October 16: The Exorcist (1973 -- William Friedkin)

★★★★

When I saw Scary Movie in 2000, I knew the horror/suspense genre was dead.  That film took me right back to graduate school and Northrup Frye’s opinion that irony and parody were the last stages in the vitality of a genre.  Frye says you can parody a genre when the audience is so familiar with the conventions that they can recognize them and no longer see the genre as real or vital.  Just a form.  When the girl in Scary Movie runs from house, sees two arrows – one pointing toward DEATH and the other toward LIFE – and chooses the DEATH direction, I knew that horror had lost its vitality.  And in fact, most of today’s horror/thriller/slasher films have an undertone of winks and playing games with an audience who knows the conventions well.

So I enjoyed seeing this movie from before the death of horror, a movie that set so many of the conventions into place and a movie that still generates a few chills.  With the leaves almost off the trees here in the Maine woods, Lou and I fixed chili, put comforters on our laps and watched The Exorcist.

The Exorcist has a commitment to horror that is hard to find these days.  William Friedkin is making a serious film about real, rounded characters, and the film has high stakes, both philosophically and for the characters.  Do we give in to despair when confronting evil, the film asks us.  The actors, too, are committed to their characters and bring presence to them in their back story as well as in the immediate action.  We understand the conflict and issues that Father Karras faces with respect to his duties as a son and his duties as a priest, and we sense the frailty of Father Merrin from the time we see his early scenes in Iraq.  Of course, we spend so much time with Chris MacNeil that we become invested in her struggle as a mother to save her daughter.  Such commitment is hard to find in today’s fill-in-the-blank horror films, which have to struggle to even rise to being clever. 

As part of its serious thrills, Exorcist introduces some great gimmicks.  Of course there is the 180-degree head turn, the propulsive vomit, and the jumping bed.   And the extended cut I watched included Regan’s backwards spider walk.  But some of the creepiest scenes to me were in the medical offices with a jerky x-ray machine popping and waving its arms around and, of course, the blood spurting out of a needle inserted into Regan’s neck.  If awfulness like that can exist in the day-to-day natural world, what horrors can lurk in the world of the supernatural?  These are effective effects.

Coming out in 1973, Exorcist couldn’t help but have New Hollywood in it, and it takes aims at social conventions.  The church gets its demystification in Karras’, who has become a Jesuit after participating in the Catholic equivalent of ROTC and is having to fulfill his required service.  He’s not sure of his faith, and he constantly second-guesses himself for being a priest instead of taking care of his family.  The upper-middle class arts crowd gets its come-uppance, too, as we watch the director meanly harass a German servant and see sweet, young, upper class girl transformed into a demon.  Religion and class are two favorite New Hollywood targets.

There’s even a self-reflexive element to The Exorcist.  Before we see Reagan transformed into monster, we’ve already seen how cinema works as Chris MacNeil practices her lines and hits her numbers in the protest scene Burke is filming.  So given these scenes, perhaps The Exorcist isn’t so scary; after all, it’s only a movie.