Amid the spinning heads and pea soup, it’s the quiet moments that make William Friedkin’s The Exorcist a masterpiece of horror.
Over 50 years old, The Exorcist is one of the most studied and dissected films in horror history. By now, legions of words have been written about it (no pun intended, for all you William Peter Blatty fans reading). Documentaries made. Questionable sequels or prequels produced, some by genuinely great filmmakers (such as Paul Schrader or John Boorman). Mark Kermode wrote perhaps the last word on it, with his BFI book. It’s being reappraised everywhere in light of The Exorcist: Believer, including in Sight & Sound, with Mike Flanagan about to give us a hopefully much better addition to the ongoing universe next year.
My last rewatch came on an unseasonably warm and sunny day toward mid-October last year. It certainly lacked the chill needed for a film like Friedkin’s, though the hot, Iraq-set prelude introducing Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) hinting at the deeper ancient mythology lurking behind the scenes was a section of the film that completed escaped my recognition in the years since last watching the film. Perhaps this is because The Exorcist comes loaded with numerous visual and narrative pre-conceptions that, when you watch the film, don’t make up the complete whole.
As in, the immediate recollections are of the shock factors Friedkin throws in from author Blatty’s work, all geared around Linda Blair’s possessed Georgetown girl, Regan MacNeil. Whether it’s her vomiting green bile, shouting lines of blasphemous dialogue, or the infamous crucifix masturbation sequence, The Exorcist is remembered most for its sensationalist horror, which still resonates. The crucifix scene is just as shocking half a century on, for all of the torture porn or extreme horror filmmakers have visited on us since then. Maybe it’s the blood. Maybe it’s Blair’s committed vitriol (or Mercedes McCambridge’s terrifying voice work). Maybe it’s just the sheer sacrilege of it, even in an increasingly secular modern world. It’s hard to believe, still, that it ever got made by a major studio.
What struck me this time was The Exorcist's quiet horror. The moments around these barnstorming eruptions of almost comic evil, of the demon letting loose, of expressions of sadism or perversion. Or around the exorcism itself at the climax, the memorable sight of Merrin and the younger Father Karras (Jason Miller), compelling the demon out of Regan by the power of Christ. Consider the escalation of it, for one thing. Just how much Friedkin takes his time as Regan slips into the abyss, being medically and psychologically tested by science, until she urinates on the carpet and tells astronaut Billy Cutshaw “You’re gonna die up there.” That’s the pivot point.
One of the scenes where Regan is being examined by a doctor, where she lies on a medical bed, looking up at the ceiling, stands as among the most harrowing. Friedkin doesn’t employ a massive number of close-ups, certainly at the beginning, as he allows his audience to enter the world and live inside it, but here he shoots Blair’s face. Regan’s eyes widen and Friedkin inserts a split second shot of the demon in her vision. It’s so split-second that few watching in a cinema would have consciously seen it back in 1973, and even on VHS years later it would have been tricky to capture. On DVD, you can freeze frame and see the grey face, yellow teeth, the tongue, with wide eyes, set against a void, staring back at Regan.
It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying because you could watch The Exorcist and not even see it. Here, it haunted me. It reminded me of Kubrick’s The Shining, which came later, where young Danny Torrance sees flash images of lifts cascading blood or murdered Overlook guests, but even Kubrick provided Bartok’s strings to telegraph the fact we should be scared. Friedkin doesn’t use anything. It’s pure silence as we glimpse the demon (named Pazuzu elsewhere), looking like something from German expressionist cinema or Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. It doesn’t need music or sound. It’s an abyss.
He repeats the trick in the other sequence that, for me, gets lost among The Exorcist’s louder moments: Karras’ dream. We previously had met his elderly mother, played by Vasiliki Maliaros, an almost 90 year-old lady with no previous acting experience, whom Friedkin met in a Greek restaurant in New York. She sadly passed away ten months before The Exorcist premiered. In the film, Mrs Karras dies, and her son, grappling with a crisis of faith, dreams of her in an unnerving sequence in which she emerges from a subway, mouthing the words, “help me”.
Friedkin overlays the sequence with a dissonant yet almost choral sound. It’s hard to describe but perhaps reflecting the idea of being trapped in a space beyond our own existence. Karras is opposite the busy road, waving his arms, but his mother seems unable to see him. He races toward her but is almost trapped in a loop, unable to reach her, as his sleeping form mouths the word ‘Mom’ over the top.
Friedkin inserts another flash of Pazuzu, near identical to Regan’s vision, as Mrs Karras turns and walks back down the subway. We see a medallion – the one that Pazuzu will later rip from Karras’ neck as he possesses him – fall to the ground. Friedkin implies descent, perhaps suggesting that both Karras and his mother are destined for hell. Certainly Karras, both for abandoning his faith and failing to be present when his mother died.
It’s one of the strangest sequences in The Exorcist, loaded with meaning and symbolism, but it’s less commonly discussed, crowded out by the bigger and more bombastic points of horror – albeit ones Friedkin brings to life extremely well. There’s a stillness, an elegance, to a great deal of The Exorcist, juxtaposed by the sheer vulgarity of the demonic presence nestling elsewhere.
Those aspects really impacted me on this watch, amidst the sheer power of everything else that makes The Exorcist one of the greatest American films ever made.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on the Modern Horror podcast on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
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