The Exorcist (Warner Bros., Hoya Productions, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the TCM showing of the documentary Friedkin Uncut, I stayed on the channel for the next two movies in sequence. One was the legendary 1973 horror film The Exorcist, which caused a sensation when it first came out 49 years ago but which I’d never seen before. Neither had my husband Charles; when it came out originally he was too young for it (11) and I was put off by the gross-out factor, which turned out to be a lot less extreme than I’d assumed from what I’d heard about the film. As just about everyone knows, The Exorcist is about a young girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who starts having horrific experiences with a malevolent spirit that has taken over her body. She starts manifesting this when she complains that her bed is literally shaking with her in it, and in no time at all she’s throwing up green slime, spouting obscenities and speaking in the deep, low, sepulchral tones of veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge. She’s also being penned in by her own bedroom furniture – for me the most frightening scene in the film is when a chest of drawers moves under its own power and blocks the doorway so she can’t get out – and ultimately she develops a pointed green tongue and a level of crimson scars on her face that makes it look like she got into her mom’s lipstick and tried to paint herself like a Native American. Regan is being raised as a single parent by her mother, screen actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, whom I’m so used seeing in Lifetime movies like Flowers in the Attic at her current age I’d forgot she was ever young), who’s in Washington, D.C. shooting a movie about student demonstrations. She’s shown making a scene from this film in which she pleads with the students who are occupying their college campus that the only way to achieve change is to work within the system. Unfortunately, the director of her film, Burke Dennings (Jack McGowran), is interested in Chris as a woman but Regan, or rather the demon inside her, isn’t thrilled by having him as a stepfather and makes sure that doesn’t happen by causing him to fall out a window to his death several floors below. (We never meet or even learn anything about Regan’s real-life dad; unlike similar characters in Lifetime movies, he never shows up during his daughter’s distress.)

Chris takes Regan to various doctors, but none of them can do anything to relieve Regan’s condition; one diagnoses it as a tumor on her temporal lobe, but X-rays of her show no sign of such a tumor. (There’s an unintentionally funny sequence of Regan’s X-rays – lined up in a row on a viewing board and virtually identical with each other – that led me to joke, “Who’s her lab tech, Andy Warhol?”) For me, the film’s most interesting character is Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), whom Chris seeks out for help with her daughter’s frustrating condition and who ultimately decides that Regan is the victim of demonic possession and what she really needs is an exorcism. Miller got into The Exorcist from a play he had written and starred in called That Championship Season (1972), about a high-school basketball coach who dominates the lives of his players well into their adulthoods. William Friedkin had seen the play in its original off-Broadway run and liked Miller’s acting so much he paid off Stacy Keach, whom he’d originally signed for Damien, and cast Miller instead. It helped that Miller had actually gone to seminary to become a Roman Catholic priest and then had had a crisis of faith that led him to drop out and study psychiatry – an interesting inversion of his character in the film, who became ordained in the Jesuit order and then studied psychiatry to help him become a better and more helpful priest. (Ironically, when Miller directed a film of That Championship Season in 1982, Stacy Keach was in his cast.) Father Karras is having guilt feelings over the recent death of his mother (Vasiliki Maliaros), with whom he shared an apartment, because she croaked while he’d left her in the apartment alone. Father Karras starts the stipulated procedures to determine whether Regan is really a victim of possession or is just mentally ill; at one point he sprinkles her with a small jar of what he says is holy water – and she indeed burns at the touch of it – though later he says it was just tap water and she’s flunked that part of the possession test. The church authorities ultimately approve Regan’s exorcism but decide they want someone more experienced at it to conduct it.

The person they pick is Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), who shows up seen from behind, dressed in black with a wide-brimmed black hat, and who looks like he should be playing the lead in a show called Have Crucifix, Will Travel. We’d already met him in a prologue set in Iraq at an archaeological “dig” near the ancient city of Nineveh – which is how a film so thoroughly steeped in Roman Catholic theology and ritual begins with the sound of a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to Friday prayer at a mosque. Father Merrin discovered a small statue of a demon at this site, which we are evidently supposed to accept as the source of whatever it is that possesses Regan in the main part of the story. Ultimately Father Merrin and Father Karras work together to exorcise Regan, and there’s a battle of wills in which Regan’s demon fights them back and kills both of them even though the exorcism is successful. The Exorcist was a huge box-office hit and people literally lined up for blocks to see it, but 50 years later it still packs a punch (or several) but it’s not the giant scare-fest it apparently was in 1973. I wondered if time had caught up with it, but then I remembered that the original Frankenstein film was 39 years old when I first saw it on TV in 1970 and I loved it. Even though Jack P. Pierce’s makeup job to turn Boris Karloff into the Monster had become so ubiquitous and such a major part of the cultural landscape it had lost its ability to scare, the film still worked for me as an almost primordial myth, a vivid parable of creation, destruction and our responsibility for the technological havoc we wreak on the world. The Exorcist 50 years later has virtually none of that kind of resonance, and though it’s relatively restrained by the standards of modern-day horror filmmaking it didn’t really ramp up the gore quotient in the genre (that would have been Night of the Living Dead, made five years earlier). One of the weirder stories William Friedkin told in his documentary interviews was that Max von Sydow kept blowing the line in which he’s supposed to call out to the demon possessing Regan (who in later films in the cycle was called “Pazuzu” but is nameless here) to leave her in the name of Jesus Christ. He apologized to Friedkin, saying that as an atheist he had trouble speaking that line – which seems really bizarre given that eight years before he made The Exorcist von Sydow had played Jesus Christ in George Stevens’s epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told.