Mini-ish movie review: The Exorcist

I like horror flicks. Scratch that. Some horror flicks. I'm a little picky. I'm not a big slasher film kind of person and I need an actual storyline (call me crazy).

Growing up, no one else in the house liked scary movies, so I "missed out" on a lot of classics, like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street...and The Exorcist (1973). I still haven't seen Halloween, but I have now seen the other three. 

Marcus Theaters has been showing old horror films in October the last few years and last night's was choice was The Exorcist. While going to see it at 10pm on a work night might not have been the best idea, I had little choice if I wanted to see it on the big screen. One of the other contributing factors was Matt could see it at that time...and I certainly wasn't going alone! 

At just over 2 hours, The Exorcist was longer than I expected. Horror movies - especially older ones - tend to be on the shorter side (Friday the 13th was 1hr 35min, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street were  both 1hr 31 min), but with a long introduction of Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) - their home, lifestyle and relationship - the longer run time makes sense. Given the time they spent on laying the groundwork, I was surprised at how quickly they jumped into the medical procedures. One minute they're a happy little family (other than dealing with an absentee father) and the next Regan is getting her blood drawn. Chris, her mother, comments to the doctor about her moodiness and excessive energy/ability to focus, but we haven't seen it at that point...which was odd. Things quickly spiral from there and they include scenes of her fighting with and swearing at the doctor and nurse. I just think they should have shown her behavior, instead of talked about it.

Chris is a good mother. They go out of their way to show that, which is important. She's a movie star - which is why they're in the DC area, because she's filming a movie - but she clearly loves her daughter and makes time to spend with her. When things start going wrong, she fights to figure out how to help Regan - taking her to a doctor (who prescribes Ritalin for a nervous disorder), then consults with a specialist (when they think it's a brain lesion), on to a psychologist progressing to a team of psychologists. It's at that point one of them suggests consulting a priest about an exorcism...not because he believes in it, but because if a patient believes they have the devil inside them (as a delusion), then it stands to reason they can "cure" themselves by believing the demon has been driven out by a ritual. 

The priest Chris consults with is a friend of a friend - Father Karras (Jason Miller) - a Jesuit who, when she asks how to get an exorcism, tells her she'll need a time machine back to the 1600s. He's a trained psychologist and doesn't put much stock in exorcisms. He agrees to meet Regan and, even after seeing what a poor state she's in and personally experiencing some strange moments with her, reluctantly agrees to speak with the bishop about an exorcism. A veteran priest is brought in - Fr. Merrin - and the exorcism proceeded. Fr. Merrin took the whole thing very seriously, much more so than Fr. Karras...until ***SPOILER*** the moment when Regan and her bed are raised about 4-5 feet off the ground. He has no way to explain it scientifically and you can see the realization of what was actually happening on his face - that they're dealing with evil and a demon.

Father Karras' lack of faith is another interest part of the story. He's worn out, from his job and being worried about his little Italian mother who lives in New York. Their relationship is important and he clearly loves her very much. Both things - his faith and his mother - are important to his character development.

Respect of the sacred is an important part of the movie. While sacred things are desecrated - a statue of Mary and a crucifix - they are used to upset and shock the audience in a distressing way, as opposed to just being there for "shock and awe" value. It helps demonstrate the level of evil they're dealing with. The strength and faith of Fr. Merrin is palpable. A couple of times during the exorcism, he said something along the lines of "I am a sinner and expelling you is not because of me. It is the power of God that compels you!" 

Given the subject matter, I can't say it was a great movie. I will never think "oh, you know what I want to watch? The Exorcist!" But I can say it was well done. The evil is very evil, leaving no room for being attractive or tempting. No one would walk out of that movie and say "gosh, I want to be possessed." There is a lot of good in the movie too, from Chris and the priests to the more subtle goodness of friends - the housekeeper, her husband and Chris' personal assistant who don't run screaming, but stay and help as best they can. 

While I wouldn't recommend the movie to a younger (lots of crude and profane language) or more sensitive audience, I can say The Exorcist is worth seeing. It's a good reminder that evil and the devil are real in a very physical way and not just a boogie-man to scare children.


~ Katie Q.



Trivia:

• When the movie was released in 1973, Linda Blair was 14 years old.
• Due to death threats against Linda Blair from religious zealots who believed the film "glorified Satan", Warner Bros. had bodyguards protecting her for six months after the film's release.
• On the first day of filming the exorcism sequence, Linda Blair's delivery of her foul-mouthed dialogue so disturbed the gentlemanly Max von Sydow that he actually forgot his lines.
• The Exorcist is the first horror film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The only other one is Get Out (2017). Jaws (1975), The Silence of the Lambs(1991) and The Sixth Sense (1999) were all nominated, and "The Silence of the Lambs" won, but, these films are not designated as horror films on IMDB.
• Father Dyer is played by William O'Malley, an actual priest who until 2012 taught at Fordham Prep, a Jesuit high school.
• The bedroom set had to be refrigerated to capture the authentic icy breath of the actors in the exorcising scenes. Linda Blair, who was only in a flimsy nightgown, says to this day she cannot stand being cold.
• The refrigerated bedroom set was cooled with four air conditioners and temperatures would plunge below 30 degrees. It was so cold that perspiration would freeze on some of the cast and crew. On one occasion the air was saturated with moisture resulting in a thin layer of snow falling on the set before the crew arrived for filming.
• Ellen Burstyn received a permanent spinal injury during filming. In the sequence where she is thrown away from her possessed daughter, a harness jerked her hard away from the bed. She fell on her coccyx and screamed in pain.
• There are tales about ominous events surrounding the year-long shoot, including the deaths of nine people associated with the production and stories about a mysterious fire that destroyed the set one weekend. Actors Jack MacGowran and Vasiliki Maliaros died before the film was released.
• The original shooting schedule was 85 days, but filming in America lasted for 224 days.
• In the arteriogram scene, the bearded man who assists the doctor is Paul Bateson. He was an x-ray technician at NYU Medical Center where that scene was shot and managed to get that small part. In 1979, he was convicted of the murder of a film critic and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. However, he bragged about and was a suspect in the murders of six men whom he said he picked up in gay bars, had sex with them and then murdered and dismembered their bodies and put them into plastic bags "for fun" in 1977 and 78. They were known as the "bag murders". Although investigators believed his story, he was never officially charged and those murders have technically never been solved. Bateson was released from prison in 2004. The whole story revolving the "bag murders" were later fictionalized in Cruising (1980), which is also directed by William Friedkin.