Let's talk about The Exorcist (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Anyone can and does weigh in on The Godfather at the drop of an orange, but I never see any posts on The Exorcist.

I saw it for the first time in its entirety last night at the Harkins theater Tuesday Night Classic. This was the 2000 Director’s Cut. Since it isn’t just *any *horror movie, but the horrror movie, I wonder what people think. In general, I liked it, but…

My first impression: man that was a slow film! Not just because pacing is so much quicker now - I think it would have been considered slow in 1973. It starts out with -what? -twenty minutes of Fr. Merrin in Iraq that as far as I could tell added nothing to the movie. Yes, he found the tiny demon head. So? There’s a ton of foreshadowing in this film that never has a payoff. Was there payoff in the book?

Then we have ten minutes of Chris filming a scene from her movie. What did that add? I don’t know!

Lots of shots of Fr, Karras walking. More walking. Chris walking. Doesn’t anyone in Georgetown drive? :slight_smile: yes, we get it! It’s moody! (The scenes with Karras’s mother are fine. That’s setting the stage. I have no issue there.)

But contrasting with the slowness of the pacing, the editing is cut like some action movie on speed. We have a scene where Fr. Karras is with his mother in the hospital, and then in the very next scene she has been found dead in her apartment, dead two days. Come on! How’d she get out of the hospital?

We have a defilement of the Virgin Mary statue, symbolic of a Black Mass. But there was no Black Mass. There were no coven of Satanists trying to summon a demon, He just showed up. So why do the statue? In THAT church? Who knows!

Then when the going starts getting good, Burke Dennings gets thrown out Regan’s window by the devil. Or does he? We never even saw him in the house, never saw him baby sitting, never saw him portentously enter her room, never even saw his body. The first killing by the Regan-demon and it’s off camera! WTF?

Lt Columbo, I mean, Kinderman is on the case. He “invites” Karras to advise on the investigation, but you KNOW he thinks Karras threw the guy out the window. But why? He has no connection to the family. All he did was look like a boxer and write a paper on witchcraft. And…?

Kinderman finds a statue head of a demon at the base of the Exorcist Stairs. But nothing comes of it. No one sees it, Merrin never makes a connection. So why have the head in the movie?

Now we get to the good stuff, and yes it is still good! Spider walking, levitating, head spinning, pea soup projectile vomiting, crucifix insertion, demon language, backwards masking, Regan’s demon makeup, psychological manipulation of Karras, freezing bedroom fog breath THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!. Sorry, got carried away there. This is the meat of the film, and it holds up well.

And in the denouement, we get some odd scene of Lt Kinderman asking Fr. Dyer if he wants to see a movie, like he did Karras earlier. Is there supposed to be some subtext there?

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In the book the actual exorcism takes up maybe 10% of the whole. The Exorcist is really about how Regans possession forces the books protagonists to question the direction and beliefs in their lives to save the life of a little girl. Merrin had battled the demon before and the statue he found in Nineveh was a representation of it. Even though he had serious heart disease, he knew he had to confront it again. No matter the cost.

Karris was a psychiatrist in deep doubt about his faith. The death of his mother was a reminder that God wasnt the benevolent father he had imagined and that the worlds of science and religion didnt intersect.

Chris was an atheist who deeply loved her daughter and would do anything to save her. When medecine couldnt help her…

Kindermann was trying to solve a brutal murder that couldnt possibly be carried out by a little girl.

IMO, the Exorcist is more about character study than horror. Its just the horror was so shocking.

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I think one surprising thing is how profane the movie is. 40 years of horror films have left me a bit jaded, but the langauge the Regan uses to harangue the priests is still shocking - especially coming out of the mouth of a young girl.

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I agree with Madsircool’s observations. I read the book before I saw the movie, and IMO it’s a great film but the book was even better.

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I haven’t seen the film in about 15 years, but I’m coincidentally re-reading the book right now. As a result, my memories of the latter are much fresher.

I really don’t remember the film as being slow and the introduction you describe neatly ties in with the main story, so that’s fine with me. Plus it sets the mood of coming dread quite effectively.

You say that it was 20 minutes-long and I’ll take your word for it, but I would have said it was half that. Again, you’re probably right, but it shows that the length of that sequence never bothered me.

I don’t remember that many “walking scenes” but again : moody 70s setting, I’m fine with that.

I may be wrong but I always assumed that the demon itself was reponsible for the defilement. It would certainly be creepier than having an unnecessary bunch of weirdos in black robes do it.

That may be a problem with the editing of the film, because the book is much more explicit about what happened and the whole thing makes sense. Dennings drops by at a time when only the baby-sitter is home and she has to go out for some errands. Actually, this isn’t described “in real-time”, we only learn it after his death. Again, that’s quite clever.

HOWEVER, the book doesn’t describe the killing at all either, which is a stroke of genius and it’s fortunate that the film kept it. We first learn that Denning has died “falling down the stairs”, then the inspector goes to the morgue to discuss the case again with the coroner and take another look at the corpse. That chapter ends on the revelation that Dennings’ head is twisted at 180°. Chilling. Showing the murder would be a let-down, better keep it for your imagination.

There are a few important-ish characters from the book that were left out of the movie, notably two servants. One of them ends up being suspected of the murder, which makes perfect sense in the book (tense relationship with Dennings and an alibi that turns out to be a lie).

More mood-setting ?

Yeah, all of this is great and has held up remarkably well. Again, pacing is one of the strengths of the movie and the gradual mounting of terror is very effectively done. I must note however that the spider-walking scene is even more terrifying in the book : Chris and the baby-sitter have spent the whole night talking. In the early morning, the latter goes out of the room to get something and when she comes back, she notices the horrified look and Chris’ face. She turns around, sees nothing, then looks down and sees Spider-Regan hiss and lick her ankle.

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I saw the movie when it was new in 1973. Given the generally poor quality of horror films at the time, it was riveting. I can’t recall another demon possession film prior to that one, though I’m sure someone can point one out. I can also see why it would be a bit of a yawner now, however.

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Same here. Not as subtle as something like Rosemary’s Baby. Splatter horror had been around for a while, but that was just blood and gore. Linda Blair’s performance was something utterly new, but it’s been done to death just in the parodies.

Paper Moon featured another foul mouthed girl the same year, but that was done for comedy.

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I have not seen this, but the comment from user gkrejci (“The Inspiration for The Exorcist?”) is very interesting.

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Thank you for the comparisons of the book! Very informative.

Maybe the Iraq scene didn’t run 20 minutes, maybe it just seemed like that, but I’m still not sure what it added. There’s all this stuff going on - people with guns, people watching him, people challenging him, the clock stopping - that all seem like it should mean something, but nothing comes from it. There’s a line between subtle and missing, between understated and unstated, and IMO The film is on the wrong side of that line.

The vulgar language used is quite atypical for the early 70s. Considering the most anyone used in a mainstream film was like ONE swear word at the time, Regan-demon’s tirade is quite shocking. I wonder if it would be too much for the delicate sensibilities of 2019.

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I really should watch the movie again but my 2 cents is that this introduction adds depth to the phenomenon without telling you too much about it. You know that you’re dealing with an evil entity that is incredibly ancient, that it brings chaos, that it can act on the physical world and that Merrin already has experience with it. Plus the Middle-Eastern location is a bit unsettling in itself for us Westerners, so that you find yourself slightly off-balance right from the start.

All in all : foreshadowing. Something wicked this way comes…

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And not just incredibly ancient, but world-spanning. The story is then localized in mundane real-life modern Georgetown, and that is what makes it all the more menacing.

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That part I did like.
“Why her? Why this girl?”
“I think the point is to make us despair; to see ourselves as…animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”

But the devil has such mundane plans. What did his adventure accomplish? Killed two priests, and one other person, but had no effect outside of their lives. Regan doesn’t remember, and Chris will convince herself that nothing really happened. The only people that really know, and could despair, are dead.

I guess the devil has lots of time. He’s playing the long game.

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I wanted to make this a separate post:

In the world of the movie, Heaven, Hell, the devil and God are all real. So, what do you think happened to Merrin and Karras? Are they in Heaven?

Since Catholics don’t think you have to wait for the Resurrection, they could be, even before the movie ended.

On the other hand, does Karras’ suicide condemn him to the very Hell he was fighting against? I sure hope not.

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Im not sure that Karras’ action was suicide. He sacrificed his own life so that a little girl can live a healthy normal life. It completed Karras character arc, he started as a man who was questioning his faith and usefulness. He stepped up to participate in an Exorcism despite these doubts and he performed magnificently. He didnt surrender his life, he sacrificed it so another can live.

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I agree, but how much of a rules stickler is the God of the movie?

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Funny, I was thinking about this movie the other day. I had read the book and then saw the movie when it was first run, and haven’t revisited the story since – so we’re talking 45+ years ago.

What I was thinking about was how I didn’t find the movie all that scary. The studio hype was all about how frightening it was to the point of a pretty good gimmick – larger theaters had a nurse in attendance to treat those viewers who got so scared they fainted.

I came to the conclusion then and still believe to be true that people who thought that being possessed by the devil was possible found the movie way scarier than those of us who didn’t.

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Slight nitpick: She was possessed by a demon, not the devil. This seems to be an almost universal human experience throughout history. Im not saying I believe in demons or possession, but I do believe there is still quite a bit out there that we cant explain nor understand.

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Really, the scariest thing about that movie is the male X-ray tech who prepares Regan for the brain scan. Paul Bateson was a real-life X-ray tech who had also done a bit of acting, and he was likely an active serial killer at the time. He was eventually convicted for a murder that happened a few years later, did about 25 years in prison, and is believed to have died in 2012.

He was openly gay at the time as well, which for the era was very unusual.

And guess where I learned about that? You guessed it - The Dope.

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I don’t know about that. I’ve always found supernatural horror movies way scarier than slasher flicks, even though I don’t believe in all of that stuff.

With serial killers… well, no matter how ruthless and clever, they’re still human beings in the end and can be dealt with as such. Shot in the head, problem solved. That’s why these films come up with all these false deaths, to the point where it becomes ludicrous, or up the gore in order to bring something new to the table. But that’s mixing up being terrified with being grossed out.

In supernatural horror, what gets me is the feeling of being stuck in a nightmare, totally unable to understand what’s going on, predict what will happen next and understand how to bring the ordeal to an end. The fact that it cannot happen in real life is irrelevant, it’s the absolute helplessness and hopelessness that are distressing.

In that respect, i.e. building up an feeling of inescapable and unintelligible terror, The Exorcist did it better than 99% of all horror movies

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Did you see the two season TV series Fox had a few years ago? It was truly excellent. And creepy.