The Exorcist - If there were two films to be marked as textbooks for the post-New Hollywood "blockbuster" era, they would be Star Wars and The Exorcist. And yet there is something old fashioned about The Exorcist, something which Star Wars lacks but Jaws doesn't. It possesses that old strange 70's-ish quality that its characters deserve just as much time, development and attention as its effects, if not more. Which is why The Exorcist cannot be remade and be as shockingly gruesome as it was in 1973; because time and measurement were given to the screen leading up to the horrors that await.
The very idea that this film was made in 1973 and got away with an R rating is just shocking. Imagine, only six years earlier, audiences and critics alike were stuplified by the display of violence in Bonnie and Clyde which would appear very tame by today's standards, and only three years earlier had the first use of the word '****' had been used in 1970's M*A*S*H.
The Exorcist has been so influential that its effect somewhat wears off. Before The Exorcist, horror was all about suggestion and suspense. 1963's The Haunting is one of the creepiest films I have ever seen and there is hardly anything onscreen shown. Hitchcock is known for being the all-time master of offscreen suggestion and horror. The same goes with the silent French silent The Fall of the House of Usher, which transports the viewer into such an atmosphere that the semi-apocolyptic ending is like a slow awakening from a long hypnotic dream. But The Exorcist set new standards. With the levels of sex, violence and obscene language being raised by masterpieces such as Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H and Mean Streets, William Friedrikin saw the chance to re-invent the horror genre completely by adapting a novel claiming to be based on true events about the exorcism of a 12-year old girl possessed by the Devil.
After The Exorcist, audiences became impatient with the "old-fashionedness" of off-screen suggestion, and while this traditional technique lasted some years longer and flourished in Speilberg's Jaws, by the 80's all audiences wanted in horror films was more guts and more gore.
We cannot entirely blame The Exorcist for that, just as we cannot blame Star Wars for starting what it started; that is, a new revival of the Hollywood blockbuster based on franchises, bug-budgets and simple-minded stories with little regard for cinema as serious art.
Now The Exorcist, despite its imperfections (loose plot ends, occasional indulgence and lack of significant extra screen-time to the legendary Max von Syndow), is a grand achievement in the true terror which can be brought about by the manipulation of the film camera. While probably less shocking today than it was forty years ago, the film baffles the viewer in its violent and strange perversities. Some of the obscenities (while there are relatively few) used in this film would not make even into a rated-R film today, nor would some of the scenes (particularly one involving violent masturbation and a cross) find themselves in modern movies without an overwhelming surge of protests. I would have loved to have seen the meeting when Friedkin pitched this film to its studio's producers. They truly must've thought, "Is this man safe to be around?" Of course Polanski's supernatural horror film Rosemary's Baby had come out some years earlier, but The Exorcist reached beyond it into truly radical territory.
If ever there was a film for the religious to be offended by, it is The Exorcist. It so explicitly perverts Christian iconography as well as the innocence of childhood. But that is if we ignore the human story in it, which concerns a young Italian priest who is beginning to have his doubts. "I want out", he tells one of his superiors. He joined the priesthood with a degree in psychiatry, expecting psychiatrics, instead he is bombarded with people suffering from religious and philosophical pondering and doubts. The young priest learns what he was ignorant of while joining the priesthood; that the human psyche and soul are two different things (Cartesian dualism).
In discovering this he learns to accept his faith and preform the task that is asked of him; the exorcism. Father Damien's transformation is at the heart of the film, but not at the center-stage. There, is the grotesque and demonic transformation of the young Regan MacNeil which is what the film is remembered for. And boy is it terrifying.
But in the end, The Exorcist is a less effective film than say Psycho or Jaws, because contrary to the two, it shocks and terrifies you throughout its two-hour duration, maybe stays in your mind for some time, but it doesn't come to haunt you. Not many people today believe in demons or demonic possession, but I'm sure we all believe in the existence of sharks and serial killers. It is the while lies that rest at the center of the other two films is what makes them among the scariest ever. Logically, we all know that every time you check into a run-down motel a insane lunatic is not going to stab you to death in the shower, just as we know that every time you go into the water a shark is going to bite your leg off. But it is possible, and that sends a message to our most primitive instincts and leaves us with a superstition of enviroments, such as swimming in the ocean, or taking a shower. Jaws and Psycho are films that haunt you in the daytime, The Exorcist is one that haunts you in your dreams. The former is more effective, for one can always wake up. 8/10
