Logical loopholes in the Exorcist - please discuss for my sanity!!!

It’s not related to the movie, no. It’s an interactive “ghost story” with the same sort of background and general atmosphere. It is also by far the most terrifying thing that I’ve seen in any medium. :slight_smile: That being said, if one does not like “The Grudge”, one will not like “theHouse” for similar reasons. De gustibus non est disputandem, and that.

Good post, but I disagree with the quoted part above. The Demon left Fr. Karras’ body after he fought the urge to strangle Regan and prior to his throwing himself out of the bedroom window.

Some people (yes, including ‘kooks’ like Wilson B. Key) believe one reason the Exorcist was so creepy were the subliminal techniques Friedkin used throughout the film. Not everyone who saw The Exorcist consciously perceived the death mask; which flashed momentarily on screen about a 1/2 dozen times - or the soundtrack; with the sound buzzing bees and pigs being slaughtered laced throughout.

If you don’t wanna look like a wimp, watch the movie again with no audio / close captioned. It’s alot less frightening.

It was indeed creepy, thanks for the link!

I didn’t read the book or see the movie until YEARS after the movie became a hit.
I thought the book was okay, and the movie was pretty cheesey.

But “logical loopholes” aren’t really an issue for me. Remember, in the book:

  1. Father Karras sees the “logical loopholes” as well as anyone.

  2. Blatty points out that as far back as the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church declared that exorcism was to be reserved until all secular medical treatments had failed. Even the Church has presumed for centuries that symptoms of possession should be treated first as symptoms of a physical or mental disease.

So… why does Karras choose to see Regan’s condition as a real case of possession? Because he’s having his own psychiatric problems and his own crisis of faith. He’s got grave doubts about God’s existence. So, for him, a real possession is proof that Satan exists. And if Satan exists, then God must exist… right?

One way to defuse The Exorcist, Poltergeist, or virtually any horror movie with localized bizarre events is to consider how quickly the demons et al would have been vanquished in a real-life setting.

All the victims had to do was call up the National Enquirer, Weekly World News, A Current Affair or a bunch of network reality show producers and fill them in. You think any self-respecting demon or spirit would hang around once the place was deluged with reporters, Hollywood types, hangers-on and a horde of gawking tourists? Think of Salem’s Lot with a bunch of RVs full of slack-jawed nincompoops cruising by the old haunted house.

No vampire would put up with that crap.

Now this would not work with something like Night of the Living Dead where almost no one normal is left. You could call up the National Enquirer and reporters would show up alright - but they’d be more interesting in a good meal than a juicy quote. :eek:

Unfortunately, some of the assertions made by the Kook of Kooks (WBK) persist as urban legend. The scary Father Karras face flash only occurs twice: once in a dream sequence, and once during the exorcism. You either notice it or you don’t. If you don’t notice it, it doesn’t make things any scarier. It’s no different from the red flash in Spellbound – a simple special effect.

Everything else Wilson Bryan Key rambled about was either totally imaginary (like the faces in the condensed breath, which was real and only had faces in it in the same sense as the smoke from the WTC did – by virtue of imagination and projection) or just regular sound design or art direction, like the creepy noises in the sound mix or the dead flowers passim.

God, I hate that guy. (“Ritz crackers have hundreds of instances of the word ‘sex’ baked right into them, that’s why you keep buying them!”)

You know, I don’t have sex all that often, and I hate Ritz crackers and thus never buy them. Perhaps there’s a connection! :wink:

It’s possible that the insidious attempt by the mind-control specialists at Nabisco to equate sex with their product has backfired for you and put you off sex as something that smells funky, messes up your fingers, and coats your tongue.

Maybe you can sue for damages. :smiley:

Yeah, but good sex smells funky, messes up your fingers, and coats your tongue. . . .

Not relevent to WBK, but in the re-release a few years ago they added 1 or 2 more face bits.

No, of course not. Maybe “If some of them do some things that are the devil’s work” would be clearer.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks’ “Self-Made Critic” wrote a great piece on The Exorcist: