Suspiria

SUSPIRIA

(1977)

Dir - Dario Argento

Overall: GREAT

The finest Italian horror film of all time both defines many of the tropes of European genre cinema for its era while also forgoing thematic analysis.  Suspiria is not so much a movie that is "about" something as much as it is simply a movie for movie's sake.  It is a visceral experience that exists wholly within the realm of the cinematic, something where sound and visuals entwine in perfect harmony to create ninety-eight minutes of vibrant nightmare fuel.  There is a story going on in Suspiria of course, but as is the case with much Italian cinema from the 1970s, the story is in service to what it sounds and looks like.  Conventionally speaking, movies work the other way around, where a story is present and then decisions are made in how to tell that story.  For Dario Argento and his crew, this was likely no different in conception, but the results consistently eschew standard narrative immersion in place of a purely cinematic immersion.

 

This was Argento's sixth feature from behind the lens in nearly as many years, Dario having been born into the movie-making industry as his father was a producer and his mother a fashion designer.  Of course much has been said about how much of an Alfred Hitchcock fan Argento was and is, and one only needs to take a cursory glance at any of his film's to see the influence of the Master of Suspense.  So as a movie fan who came up in the industry, it makes sense that Argento's work is always designed in a way where things like logic and plot are secondary to the film's overall aesthetic.  These are movies made by someone who loves movies, crafting them in a way where they work as sensory experiences to be seen in glorious detail on a big screen and with a bitching sound system where the audio and the visuals hold sway.  There is no movie in Argento's filmography where this is more paramount, (and relentlessly so), than Suspiria.

 

"Relentless" being a key word.

After casting her as the co-lead in his previous film Deep Red, Argento and actor/screenwriter Daria Nicolodi became a couple and in turn collaborated on the follow-up.  It has been said that Nicolodi was responsible for pushing Argento into supernatural horror and away from the giallo which he had helped popularize and had much success with, and while there may be credence to this claim, Argento was at a point where a change in genre was welcome anyway.  After his Animal Trilogy of giallos opened his career, he had already tried to movie away from such material with the 1973 comedy The Five Days, a film that failed at the box office and quickly made him return to the giallo with his tail between his legs.  Thankfully he one-upped himself with that giallo, Deep Red being arguably the best of them and a high watermark for the filmmaker.  The stage was therefor set, either to continue staying in his lane with another black-gloved Italian slasher, or to try again and pivot into material that he had yet to cover.

 

Enter Nicolodi's influence where the resulting Suspiria combined her fascination with fairy tales and an alleged anecdote from her grandmother about fleeing a piano academy in fear of the teachers practicing witchcraft, all with Argento's interest in concepts found in Thomas De Quincey's 1845 essay Suspiria de Profundis, that of a European "Magic Triangle" intersection of Germany, France, and Switzerland where three Sorrows exist, ala the Greek fables of three Graces and three Fates.  These Sorrows would be "Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears", "Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness", and "Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs", the latter being chosen as the big baddie in the film.

 

A big baddie who snores a lot apparently.

In contradiction to the idea that the narrative is an afterthought here, this may seem like a lot of material to be mined into a multilayered story about young coming-of-age women who face off against ancient evil forces that have been holding sway over a specific geographical location, causing mischief for centuries that could be attributed to all kinds of European turmoil.  While some of this may technically be what happens in Suspiria, you have to make leaps to these conclusions which Argento does not bother alluding to much.  The bare bones plot of Suzy Bannion arriving in a foreign country and uncovering a creepy mystery as to what her female dance instructors are up to is all there, but we are never given details as to any profound significance therein.  Instead, Argento hits us with style over substance right out of the gate, only letting up for a couple of necessary pauses so that the audience can catch their breath, settle their heart rate, and get some exposition until the next sensory explosion of primal colors and Goblin's wailing soundtrack hits again.

 

Suspiria is about those sensory explosions, and arguably ONLY about those sensory explosions.  This is in turn a master stroke because once again, we can look at the trope of European and specifically Italian genre movies from the day being more about set pieces than ironclad narrative cohesion.  People can watch Suspiria, the work of Lucio Fulci, some of the more ridiculous Spaghetti Westerns, or pick any giallo from the 1970s and they can laugh at how many plot points do not pass the icebox test.  Passing such a test is never the point though, and it is certainly not the point in Suspiria, but what works so well here is the type of otherworldly realm that it exists in.  By rooting the movie squarely in the supernatural, every outlandish and horrifying thing that happens needs no tangible explanation.  In fact if it had such an explanation, the nightmare illusion would be shattered, just like when you are having such a nightmare and realize that you are dreaming, at which point you wake up and the fun is all over.

 

And who would want to spoil this woman's fun?

Argento keeps that fun going throughout the movie, largely by throwing one inexplicable scene at us after the next.  We get yellow eyes and a hairy monster hand emerging from a window three stories up, a woman getting her still-beating heart stabbed on some type of scaffolding or balcony that is never shown to us, her friend screaming and banging on doors that no living soul answers as if she is the one being murdered, a blind man getting swooped down upon by some invisible force only for his trusted seeing-eye dog to lurch at him and rip his throat open, maggots descending from the ceiling and coming from a room-temperature attic where someone inexplicably was keeping raw meat, the main witch who is hidden throughout the whole film inexplicably deciding to sleep just on the other side of a flimsy sheet when the entire school is huddled together in the dance hall, a room brimful of wire, door handles placed at eye level, and of course impossible blue, red, or green color schemes nearly everywhere.

 

Even the opening where Jessica Harper leaves the Munich-Riem Airport and ventures into a pitch-black stormy night, we are already presented with vibrant colors intruding upon an otherwise actual location.  Also, the rude cab driver that she frantically flags down seems off to say the least, a man who refuses to help her with her luggage, has no idea where she insists on going at first, and then ignores her questions throughout their ride, only coldly staring at her when he has to.  All the while, the Black Forest in Freiburg, Germany is ominously shown outside like a series of prison walls, engulfing the cab while Goblin's score does half if not more than half of the mood setting until and during our first yet not last hilariously heightened murder sequence.

 

Imagine driving through here on any night while listening to any part of Goblin's soundtrack and NOT shitting your pants.

Which of course brings us to Goblin, the Italian prog band that collaborates with Argento for the second time here.  Whereas their previous score for Deep Red was full of catchy and stylish rock tunes done in a conventional band setting, their Suspiria score is a beast like no other.  Argento said to have worked closely with the group in concocting it, the music being finished before filming even began and apparently played on set at high volume to induce the correct atmosphere for the cast.  To say that this movie has the best soundtrack out of any in the horror genre is something that can barely be debated.  John Carpenter does a bang-up job in Halloween, Bernard Herrmann composed the most instantly recognizable sting during the shower scene in Psycho, (equal to John William's Jaws theme of course), but what Goblin does here is singular.  No horror movie is as naked without its music than Suspiria is, to the point where it is impossible to imagine the outlandish visuals without the equally outlandish sounds.

 

Music is often problematic in movies, dictating emotions to the audience that undercut a level of verisimilitude that would otherwise be achieved if we witnessed the drama unfolding on screen in a sober context.  Yet again, because Suspiria is not going for verisimilitude in the slightest, it only makes sense for the soundtrack to be as all encompassing as it is.  This is NOT a sober film.  This is a film to be swallowed up by.  At regular intervals, Argento gives us a break from Goblin's uncanny mixture of eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, "Witch!" screams, wailing vocals, unintelligible whispered gibberish, and all kinds of avant-garde noise, but the cacophony of sound always comes back, hounding us into a stupor where the creep-factor is intoxicating.  It often times seems as if the characters are hearing the same pummeling noises that we are, which would only make sense in a universe where rooms change to primal colors, and dogs, maggots, hairy arms, and wire rooms attack at a moment's notice.

 

Warning: men in picture are far more terrifying than they look.

As stated, this is style over substance, more overtly than even usual for Dario Argento who has made a career out of such tactics.  It is amazing to see what he accomplishes here at the peak of his powers and with a significant budget at his disposal.  Just compare it to any of his films from the last several decades to see the difference merely in the presentation.  When stuck with limited shooting schedules and funds, Argento regular forgoes flashy camera setups and ingenious shot construction out of necessity, let alone indulging in any kind of wild set or costume designs.  That is why his later movies often feature heightened performances instead, perhaps to compensate for the lack of visual flair since his scripts are routinely threadbare enough that other components require exaggeration to give his films SOMETHING to elevate them.  While Alida Valli chomps at the scenery a bit in Suspiria as the cold and butch dance instructor, and the English dubbing in these movies always renders the performances jarring at best, unintentionally silly at worst, most of the portrayals come off as level-headed.  This provides the necessary contrast to how exaggerated the film looks and sounds.  If EVERYTHING was cranked up to eleven, it would come off as ridiculous instead of ridiculous AND atmospheric.

 

Suspiria therefor represents Argento at his best, in a transitional phase where he had the clout and success behind him to take a chance with the financial backing to capture lightning in a bottle.  Every frame of the movie is visually stunning; even the "normal" ones where characters are merely sitting around are done so in loudly decorated rooms where the wallpaper and set design is as eye-catching as any of the bright red blood splatter.  Shit, even when shooting outside in broad daylight at the BMW Headquarters for a young and dashing Udo Kier cameo, Argento stages elaborate camera angles, some way high up looking down at the characters as if they are insect-size, some low angle closeups, zooms, and reflection images, including one where the director can be seen watching the acting unfold.  Yet just like the lack of who, why, what, and where all syncing up perfectly under a microscope, the film's imperfections enhance the unique, strange, and surreal nature of what we are watching and hearing.  There are other genre films the indulge in nightmare logic with elaborate camera set ups, over the top death sequences, and memorable music, but none of them are as masterfully aligned as Suspiria.  Argento himself would never top it, (never come close in fact), but considering that no one else has either, it would be asinine to expect him to.

 

Go right ahead Mr. Argento, you have earned the right to make Dracula 3D.

Halloween

HALLOWEEN

(1978)

Dir - John Carpenter

Overall: GREAT

 

If there is one thing that critics and intellectuals, (the two of which are often mutually exclusive), like to do, it is to over-analyze a work of art.  John Carpenter's Halloween was a little movie that could, launched into production quickly, shot just as quickly, and released without any expectations that it would become one of the horror genre's biggest game changers.  It was a humble film and in effect still is.  DIY in its execution, Carpenter, his friends or their friends, some independent producers and financiers, plus a cast made up almost exclusively of not big names who were working for scale all rolled up their sleeves and made the movie happen.  No one would predict that it would become one the most financially successful independent movies ever made, let a lone a movie that would immediately begat an entire sub-genre and in turn spawn a franchise that like Michael Myers himself, still refuses to die.

 

Anyone involved in the film's production would have been absurd to foresee any of its immediate or lasting impact, and this is what makes it such a masterwork.  That is to say the movie's unassuming simplicity is its key.  Halloween has its direct slasher roots in things like Italian giallos, Bob Clarke's Black Christmas, and the works of Alfred Hitchcock of course.  Masked or disguised killers picking off naked or half-naked women was nothing new.  The film's success and influence lies more in its execution though.  It takes a little movie that could to change the rules.  More to the point, it takes a creative team behind it who know what the hell they are doing to change the rules.  Carpenter was such a force from behind the lens, (and behind the typewriter and the synthesizer), that tasked with creative control in making a meager babysitter killer movie set on the year's spookiest holiday, proceeded to strip everything down by necessity.  He could not go big or go home.  He had to be clever and go home.

 

"We ain't got time for nothing fancy, just get IN AND OUT of P.J. Soles and let's move on" - See what I did there?

Producer Irwin Yablans and money guy Moustapha Akkad reached out to Carpenter with the title Halloween, the bare bones premise behind it, and after securing a measly $300,000ish budget, it was all systems go with the ragtag group of people on board.  The list was not limited to Deborah Hill, (co-screenwriting, producing, six-year-old Michal Myer's stabbing hand), Dean Cundy, (cinematographer), Tommy Lee Wallace, (production designing, co-editing), and Nick Castle, (himself a filmmaker and buddy of Carpenter's who performed as "The Shape" Michael Myers for allegedly $25 a day).  According to legend, even the actors helped move gear around and set up shots.  It has the same kind of "Whoo-hoo we're making a movie!", all hands on deck energy that George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead had and would have.  Like those films, Halloween was backed into a corner from a production standpoint, and the people who made it had to think on their feet, work within their means, and perhaps most importantly, utilize a concept that was doable within those means.

 

That very concept and the one which film essayists have projected their own intricate theories onto is actually a pedestrian one.  Something along the lines of "Evil exists for the mere sake of it, and it cannot be controlled, cannot be reasoned with, and is still out there".  This is what Halloween is about because that is what Carpenter directly intended it to be about based on the project that he was given and the money to make it with.  In his words, it was "No big deal".

 

A William Shatner mask?  Sure, that'll do.

It is fun to critique Halloween as an allegory about the dangers of sexual promiscuity amongst women and/or horny teenagers, about repressed male desires manifesting themselves violently, about crippling American values where young women are left to fend for themselves due to absent adult figures, about the horrors of suburbia where working class white folks flee from the cities only to still find themselves as easy prey, or as a feminist empowerment vehicle that established the final girl trope where one lady is always left standing up against the killer.  Cases can be made that Halloween works as some conservative morality play where people who take a lackadaisical approach to living in their seemingly safe and neutered little communities still better look after their kids, keep their genitals in their pants, and watch out for the impending doom from outside of town.  It is more accurate though to remember that this is a boogeyman movie first and foremost, one made in an unpretentious manner and all the better because of it.

 

When watching Halloween all of these decades and terrible sequels later, viewers may find it difficult to be in the same state of mind as the original audience was.  This may seem like a "back in my day" boomer complaint, but it is part of the double-edged sword impact that seminal works in a genre manifest in the first place.  Even the initial 1978 audience was annoyed by Jamie Lee Curtis' protagonist repeatedly dropping the knife right next to Michal Myer's clearly not dead torso when she thought that the danger was over.  This was done as part of the audience immersion though.  Curtis' Laurie Strode was meant to be a sympathetic folly to Myer's relentless evil; an unassuming, all American teenager girl, (and the only one of her three friends that was not sexually active by the way), who would make foolish decisions when caught completely off guard by the boogeyman coming to get her.

 

Yeah, might wanna hold onto that pointy sewing needle there Laurie, just to be on the safe side.

We the viewer though have seen too many horror movies and know how stupid it is for her to continually assume that the boogeyman is going to stay down.  This was still the case when the film came out since the general rule was that the people in a horror movie do not know that they are in a horror movie, (at least until Wes Craven started nodding and winking at the audience some time later with Scream).  Yet today, and after all of the abysmal slasher movies that came in Halloween's wake, we are even MORE annoyed at Laurie's lack of foresight.  This can be seen as a "flaw" if one is to have a cynical perspective; a lazy trope that takes us out of the film because of its over-use.  In other words, the opposite of the film's intended and initial immersion factor where even though we were irked by Laurie's "dumb people in horror movies" behavior, we still liked her and our yelling at the screen was part of the fun.

 

Yet one could say this about many aspects of Halloween, including its musical score which dictates a mood the whole way through, or the way in which Michael Myers appears and then disappears while characters are looking directly at him, or the jump scares and soundtrack spikes that give us a jolt along the way.  These are movie tricks that have been done ad nauseum, some before Halloween even came out, let alone incessantly since.  Carpenter's film has its fare share of them, but context gives it leniency.  We cannot put ourselves in the headspace of the popcorn-munching public who made the film the sleeper hit that it became.  There is a level of innocence that is lost.  In the case of Halloween, it comes from the fact that it was so skillfully done, so engaging, so atmospheric, so universally creepy that countless other horror films immediately starting snatching up all kinds of its ingredients, almost always without understanding how they worked in unison with each other or more importantly, how they would quickly stop working once done to numbing effect, movie after movie.

 

Per example, anyone seen this piece of absolute dogshit?

Halloween itself has the even more uphill battle for modern audiences in the fact that it became a franchise.  Continuing the Michael Myers saga is such a moronic idea that one has to laugh at it, in addition to being frustrated by it.  Think about how the movie ends.  As we discussed, Myers repeatedly comes back up each time that Laurie strikes him down.  Fueled by pure uncompromising evil, he will not stop his pursuit no matter how much bodily injury befalls him.  We are shown that Michael Myers is made of flesh and blood from the very opening scene where his six-year-old form in a clown costume murders his sister and stares blankly into the street when his parents come home and unmask him, bloody knife in hand.  We are told from Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis that what he dealt with for fifteen years was an emotionless monster, but a human that was an emotionless monster.

 

Yet Myers seems to possess supernatural endurance, not to mention the eerie ability to disappear in the blink of an eye when patiently stalking his prey.  There is something...more to Michael Myers than merely being a psychopathic killer.  Again, countless other films have done this and many of them bring the killer back again and again in sequels.  In Halloween though, this idea is understated enough to subtly unnerve.  In Terrifier, Art the Clown hacks obnoxious people up in cartoonishly gory fashion, only to blow his head off and just come back alive willy-nilly.  There is nothing unnerving there, just schlock ridiculousness. After taking nearly an hour to kill someone again on screen, silently stalking them while we occasionally hear him breathe, our final glimpse of Michael Myers has him laying on the ground after falling two stories from Loomis emptying his revolver into him.  There is more though, as the film itself does not wrap up until we get one last shot of the ground where he just was and just like he keeps doing, he is no longer where he was.  We then get a fantastic montage of various locations where the action took place before, all still, all dark, all quiet, and all void of Michael Myer's physical frame.  This means that he is still out there.  Evil is still out there, and it has shown us that it will always be out there, always returning, always attacking the most relatable victims that it can.

 

There's something so unsettling about a boy flying a kite at night...and about Michael Myers disappearing...again.

So, why show us more of this in future installments?  Worse yet, why add more of a backstory to Myers?  Why treat him like a character at all and not merely the embodiment of pure evil that he actually is?  The more we see of him, the more exploits of his that we witness, the more horror cliches that clutter up his on screen appearances, the more possible or direct explanations we get as to his origin and motivation, the more it deflates what is so disturbing about him.  Michael Myers does not become more scary when we see him stalking more, killing more, getting back up more, being blown up and surviving more, getting more ooga-booga supernatural nonsense thrown into his roots, or getting whatever the hell appalling garbage Rob Zombie decided to do with him.  He becomes more scary when the camera shows us where he was at the end of Halloween and then...never shows him to us again.  This film's finale is profoundly creepy, arguably the creepiest ever done, yet only if we are to ignore everything that followed it.  Not just the sequels, reboots, and retcons, (or fuck knows what other nostalgia bate that unimaginative studios are going to come up with to keep this shit going), but also the gallons of slasher movies that proceeded it.  By adding more, they only take away what works so well.

 

So yes, context is important.  Watching Halloween as a standalone film, a film that is wonderfully accomplished by a director who grew up on genre pictures and knew what aspects worked, how they worked, and why they worked, is a rewarding experience as much as watching any other outstanding bit of celluloid that has come down the pike.  It is just that it takes some mental manipulation on our parts to see it as such, nearly five decades later.  Thankfully, Halloween is so well done that it can still be enjoyed for the crowd-pleasing movie that it is, both on its lone terms and as a property that begat lesser properties.  This once again brings us to the film's simplicity.  It still works because the concept is simple; "What if the boogeyman was real?  What would that be like?".  The music, (easily some of the best and most famous music in any horror movie), works because it is so simple.  Carpenter's rudimentary keyboard chops came through, his score never gets in the way; it only intensifies an already chilling experience.  The mood is relentless, just as Michael Myers is.  The small budget and means of filming could only produce something so unpretentious and in effect, excellent.  We can over-analyze Halloween, yell at Laurie when she drops the knife, compare it to all the other Halloweens, and take or leave the slasher sub-genre that emerged from its primordial ooze, but if one can actually get in that proper state of mind, nothing can interfere with how much of a masterpiece it is.  Michael Myers is authentic evil.  Halloween is authentic horror.

 

Authentic horror...in photographic form.

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 film 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 movies 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 or even 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, (stated in the novel yet only implied 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.