Shocktober 2023 - The Exorcist (1973)
“How do you go about getting an exorcism?” – Chris MacNeil
Welcome to the 2023 edition of Shocktober, my annual horror movie festival that I’ve run since 2006, making this the 15th Shocktober in total (there were 2 years I skipped). As this is the first Shocktober on this new platform, I thought I’d hit the ground running with what many consider to be the greatest and most influential horror movie of all time. So, get yourselves ready, this is the first of my 13 Screams this year.
The Exorcist – this was released just at the point when I started taking a serious interest in horror movies. I had enjoyed the very few I had seen up to this point, but 1973 was a landmark year. This was due in part to having reached my teenage years and suddenly being given the freedom to stay up later, even on school nights to watch them when they appeared on one of three TV channels that were available, and the acquisition of Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies which quickly became a bible, giving me a timeline to all these movies, 99.9% of which I had never heard of, but had a sudden yearning to see. (Despite my parents having bought me this book, there’s no doubt that they spent much of my teenage years hoping this was a fad I’d grown out of. It’s been fifty years now, so I’m guessing their hope was a forlorn, lost one.)
Oddly, I had no burning desire to see this film back in ’73. I was a lot more concerned with Frankenstein and Dracula movies. There were what I considered to be REAL, proper horror back at the age of 13. In fact, I didn’t see The Exorcist until a midnight showing at a cinema when I was around 27 or 28. My collecting of films was in full flow at that point – the heady days of VHS, but The Exorcist was way off the menu due to the Video Recordings Act – it took a while to add it to my collection. But during that screening, I was underwhelmed because I realised that I had seen “the best bits” in clips here and there over the years. I didn’t realise its real power.
Prior to my screening of the DVD for this article, I hadn’t watched the movie in over 20 years. And strange as it might seem, that was a good thing, because I came to it fresh, with perhaps a different sensibility. Suffice it to say, this screening was the best experience of the four or five times I’ve seen it, and certainly the time I realised its power and felt its impact. At the time of writing, four days have passed and I’m still thinking about various aspects of the film.
It's pretty hard to write a review of it, but I’m going to give it a good attempt. Why is it so hard? Well, the story is pretty lightweight and simple. A young girl becomes possessed by a demon and a couple of priests exorcise it out of her. There. Done and dusted. But there’s so much more that that to it. There’s nuance, there’s depth, there are incredible performances, there are groundbreaking special effects that still hold up today, fifty years later in the days of CGI. There’s a mounting sense of dread that pervades the whole film as seemingly unconnected events coalesce into a single story.
We start off in Iraq, in an archaeological dig, overseen by Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) where a medallion of Saint Joseph is discovered along with a small artefact depicting the demon Pazuzu.
Meanwhile, in Georgetown, Washington, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burnstyn) is filming a new movie on location and has rented a large town house with her twelve-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) and begins to hear strange noises in the attic. She also notices a young, very intense priest on the grounds of the university where they’re filming.
This is Father Karras (Jason Miller) who tends as best he can to his ailing mother who lives in New York. Karras is a man in conflict, a trained psychiatrist, he is losing his faith.
At this point, the story centres equally on Karras, whose mother dies along, causing him immense feelings of guilt, eroding his faith even further and the escalating events at the MacNeil house. Regan has discovered a Ouija board and claims to have contacted a spirit she calls Captain Howdy. Whether it’s the use of this Ouija board that brings the demon to her is never explored, but she’s having trouble sleeping because her bed shakes violently, she interrupts a party held by her mother by wandering in wearing her nightgown and wetting herself. This is just the beginning.
Karras is overwhelmed by his feelings of guilt that his mother died in such a way and is experiencing dreams involving his mother and a Saint Joseph medallion, the one found by Merrin in Iraq. This plays into the story and is a recurring motif but I can’t really explain how. (But it makes sense while watching the film.)
Regan is getting much, much worse and is restrained on the bed, having undergone a series of medical tests and is now exhibiting abnormal strength, off-screen she kills Chris’s friend and director by snapping his head 180 degrees and throwing him out of her window on to some stone steps that run alongside the house. But there are no witnesses, however Lt Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) is investigating. As Regan is now speaking in tongues, levitates and debases herself with a cross, her mother heeds the advice of one of the doctors and seeks an exorcism.
Exorcism isn’t something the Catholic Church seems to readily embrace in this day and age, and it takes a bit of persuasion, eventually it’s agreed that Karras can attend the ritual, with a more senior priest leading, which is where Merrin enters the fray.
The exorcism ritual is brutal, as the demon (who never identifies itself) uses psychology to war against the priests, it preys on their weaknesses costing the elderly Merrin his life, until Karras snaps and literally beats the demon out of Regan, taking it into himself, before performing one last act of sacrifice, throwing himself to his doom out of the window and on to the stone steps. Regan is now cured and has no memory of what happened. The police investigation stops there also, because there’s no evidence Regan who as a 12-year-old child could feasibly snap a grown man’s neck, and I guess demonic possession wouldn’t play too well in a court of law.
It’s the performances, as I mentioned earlier, that really sell the film. They’re so grounded in reality, the people are so ordinary, yet these seemingly unbelievable occult occurrences happen to them and they make it seem so credible. Even the famous scene where Regan’s head slowly spins around still retains its impact. It’s very easy to see why Hammer Films were losing ground at an alarming rate when their output at this time was still Frankenstein and Dracula movies with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee doing their tired best against overwhelming odds.
The times, they were a-changing, as Bob Dylan said. But Hammer never got the memo.