Streaming Availability: HBO Max
In the year 2000 The Exorcist was brought back to theaters with a very big marketing push. I am not 100% sure why this happened, but have a few theories. That was roughly in line with its 25th anniversary, it was just after a very successful rerun the Star Wars trilogy, and maybe the success of The Blair Witch Project helped too. There was a lot of hype around Blair Witch, people were calling it "scariest movie ever made". The Exorcist had held that title for decades, maybe Warner Bros. felt they needed to knock down an upstart.
I can only imagine how an audience of teenagers expecting jump scares and gore (and probably tits too) would react to The Exorcist in 2000. This was year of Scream 3 and Final Destination. Horror was a lot slicker and playing for younger crowds. Imagine an audience hopped up on Dracula 2000 having to sit through the opening of The Exorcist: many minutes of an old man slowly puttering through the markets of Mosul, Iraq, no demonic possession in sight. They might have rioted. I was eleven when I saw this movie on home video, and I was bored out of my mind. "Boo, put on the House on Haunted Hill remake, mom!" I was also an idiot.
Maybe that hype was always the problem. You tell people "scariest movie ever made" and you're giving them visions of this thrill-a-minute extravaganza. Nobody imagines an adult drama about a single mother trying to navigate a horrifying illness in her daughter - the truly scariest scenario but not in a schlock genre sense. Nor do they picture a B-plot about a sad priest questioning his faith. There is an entire act of The Exorcist where nothing scary happens except a Ouija Board planchette moves slightly too fast, a candle burns too bright for a second, and a dog barks. I feel like today The Exorcist has lost its throne as *the* great classic horror movie. I hear more reverential talk about The Shining.
The Exorcist is a two hour movie (with another ten minutes if you're watching the director's cut) that establishes a relatively normal world at its heart. It then has to work slowly to destroy it. Only in the back stretch do we get the iconic foul-mouthed demon and special effects wizardry. Having it watched it as a thirty-two-year-old with actual life experience, I would not cut a minute. This movie was nominated for Best Picture in 1974. I love The Sting, but The Exorcist should have won.
The brilliant thing about The Exorcist is that it is a horror movie without horror movie characters. We do not have horny teenagers banging at lakes or breaking into haunted houses. These are rational people of a liberal mindset, mostly middle-aged or older. When the trouble starts with Regan (Linda Blair), her mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn) does the right thing: she takes her to the hospital. We get an exhaustive review of the obvious medical explanations, none of them pan out. There are scares, but the more mundane horror of medical procedure. There's a really unpleasant and painful depiction of a spinal tap, and a scene where a neck catheter causes blood to squirt out of Regan's neck realistically. Later Regan is brought to psychiatric professionals who have no further explanation. The exorcism is only a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass when everything science has to offer has failed.
It is interesting that the demon (who I don't believe is ever named in the movie, but sequels will tell us is Pazuzu) chooses Regan. Chris is a single mother and an actress, important enough to get an invite to the White House. They're only in Georgetown, Washington D.C. temporarily while working on a film production. The father is out of the picture and is a clear trigger of anxiety. Regan looks looks so young while bed-ridden and covered in make-up, but she is twelve, on the cusp of puberty. She's between homes, between phases in her life, ample meat for a demon.
Also, this is not a religious family. Priests only enter into The Exorcist because it just so happens that the Catholic University is next door. Pazuzu has gone out of his way to target the most liberal, most secular, most "liberated" women he could find. It is a full on attack on the modernity of the Seventies, and modernity loses. Even one of the two titular exorcists, Father Karras (Jason Miller) wants to live in a modern world. He denies the possession several times even with voice changes and green contact lens effects right in his face. Finally, he's out there tossing holy water and chanting 'Our Father's. All the sophistication of a major international bureaucracy that is the Catholic Church is gone. We're fully in folk religion mode. A more ancient, more primal form of faith saves the day.
Speaking of Pazuzu, what is with that name? There are ten billion demons to pick from in Christian lore: we've seen several of them already. Pazuzu is not one of them. He's a Mesopotamian wind demon, more ancient than Christianity, possibly more ancient than Judaism. Even more curiously, while he was a spooky winged figure with a bestial head, Pazuzu was a positive force. His face was worn as an amulet to ward off worse spirits, such as Lamashtu, the kidnapper of children. Lamashtu is the precursor to the Jewish demoness, Lilith, who would work better as the villain of this movie. The mythology is backwards, I'm not sure why.
William Peter Blatty wrote the book this is based on and also wrote the screenplay. He was Catholic but by no means a fundamentalist. He's a strange figure with a lot of curious interests. Father Merrin (Max von Sydow in fantastic age make-up) was based on Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist and theologian with some wild New Age theories about evolution and Christianity. The more you study Blatty the more you realize you have no idea what he's going for half the time. I imagine there was some intention here with Pazuzu, I cannot figure out what it might be.
Importantly though, The Exorcist might take its sweet time getting to the scares, but they are here. At this point the most extreme scenes of The Exorcist are so well-known as to be legends already. I do not need to tell you about Regan's head turning around 360, the puking of green slime, unspeakable things being done with a crucifix. "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!" might as well be The Exorcist's tagline, put it on the posters. There's great jumpscares with Pazuzu's pale vampiric face. But as mentioned, The Exorcist is always operating with a lot of restraint. One of the early deaths in this movie happens off-camera, as Burke (Jack MacGowran) is tossed down the iconic steps, probably by Regan, and this is treated as a mystery. We never do see the corpse with its head turned around backwards.
However, we will not be screwed out of seeing a body go down those stairs, don't worry.
I think the most disturbing element is the make-up. Regan goes from healthy girl to believably sick to finally a witch-like creature, the iconic Halloween mask. She disappears out of the movie, with instead an awful thing filling her void. Ellen Burstyn does such a great job selling her character's despair at what her daughter has become. It's heartbreaking seeing her lose control and sob. This could be cheesy schlock, but it almost never gets there. (Okay, the demon barking curses and slurs is pure schlock, but I'm not anti-schlock.)
William Friedkin (RIP) was an incredible director and The Exorcist is a gorgeous movie. I can forgive a lot of indulgences when they're so beautifully-shot. There's a long take in New York City as Father Karras walks through a neighborhood full of bratty children that is really impressive. But I do need to mention that there are multiple stories of Friedkin being actively abusive during the production. I do not think you need to slap your actors across the face to get reactions out of them. Nor do you need to fire a gun full of blanks on set.
To wrap this up, The Exorcist was a big deal in late 1973 and 1974. Everything about this movie is iconic, even the music. (That opening Tubular Bells riff is barely in the movie and yet everybody knows it.) I'll have much more to say about the history of The Exorcist and its impact later. This was an enormous landmark movie in the history of horror, a box office smash immediately. So of course, there had to be sequels, rip-offs, and more demon movies.
Next Time! I already covered The Exorcist II: The Heretic back in 2020. So that's one less movie to write about. So instead, we will jump ahead to 1990 to cover the third movie, The Exorcist III.
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