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.

Sweet Hostage (1975)

As Exhibit D in the Linda Blair Victim Files, Sweet Hostage is on a different level to the others. Here, Linda Blair is Doris Mae Withers, and she is by far the spunkiest and most independent of Blair's characters up to that point. While the title conjures up some images of an innocent young girl in a flowing white dress being violated by a slobbering psychopath (and not all of these connotations are unfounded), the extent to which Blair's character is a victim, or even really a hostage, is very minimal indeed, and this is by the will of both the lead characters in this surprisingly moving two-hander.


Linda stars alongside veteran Martin Sheen, whose paternity over several of the Brat Pack is so wonderfully obvious from the offset. It is like Sheen is creating a living, breathing mold for what his son(s) would become, and when I say this, I think, of course, of Charlie. Here, Sheen plays a manically sophisticated escaped mental patient with a penchant for romantic poetry, and a tendency towards the occasional flip-out. He has that sort of omniscient life force about him, an energy and buzz that seems superhuman, in the same league as Jack Nicholson, that makes anything he does simply fascinating to witness.

Blair and Sheen make a remarkably formidable pair. They have such chemistry from their very first encounter, a sort that, despite the great talent of these two actors, surely goes beyond make believe. In the same eerily ever-present way that Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling had such simmering sexual tension in a beauty-beast relationship, this sweet 15-year-old and this eccentric stranger 20 years her senior have a tangible connection that enables their entire story to ease by, under unspoken promise of meaningfulness. As it turns out, Linda Blair later revealed in an interview that she fell in love with Sheen whilst filming.

Doris Mae starts off the film as a young tomboy, living in some rural Southern town, where she chatters with the locals with familiarity, but acts as an exasperated onlooker throughout her parents' frequent conflicts at home. She generally seems her normal happy self when she is away from the farm where she lives. In the opening sequence, we are introduced to Leonard Hatch (Sheen), a gallant fellow who bows and recites poetic stanzas for the ladies. He is also on the run from a not too harsh-looking mental institution, and blends in remarkably well: he seems to be one of those selective psychopaths, who knows when to play it cool, which is why Doris Mae thinks nothing of hitching a ride with him when her truck breaks down.

After a little engaging banter, it becomes evident that Leonard does not plan to drop his new Lady Fair off at the farm. Yet Doris Mae is no victim. She insists on holding the power over her captor. "If you're gonna rape me, just pull over and get it over with!" she demands. But Leonard has no such vulgar intentions. His intentions may be rather unclear, but if anything, he seems more in want of a companion, and perhaps a pupil, to whom he can impart all of the romantic wisdom deemed by the doctors to be illness.

The pair live together in a little abandoned farm, and grow to love each other. It says all you need to know about rural Southern towns in the '70s when the thing that causes authorities to be alarmed to a possible kidnapping is Sheen's character purchasing women's clothes at a store. For whatever reason, the store girl deems this highly suspicious/inappropriate and calls the police, who seem to share her suspicions enough to pursue this women's-clothes-buying deviant. It also says all you need to know that this incident demonstrates more effort to save Doris than her parents ever do. But Doris doesn't need or want saving, and the inevitable fallout of the law's involvement turns the story into a sort of Romeo and Juliet tragedy.

For what some might deem an exploitation picture typical of the mid-'70s TV movie scene, Sweet Hostage is a poignant and touching film that deserves much wider viewing and acclaim than it has ever received. Blair and Sheen carry the movie flawlessly, and seemingly without much need for direction, and make one of the most sweet and unconventional romantic couples of lost cinema.

Born Innocent (1974)

Every now and then with a child star, particularly one from the '70s, you have to wonder what their folks were thinking. I don't really plan on questioning how well juveniles are taken care of on set: it is a tricky topic, given the often inevitable outcome of the poor soul's trip to Hollywood. Some (Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields) turned out to be well-educated, classy and talented adults. So after The Exorcist (all dubbings and doubles aside), was there anything Linda Blair's parents weren't OK with? Video interviews with Mr and Mrs Blair show them to be very decent, loving and caring parents, which is all the more baffling: at least Terri Shields made herself obvious as a maniac with such ludicrous claims as "people want to see a sexy child". Linda's Act I consisted of regular victim roles, and one would surely be excused for questioning her overseers' choices. But then, despite being far less mainstream these days than Foster or Shields, Linda also turned out great. Solid B-movie credentials over the decades, solid commitment to various charities and animal organisations, including her own, and a good sport at horror conventions galore.

Exhibit C in the Blair Victim Files, after The Exorcist and Sarah T. respectively, is Born Innocent. Another (many more came) made-for-TV movie which took advantage of Blair's cute face and apparent lack of parental controls. Sarah T. was a good girl really, who became sucked up in depression and addiction and expressed remorse for the damage her troubles caused to others. Chris Parker is different. At least in the end. The sour-faced youngster is introduced with a swell of sympathetic string music that reoccurs throughout the movie. Chris is a young runaway who has been arrested again, and makes herself scarce in the holding cell crammed with young, female Peter Stormare types. She seems out of her depth in the whole runaway business: the other girls look ready to chew the balls off a wrestler, but Chris crouches in the corner, her sweet face obscured by her hair.

When hauled up in court, the ball is dropped on Chris at the same time it is on us. The Judge rather compassionlessly reveals that her parents have handed over full custody of her, making Chris a Ward of the State, a.k.a. Hapless Victim of Society. So off she is carted to a half-way house for unruly girls, where she is swiftly and clinically examined by the Nurse Ratched of the joint, a steely woman named Lasko. Stripped off and her cavities searched for substances, Chris seems further still out of her depth when told, "Girls get drugs in here any way they can." At this point, she's probably starting to wish she had smuggled in some dope.

Cute little Chris quickly comes to the attention of the resident aggressive dyke, who leers at her and seems to have a gang of cronies at her disposal. The staff are all incompetent, and mostly very hostile, with the exception of counsellor Barbara (Joanna Miles) who defends Chris from punishment when she offends the others. However, none are efficient enough in dealing with juvenile delinquency, as the tough lesbian proves when she and her gang corner Chris when she's in the shower. They pin her down and rape her with a toilet plunger. (So Mr and Mrs Blair, about your supervision of your 15 year old daughter's role choices...) That said, this scene is incredibly powerful, and is tackled with gritty realism by the actors and cinematographer. Without this scene, we would not have a full understanding of either the abuse of Chris, or the abuse in general of institutions. At this stage in the game, Chris is the softened victim, who recognises her own pain and feels sorrow.

Having earned a little merit, Chris is granted a visit home. Being that she was an affluent runaway, it's safe to assume that this is not such a privilege after all. Within minutes of being home, shit is going down. Her dad is one of those short, wide, balding assholes who goes red all over with rage. Her mum is a hopeless neurotic who just sits home and chainsmokes. The dad beats the mum, and Chris helplessly looks on. The dad later abuses his daughter, remarking on her tight jeans and smacking her about. The one person left to turn to is Chris' brother, who, although seemingly regretful, offers up every excuse he can muster as to why he cannot save his little sis from the abusive background he fled himself.

It is a sad situation when, actually given the option, Chris returns to the institution in favour of staying on at her parents' house for a few more days. And isn't it a miserable statement about the realities of child abuse? This incident cements the poor kid's downfall. She finds herself with nothing to live with, no life to return to, no goal to work towards; she might kill herself if she hadn't found some evident comfort in her bitter surroundings. Accompanied down the muddy slope by the same mournful string instrumentals, Chris eventually hits the bottom. She is finally just another runaway, problem child, young convict. Another brick in the wall, graffitied with 'Jesus Saves' and 'I Wish I Was Dead'.

Sadly, some forty years later, this is not one of those films we can say feels dated. The message, or warning, still rings hauntingly true. Life is easily fucked up. Especially when you're a parent fucking up your child's life. Talk of The System, and all its atrocities, is no less nowadays. Some may argue that it's only ever gone downhill. Children, being taken from or discarded by their parents, being circulated like unclaimed luggage on a carousel, through a stringy network of homes and institutions, and finally deposited on the other side of parental responsibility, with no qualifications, no support, no home and very little other than crime to turn to.