The Exorcist (1973)

If you tot up box office pull, critical reaction, social and cultural impact, controversy level and professional accolades, can you think of a more successful horror movie than William Friedkin's The Exorcist? It would be seriously difficult for anyone to deny it. I say this, with the words of asshole teenagers ringing in my ears... It's crap, it's boring, it's stupid and the deal breaker: It's not scary! Some young idiots seem intent on denouncing anything older than they are, where I have always reveled in vintage styles. To them, if there is not a body count of at least five, it's not scary. To them, if no one is sexually assaulted by some evil being, it's not scary. To them, if there is no blood and guts flying around at a persistent rate, it's not scary. Well, if we can replace 'guts' with 'vomit', I think we have just solved at least one of these issues.

As a kid, how I yearned for this movie! In my adolescence, my love for horror was blossoming, and I always tuned into those countdown shows of '100 Greatest Scary Moments' and the like. I read every page on the internet I could find about The Exorcist when I saw it ranked at number 3 on the list, and looked at every picture, and listened to every audio excerpt. Back then, the internet (and my knowledge of how to use it to its fullest potential) was in its infancy compared to today, and so if I was gonna see this thing, I'd have to suck it up and ask my folks. Well, Mum immediately said no (duh!), and Pop was also unconvinced, although generally far more on my side. He just didn't want to get shit from my mum for saying yes! Well then, my 13 year old self said, I'll just read the book instead. I mean, they don't put age certificates on books, so who's going to stop me?! (Note: this technique, first devised and exercised in the case of Carrie, was a useful crutch during this time).

Pretending to Mum that I won't go out of
my way to watch this movie anyway.

And then, everything changed. In the shite little town that my mum had moved us to for high school, there weren't many shops, and they were mostly of little interest to teenagers. But a new one came along one day: a second hand video shop. No DVDs, just cassettes. The store's very basic policy was 5 Videos for £4, or £1 each. Simples. After scoping the place once or twice, and noticing that they just bagged videos by the bundle, and didn't bother to sort through them first, I tried my luck one day. The Exorcist, Hellraiser and Gothika, sandwiched between The Little Rascals and Toy Story. Bish bash bosh, off I headed home with my very own copy of The Exorcist! What a fucking badass I was! As if I just got away with that!

Now I knew, for the most part, what to expect due to my collective fragmentary research. I knew that what I had invested a whole 80p in was a piece of history - that was what I loved about it. My friendship group was only as hardcore as The Ring, and had always denounced my love of David Bowie as 'fancying an old man'. But my parents brought me up well, on Fairport Convention and Janis Joplin and Kate Bush. The favourite movies they liked to share with me were The Hunger, The Company of Wolves, and Tess. My Pop was 40 when I was born, and so being a young 'un and direct descendant from an original '60s flower child and member of Alex Sanders' coven, I had some seriously special and vintage influences headed my way. He saw The Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who, all in grassroots concerts where landlords would cut the power after midnight, and the bands would carry on thrashing unplugged for hours into the morning. My parents are two fucking cool people, and although Mum was a little on the overprotective side, they showed me how to appreciate quality art, and to see past age.

My day to day operation relies fairly heavily on the fantasy that it is 1976. Or -3, or -4. Basically throw me anywhere between 1965 and 1978 and I ain't coming home. This period has always had a dazzling appeal to me, and all the cool stories my folks have told me about these times shaped my interests and tastes as an adult. There is not a day goes by that I do not wear high-waisted flares, platform shoes and my hair in flicks. I'm one of those (I bet many of you will relate) who feels they were born too late. When I watch old movies, and see cute chicks like Linda Blair or

Ultimate staring contest

Sandra Cassell with their bell-bottomed jeans and clingy tops on braless tits, I just feel like I belong there, not here and now. And so old movies are a means of fantasy, they're like my porn (which the '70s produced wonderfully, too! Man, remind me to review Deep Throat on here sometime!)

But I lengthily digress... The Exorcist! We start in Iraq (God, can you imagine?!), where Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) seems to have retired to some anthropological position, and is alerted to some interesting demon relic they have found. Merrin seems to recognise it, and takes a journey to another dig site, where he stands face to face with a lifesize statue of the demon Pazuzu. Fade to Georgetown, Washington, where actress Chris MacNeill (the wonderful Ellen Burstyn) is living with her daughter Regan (our gal Linda Blair) whilst filming a movie on location. They are such a cute couple, who clearly adore each other, and Linda's signature cuteness is at maximum impact. Despite Regan's absent father causing stress to them both, they seem to have an awesome life. Their house is gigantic, and they host cool parties where people drink at their bar and priests play their grand piano for singsongs, all while multiple cigarettes create a fog. I mean, if that's not living the '70s dream, I don't know what is!

Livin' the dream, baby!

But strange occurrences are off to a flying start, first around the house with weird noises, and then with Regan. Now Chris is a very modern '70s woman, who doesn't care to carry a husband who can't deal with her career, and doesn't believe in God. She lives a fun, liberal, atheist life, as does Regan. So when things first kick off, she takes her to doctors, seeking a psychological explanation for her daughter's violent outbursts. Chris soon reaches breaking point, at which she knows nothing anymore, and will turn in any direction open to her. So when clinical doctors and psychologists professionally suggest that this steadfast atheist turn to priests for an exorcism, she seeks the help of Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Karras is a deep, complex character, who also stirs our sympathy. He is a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist from a destitute Italian family, whose poor aged mother is put into a cruel state hospital because he cannot afford a private hospital for her, where she later dies. He is racked with guilt and finds himself falling apart from his faith. When Chris turns to him for an exorcism, he follows her pattern of action: first he examines the girl as a psychiatrist, and finding himself flummoxed, eventually agrees to take the matter to the church's Boys Upstairs, so to speak.

When Ebert reviewed The Shining, he drew attention to one of the film's strengths, in the way it creates mystery by ensuring that none of its characters are reliable sources, preventing anybody - including us as an audience - from understanding the situation with clarity. I think that Friedkin expertly handled this same method, while thankfully recruiting William Peter Blatty, the novel's author, to adapt his own work for the screen. The doctors suggest exorcism as a last resort, when they can present no medical explanation, saying that it could produce results thanks to the power of suggestion. The 'demon' seems to taunt Karras very personally, telling information it shouldn't know. But we know Damien is feeling unstable and desolate since his mother's death. Chris is hysterical a lot of the time, and the famous head spin, as written in the novel, dictates that in the delirium of the scene, before fainting, Chris "thought she saw" Regan's head turn all the way around. It is never certain. None of the characters know whether Regan is crazy or possessed, and neither do we. Do the characters believe in the devil and all that sort of stuff? Do we?

Are you ready for a mind-fuck? Then I'll begin.

Friedkin's direction of The Exorcist is so bold and self-assured. The screen is his playpen, and he likes to play Follow the Leader, pulling the audience along in one direction and then cranking the lever to a trapdoor we hadn't noticed we were standing on. Consider, for example, Karras's silent dream sequence, in which he tries to chase his mother through the street, cut with close-ups of a pendant falling. Each time we cut back to the necklace falling, it is like a warning of the inevitable, that what falls must land, like a countdown to a shock cut, with Regan screaming wildly. He does the impossible of making what is essentially an exploitation visual an artistic endeavour, and benefits greatly from Blatty's screen adaptation of his own novel. What many have deemed so shocking about The Exorcist for generations is not its real spirit - it is no I Spit on Your Grave, although the source material could definitely have been deviated as such under the wrong pen - but vital ingredients to the best telling of this narrative.

As an adult, I suddenly saw the film from an entirely different perspective - that of the mother, Chris. When I reread the novel and considered it, it occurred to me that the 'main character' of the story is either Chris or Karras - not the titular Exorcist Merrin, or the girl he exorcises. Their individual threads of mental and psychic torture are the real plot, and when I watched the movie again as a parent, a whole new dimension of sympathy for Chris had opened up. My daughter is fast approaching Regan's sort of age, and she too is my only child, so the idea of such a horrific ordeal unfolding for my own baby, and my having absolutely no control over it, gave me more terror than any pea soup vomit or crucifix masturbation ever did.

The same can be said for Karras, whose mental state - and its consequent attribution to his death - is more detailed towards the end in the book, and by the finale of the story, we know that the exorcism has been going on for around four or five days, and in that time, he has caught perhaps half an hour's sleep once or twice. He has not eaten, is still reeling with guilt and grief over his mother's hospitalisation and death, and has spent the better part of a week being psychologically tormented by an apparent all-knowing demon. Having a depth of understanding into Karras's condition when he confronts Regan for the final time is crucial to knowing how it will, and must, end. And ultimately, Karras is one of those poetic tortured souls whose only release is surely death, making his fatality somehow not as tragic as it may first seem.

The Exorcist remains one of the most notorious horror films of all time, as well as one of the most mainstream and creatively successful - an odd combination for the genre. But what many a modern audience seems to have little appreciation for is the telling of a horror story with no guts and gore, no murder or bogeyman. Even with its infamous special effects by Grandfather of Makeup Dick Smith, the movie is considered 'boring' these days because of the long stretches of deep dialogue and character building that punctuate the horror scenes. In this sense, it is similar to Jaws - another movie I always loved but grew a deep appreciation for on many new levels as I matured. I daresay the ship has sailed for movies of this calibre to be made again. We are too politically correct, and big studios are simply not willing to give a picture like The Exorcist the time and budget they granted it back in the day. As with many things that took place during that evolutionary era, all the elements happened to be aligned that would make it happen, and sadly, those elements are now at best out of whack, and at worst, non-existent.