I see that The Exorcist is coming back in the movie theaters. The ad on TV said “the scariest movie of all time.” Entertainment Weekly said that as well, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as number 2. I confer with them on TCM, but the Exorcist did not scare me. It was about a bratty kid posessed by a bratty demon. When the priests came in, instead of giving the girl a good whacking they splashed holy water on her. OOOOOH! So scary…NOT. It was not scary. It was dorky.
Horror movies with too much of a religious theme, or really a christian religious theme, tend to not affect me. Why is The Exorcist so scary?
In my humble opinion, I suspect this movie may be moved elsewhere soon, but I’ll answer here anyway.
I’m into movies big time. Whenever someone asks me what’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, I answer without hesitation “The Exorcist.” I’ve only seen the movie in its entirety once, and although I have seen bits and pieces again over the years, I cannot imagine watching it all the way through again. And now it is being re-released in the theaters? Ay yi yi.
I was twelve years old in the summer of 1986 when one night I couldn’t get to sleep. I thought I’d go and watch a little TV and fall asleep to it. As it turned out, “The Exorcist” was just starting on one of the movie channels. I had heard of the movie, and that it was supposed to be frightening, but the opening fifteen to twenty minutes didn’t seem all that intimidating. I kept watching.
Huge mistake. This was NOT a movie to fall asleep by. In fact, by the time the movie was over, I was even less inclined to fall asleep than before. By the time I did get some sleep, which wasn’t until the following night, I had horrible nightmares. “The Exorcist” has the distinction of being the only movie ever to give me nightmares. “Aliens” didn’t do it. “Psycho” didn’t give me as much as a twinge. The recent re-make of “The Haunting” flat-out bored me. The vast majority of slasher movies are simply re-treads. “The Blair Witch Project” failed to frighten me, although I was a little jarred by the part in the house at the end, when the walls of the house are shown covered in kid-size prints, all located at a child’s height from the floor. Parts of “Poltergesit” unnerved me badly as a kid, especially that part with the damned clown, but I never had nightmares because of it. Only the “Exorcist” did this to me. Although I have heard that this movie will be re-leased with new scenes, I have reservations about subjecting myself to this movie in the theater.
Why was this movie so scary for me? Perhaps the best answer I can give is that it is so grounded. By that I mean that the movie almost feels like a documentary. The charcter development is maintained throughout the movie, the suspense is allowed to be built slowly, and I felt that the special effects were somewhat deemphasized. Compare this movie with recent “horror” movies laden with special effects like the re-make of “The Haunting”, and you’ll see why I think that special effects are the least important aspect of a successful horror movie. (The clown scene from “Poltergeist” is another example…the scariest moment in that movie, when the kid sees the empty chair, was a part that required no special effects at all, save a crew member yanking the clown away off-camera).
The religious aspect of this movie was irrelevant at the time that I saw, and it remains unimportant to me today when it comes to considering how scary it is. What’s more important is how it was made. Because the movie feels so believable, so realistic, it is easier to believe the horror. That is what I think makes “The Exorcist” so damn scary for so many people. Movies like “The Haunting” and “The Blair Witch Project” feel too artificial to me.
On the other hand, I recognize that horror is probably a lot like comedy. How a person responds to it is largely subjective. So it’s no skin off my nose if someone else doesn’t think this movie is scary.
Well, I happen to agree with you. I don’t find The Exorcist scary at all. I also don’t find The Omen frightening. I don’t know why–I just don’t. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a fear of hell. I guess that’s it.
It might have been the audience I watched it with - a bunch of people from my freshman dorm, all of whom wanted to be scared - but The Exorcist scared me quite a bit. In a fun way. I didn’t have nightmares or anything, but I know that after it was over, at 2 am, none of us wanted to go to bed. I don’t think the religious aspect had anything to do with it. It was more like we - or at least I was, anyway - were empathizing with the mother, feeling the rising terror of knowing that there was something terribly wrong with her own child.
On the other hand Rosemary’s Baby scared me not at all. I was just annoyed with everyone’s behavior in that movie, especially Rosemary’s. She should have realized that something was wrong way, WAY earlier and just split. And the ending was so lame.
It could be that it was the first to show those images (?). For example, I don’t find “Psycho” scary at all. But audiences at the time were freaked out, especially at the shower scene, because it was close to home and hadn’t been represented before.
I am BIG fan of “The Exorcist.” I find the issues that it examines fascinating, which is all the more odd because I am an atheist. It is scary (not jump-out-of-your-seat-scary, but disturtbing-scary_, to me, for these reasons:
–The whole issue of “something is happening to my child, I don’t know what it is, and I’m powerless to affect it.” Chris MacNeil’s frustration as Regan gets worse and worse is very realistic. The re-release adds scenes that make this more impactful.
–The terror of being confronted with a medical problem you don’t understand, the examination and treatment of which is painful. Hell, to me, the single worst scene in the movie is when Regan undergoes a spinal and a primitive CAT scan.
–The nature of good and evil. This otherwise good-natured child becomes a foul-mouthed, unclean monster through no fault of her own. (Several critics theorize that this represents early 70s parents’ reactions to their hippie children.)
–The failure of religion to resolve the conflict. The girl is possessed by a demon–the story makes that explicit. Yet the two priests, using the exorcism rite and the name of Jesus, are powerless to drive the demon from the girl. The only way in which Father Karras can save her is to physically attack her, and dare the demon to enter him, then kill himself. Although the movie is largely about his crisis of faith (It is called “The Exorcist,” not “The Exorcised”), his faith is not enough to save Regan–he must take action.
BTW, I saw this re-release at a test screening in Ann Arbor back in May, and I highly recommend it, just for the re-added scenes between Chris, Regan and her doctor, the remixed sound, and the utterly pristine new print. A great movie experience.
Appreciation of a good horror movie, like the appreciation of a good meal, depends on the sophistication of the viewer’s palate. There is no point in serving filet mgnon
with black truffle sauce to someone who would rather have a corndog. Similarly, there is no basis to explain the finer points of a film to someone who only reacts to images, but cannot understand the implications of the images.
The Exorcist is about more than demonic possession. It also focuses on Father Karras’s despair at the absence of a visible God at the beginning of the film with the subsequent erosion of his faith. It shows his rage at his own inability to take care of his dying mother; he can’t even cover her hospitalization. It shows how his training as as a psychiatrist and as a priest have both failed him. He is a lost, despairing man. The end of the movie shows Father Karras’s literal leap of faith out of the bedroom window, sacrificing his life to save Regan’s and finding redemption for his lack of faith and failures in life.
Similarly, Rosemary’s Baby is a frightening story of heightened paranoia as Rosemary Woodhouse discovers that a
coven of witches has designs on her baby, and finding out at the end that her child is the Antichrist. There is nobody she can trust, not her husband, not her obstetrician. And at the end, she is seduced by maternal love into caring for her baby, demon or no.
For the unsophisticated viewer, the Gross-Out is the raison d’etre of horror, hence teenagers’ fondness for the crude and moronic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s gross and unpleasant, but shallow and void of any deeper meaning.
Hellraiser, OTOH, is a dark, erotic fairy tale. Clive Barker’s tale of S/M demons is horrifying, not because of the chains and the leather, but because the soul is seduced even as the body is torn apart. For Pinhead and the Cenobites, pain is pleasure and being ripped to shreds by hooks and chains is as orgasmic as it is agonizing; a perfect blend of Eros and Thanatos. Kirsty is in danger of more than being tortured; she is in danger of having her soul so warped as to love the torture.
The Blair Witch Project works because it preys on our primordial fear of the forest at night. Our ancestors knew there were wolves and bears in the forests and they populated the nightscape with other horrors. The BWP is a fine example of the use of Panic fear (look up the origin of the word “panic” in your dictionary) to exercise the imagination. There is something in the woods, something that wants to kill you and drag your soul to Hell. If the film makers showed the monster, it would kill the movie. By not showing it, they allow our minds to create something vastly more horrific than they could ever manufacture.
I mostly agree with comments made by Shy Ghost and pldennison.
What’s scary, IMHO, is not the graphic representations depicted. It’s the fact that there have been “documented” stories of possession that lack any other explanation (yeah, yeah…urban legend, religious fanaticism, etc.), so that it could “happen to any one of us.”
PLD points this out much, much better and more eloquently then I could even hope to.
::tips hat::
This is why “Alien” did not remotely scare me…I don’t ever imagine that I will be stranded alone in space with an alien creature. I just can’t relate.
But, if what happened to Regan ever happened to MY child… shudder
It’s certainly a shame that modern horror movies think that they have to inundate us with horrific images and awesome special effects. The great filmmakers understood that what we can’t see can be much more frightening than what we can see, because if we can’t see the monster we have to rely on our imagination, which can be much more frightening.
A perfect example would be the new remake of ‘The Haunting’ vs the old one. The new one is full of cool special effects, but it isn’t even slightly frightening. The old one had almost no special effects, but the mood grabbed you and by the end of the movie you were shivering in fear.
Other examples would be ‘Jaws’ and ‘Alien’. In both of these movies, the monster was invisible throughout most of the movie. ‘Alien’ had lots of special effects because of its SF theme, but almost none when it came to the horror elements.
Spielberg got a bit lucky with ‘Jaws’ in that the mechanical shark kept breaking - he originally wanted to show much more of it, but had to change the script because the shark wouldn’t work. Now he admits that the film is probably better for it (although Spielberg already knew that horror could lie in what’s implied rather than what’s seen - if you’ve seen ‘Duel’, it’s a great example of the concept. If you haven’t seen it… Rent it.)
These movies stay with you for a long time. But for the life of me I can’t remember the differences between all the Freddy Kreuger movies, all the various Friday the 13ths, etc. They may have a bit of shock value, but they weren’t *scary (perhaps the first Nightmare on Elm Street is an exception).
Here comes rastahomie, playing up the sexual angle :rolleyes:
I, for one, find The Exorcist terrifying for one very simple reason: seeing a 12-year-old girl become the sex slave of a demon. It’s simultaneously gut-wrenching, terrifying and unsettling watching The Unseen rape this little girl. And in her psycho altered state, she more or less enjoys it. She looks at the priest and cries “Fuck me! Fuck me!” And when she/it realizes that the priest will have none of it, whatever “it” is proceeds to do the job itself. And then the thrashing scene begins, and moaning with sexual ecstasy IS A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL!, who is not even consciously aware of what’s happening to her. shudder
The possession scenes with the priests were not the parts I found particularly scary, although there was always a feeling of tension. For me, the scary portions of the film were the parts that foretold of what was coming:
Finding the devil’s icon.
The clock stopping in the archeologist’s office.
The dogs fighting.
Defilement in the church.
The “rats in the attic”
Regan’s cry for help through the message on her stomach.
Father Karras’s eventual involvement (particularly with his own questions of the paths he had taken).
Things start out slowly, but soon you know that “something wicked this way comes.” And it comes regardless of the religious persuasion of the intended victim. Regan and her mother were not religious, and were merely used as pawns to get to the real targets (the priests). For me, it was this and all the foreshadowing that resulted in a terrifically scary movie.
BTW, if you live in the DC area and have seen this film, go to M Street, near Key Bridge. One block from the bridge is an Exxon station, with a special set of stairs tucked in the corner of the lot.
This movie absolutely scared the hell out of me (in common with another poster, it’s the only horror movie I’ve ever seen that gave me nightmares) and I think the reason probably has to do with my own fears of losing control. Some OTHER FORCE has absolute control of this little girl, using her like a robot to physically manifest its awesome evil, and she is powerless to do anything about it… her ‘self’ is utterly gone. Deeply, deeply scary stuff.
The concept of demonic possession is something that totally punches all the freak-out buttons for me every time. I don’t even particularly believe in demons or heaven or hell, but what I do believe in is the power of the human mind to conjure up pretty much anything it wants to, even in a physical state. And so perhaps if you’re afraid of something, you somehow create it. (This is very disconcerting thought when you’re lying awake at 2am after reading something like the ‘Creepy’ thread.)
Having said that, I remember seeing a special on 60 Minutes or something some years back when they showed an exorcism. The girl didn’t seem particularly ‘possessed’ to me; she just seemed like a total wacko. She spoke in a deep voice claiming to be a demon, but it wasn’t beyond the range of her actual vocal chords, nor did she do anything remotely ‘supernatural’. I remember one of the priests saying, ‘If we didn’t have her tied down to this chair, she’d go floating right up to the ceiling!’ Yeah, right. Needless to say she didn’t.
Still, just the idea of it is enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.
Cooldude, your complaint reminds me of the Brits who did not like The Patriot. I guess lots of people get cranky when they see a movie in which their side is the Bad Guy or loses in the end.