account that Blatty would eventually follow it up with his 1983 novel Legion and his subsequent and excellent sequel adaptation The Exorcist III.  Just viewing the initial movie, we are left with lingering feelings and questions as to the very nature of the material, the mystery of fate and of faith.  Two characters, (both unknown to each other and both entrenched to a point in the spiritual world), are continuously shown to be drawn to two other characters apart from that world who are inexplicably brought into it against their will.  Their stories converge, fate has brought them together to wrestle with the existence of good and evil.  Once that wrestling has finished, half of them are dead and the other half are left ravished by the experience.  Evil certainly did its damage, but that same evil has also seemingly left the premises, and now the viewer is stuck to ponder the meaning of it all.  The Exorcist encourages such discourse, as many of the best movies can do.  Call it a great horror film or just a great film, but great is assuredly is.

 

The Exorcist definitely RISES to the occasion?  Eh, eh?  Ah, shut up.