William Friedkin's compressed epic of faith began with the kind of tension that could make or break the project: an atheist director adapting the source novel of a committed Christian. What worked in its favour was that Friedkin approached it the same way he'd done with the previous film The French Connection, blur the line between fiction cinema and documentary practice and see what happens. He was working from a novel by a razor sharp wit who had a artisanal way with dialogue. Between them, the creative tension birthed one of the most durable horror films in cinema history. That durability is as much due to what it doesn't do as to what it added. Until the climactic scenes of spiritual melee, the film is of generic bombast. This was the era of AIP and Hammer and, while they did fine work stretching genre, they came within not a cooee of The Exorcist's power which dared to frighten by appearing to report rather than offering a ride on a ghost train.
The prologue scene in Iraq establishes this. Father Merrin's discovery of the demonic carving is played with what feels like a lifetime of gravity but only the subtlest of emotive signalling. Instead of a big BAM BAM BAM moment, we get the clinks and clanks of the hammering workers, the silence of a museum and then the understated violence of his confrontation with the demonic statue. We don't have the details but we do have the mood. When we crossfade to Georgetown, USA and the house which will host the majority of the action, we start to feel on edge without any generic statement. Chris McNeil lies on her bed and goes through the next day's script when she hears a noise in the attic. She gets up and checks on her daughter who is sleeping but with blankets cast aside and the open window letting in a gale of icy autumn air. Something is wrong but everything looks normal. When things turn extraordinarily wrong, they still walk and talk around this normal house.
Over at the church, young and hunky Fr Damien Karras doesn't feel anything as he adminsters the eucharist and it troubles him. He visits his ailing, fragile mother in New York and it's a dark and poky apartment in a rough neighbourhood. Her fate, confused and pained in a public mental hospital, drags her son into subterranean guilt for not being there. Desecrations to the figures at his own church draw the attention of Detective Kinderman to Karras' twin expertise of psychiatry and Jesuit membership (their dialogue is muscular and earthily funny). When Chris meets him the scene, with the progressed narrative now turned frightening, is a grab at warmth in a frozen environment.
These are not the usual terms to speak of horror movies. This film just doesn't play like anything before it made to scare its audiences, yet its sense of dread and the frankness of its depictions of the weird haunt us as we watch with a sense of failing control over what we are watching. There had been some notable left turns in the genre just prior to this film's production. Night of the Living Dead gave us a doom that had no conceptual handholds. Rosemary's Baby gave us an experience of paranoia that could bring us to screaming point. Neither of those are like the Exorcist, though, in that an insistence on the process of things not immediately related to the source of the horror. Regan's hospital examination is a blow by blow squirmfest. We probably don't need it for the story but to live through the child's ugly medical experience invests us more than the finest jumpscare could. And it's playing by your own rules that, if it works, gets you slap bang in the middle of influential icon territory. That's what happened here.
Add astute casting, mixing real priests in with fresh faces, career-making chances on lesser known actors and so on seal the deal. Max von Sydow, all of forty four when he made this, is so convincing as an eighty year old man (walking with the cautious step of one who knows how brittle his bones are) that I thought he was that old when I first saw the film (and then there's the makeup). Ellen Burstyn shot from a respectable lower tier career to front and centre of the younger character actors of the time with a performance of near unbearable stress retention. Jason Miller as Karras adds a day-to-day intensity to his own burdened world. Linda Blair only needs to convince us that she's a bright twelve year old girl but gives us more of the scarifying side of her possession than she usually gets credit for (there is a lot of audio and vision mixing which led to doubts about how complete her performance was). And so on. There's not a false note between them. By the final moments of turbulent action we are left wrenched by genuine catharsis.
So much has been written about this film's technical achievements that I'll keep that to a recommendation for reader's to follow up for themselves. The history of its production and reception are fascinating.
My own story begins in the early seventies when this film was notorious, wracked (and frankly supported) by rumours of genuine supernatural forces at play in its very celluloid. I'd heard so many of these that my impression was of a film made of shocking scenes, plotless and sensational. The only people I knew who had actually seen it were my parents whose discussion of it, measured and careful in front of me, yet vibed up as quietly terrifying.
Finally, when I was old enough to see it legally, I watched the modified version on tv, cut to shreds with bowdlerised dialogue and not much more than an impression of why it deserved its reputation. But it was intriguing. This was as an undergraduate and at the dawn of home video. When I went back home for Christmas holidays it was the first thing I rented. That was when I understood the complex shifting of protagonists and how the alternations of perspective created the film's constant momentum. It was a wonder. This is at a time when I, and every other film student of my age, was ploughing through the new Hollywood of the '70s with its wealth of cinematic challenges.
The Exorcist reigned among them because it felt complete in ways that the others didn't quite. Part of the completion was this: as a lifelong atheist, I had no trouble folding myself into Karras' crisis of faith or his action at the climax. My understanding of the motivation for that action contained no need for it to be spiritual (whatever that means) but I had no trouble with anyone of credulous religious affliation who might take it more literally. You could watch it as Blatty the Christian writer or Friedkin the atheist director and the film would be unchanged.
I saw this at a cinema in Melbourne last night. It was (thankfully) the original 1973 cut so unhampered by pointless dragging extra scenes and embarrassing superimpositions of scary demon faces in shadows or cooker hoods. It was preceded by a wide ranging presentation on what had preceded the film, its aesthetics, casting, writing and so on. This caused stirs around me in the auditorium with one old goose behind me murmuring as though he were in his loungeroom waiting for the commercials to finish.
There were other bursts of this kind during the screening, some clearly signalling aloofness or superiority to the film (then why buy tickets to it?) and others so baffling they felt pathological (the guy beside me who snorted at a scene change to Jason Miller jogging was a worry). But though this persisted through most of the scenes (except the hospital and finale, of course) the greater audience's refusal to indulge it was a great refreshment. This bullshit phenomenon seemed ot peak in the mid 2010s at similar retrospective screenings of classics, following a meme that offered licence to meet anything out of sorts with contemporary filmmaking or manners with ridicule. The laughter always sounded forced, a bird call of attempted sophistication (as though such casual snobbery was anything but oafish philistinism). Last night, though, the chortlers were contained to their small islands of influence and were never allowed to dominate. I fancy it was the younger members of the crowd who led the silent pushback (there was, in a show of hands, a surprising number of first timers there and they all looked under thirty). Just as the line accompanying this film has often had it, there is hope to be had.
