The Exorcist

I mentioned recently that I had recorded The Exorcist when it aired on TCM a few months back. Director William Friedkin died recently, and that prompted me to watch the movie so that I could do a review on it here in memory of Friedkin.

The movie starts off in Iraq, where Catholic priest Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow) is on an archeological dig in Nineveh, an important Old Testament location. However, he finds an artifact that's clearly from a much later period, meaning it's a portent of... something. But nothing else of note happens to Merrin during his time in Iraq, beyond another bit of foreshadowing of him taking pills for his heart health.

The action shifts to Washington DC. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is an actress filming a movie on location in the city, and she's rented a house so that her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) can live with her while the filming is taking place. Also in Washington DC is another Catholic priest, Damien Karras (Jason Miller). He's a transplant from New York, where his elderly mother lives alone, something that causes some mental distress for Fr. Damien.

Regan has found a ouija board in the basement of the house, and has apparently been playing with it just for fun. In showing her mom the board, it's revealed that Regan has imagined some spirit named "Captain Howdy". But of course nobody really believes in ouija boards and the nonsensical ramblings it produces, right?

This being a movie, well of course the ouija board is going to be foreshadowing stuff. First Mom starts hearing noises coming from the attic, which could well be rats, or maybe if you believe Regan it's Captain Howdy. But then Regan starts having incidents that look like some sort of violent seizure. This obviously worries Mom, who takes Regan in for all sorts of medical tests and diagnostic procedures, in the belief that Regan might have a lesion on her brain that would be a plausible cause behind the sort of seizures she's suffering.

Unfortunately, the seizures don't stop, and Regan becomes more violent. Also, the primitive (no MRI or CT scans in those days) imaging procedures make it look like there's nothing physical in Regan's brain to cause the seizures, certainly not those lesions the doctors had previously theorized. So consultation with a psychiatrist is recommended and, when that doesn't seem to work, the doctors come up with the radical idea that if either mother or daughter is religious, to try an exorcism. The doctors, mind you, don't believe in the religious parts of the exorcism, but that it works for those who do believe in religion.

This is where Fr. Merrin comes in again. Fr. Damien has never done an exorcism, while Ft. Merrin did a decade or so ago, so he's located having come back from Nineveh and brought down to Washington to perform the exorcism with Fr. Damien assisting. And this is where the horror really kicks in.

The movie version of The Exorcist was released at the end of 1973, and quickly entered the public consciousness. Fifty years on, the extent to which The Exorcist did become a cultural force is something that makes it a bit hard to review. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with the movie; it's more that you can't not know about some of the tropes it created, such as Linda Blair's head spinning. That, and all the parodies it engendered. In this sence, The Exorcist is a sort of victim of its own success, through no fault of its own.

At the same time, it's extremely easy to see why the movie because such a huge hit in the winter of 1973-74. The images presented were something new and daring at the time, and the potential for some to see it as blasphemy created a controversy that naturally drove ticket sales. It's quite good, although it would, I think, be the sort of movie that loses impact upon repeated viewings since the horror won't create quite as much capacity to shock people. But if you haven't seen The Exorcist before, then it's one you absolutely need to see.