Though I saw The Exorcist before it opened, I saw it with an audience which filled a large theater, and I was aware while the film was being shown of sharing in a rare experience: the experience of seeing a film which has its audience reacting as one, completely in the palm of its hand. When the lights came up after the showing, I felt that the film I'd just seen was not only a film but an event, and that it was about to become one of the biggest popular successes in movie history (in fact, it is on its way to becoming the single largest grossing film of all time). The last time I had such a feeling was when I saw The Godfather (which also broke all previous commercial records), and indeed, it is tempting to describe The Exorcist as the Godfather of horror films: a work aspiring to be the ultimate creation in a given genre, to surpass all others through its greater naturalism, and through its being more lavishly mounted and elaborately detailed. Actually, The Exorcist is much less good than The Godfather, without the earlier film's room for its actors or its narrative flair. But these faults, which would have crippled The Godfather, are much less detrimental to the essentially mechanistic character of the horror film, and in some ways (for instance, in the somewhat cryptic quality imparted to the film by its narrative lacunae and by its director's fragmented style) even contribute to The Exorcist's effect. For, much more than The Godfather, The Exorcist aims for a single, if perhaps not simple, effect: to frighten. Its “success” can be directly measured by its ability to induce fear.

Unlike The Godfather, The Exorcist has been getting a bad press, but I have yet to see a review in which it was indicated whether or not the film was actually found frightening by the writer. Rather, as in the case of the first critical coverage of porno movies, there is much worrying about the appeal to and effect on those others who constitute the film's audience, and a tone which remains oddly impersonal, whether hectoringly moralistic or nonchalantly flippant. My own opinion of The Exorcist happens to be somewhat higher than that of most other reviewers, though, were I to be asked how good it is, I could provide a fairly evenly balanced inventory of its virtues and defects. But if I were asked whether or not I found the film frightening, my answer would be: yes, extremely. My responses in this were no different from what I sensed to be the audience's. Like those other spectators, I sat there in an essentially defenseless state, and allowed myself to be worked on by the film; I watched The Exorcist and was gripped by fear.

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The Exorcist begins with a large-scale prologue set in Iraq. At the site of an archaeological excavation, some diabolic or demonic artifacts are unearthed, whose significance, though unclear to the audience, is evidently felt intensely by the elderly priest who supervises the project. Critics have complained that this sequence carries no meaning in the film for anyone who hasn't read the novel. Yet, as one such viewer, it seemed to me its general import—that of ancient antagonists, the priest and the forces of evil, girding for combat—was quite plain. The sequence has, moreover, and probably more than any other in the film, familiar generic associations: the violation of a tomb, and activation of an ancient curse, in some exotic setting.

The scene shifts to Georgetown, and the household of a movie star, of the new, unglamorous variety (played by just such a star, Ellen Burstyn). The actress (a divorcee), her beamingly wholesome twelve-year-old daughter (Linda Blair, the girl chosen to play this role, is a past winner of a medal from the President's Council on Physical Fitness), and some domestic help are living in a rented house while the actress is on location for the making of a movie. For a time, one mainly waits for something to happen, while some preliminaries involving noises that may be due to rats in an attic are unhurriedly protracted. One's chief impression of the film during these early sections is of a work in a weighty, naturalistic style, whose humorlessness verges on solemnity. But the humorlessness isn't inappropriate, and doesn't become pretentious in the film (as it has in the obiter dicta of the film's director, William Friedkin, and William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel and the screenplay). The mood created by these vaguely defined, early sections is chiefly one of unfocused apprehension.

When that mood shifts, it does so abruptly and decisively, and from then on the horrors escalate dramatically. During the quiet aftermath of a frenetic party at the actress's house, the daughter, who'd been in bed upstairs, suddenly appears and, trancelike, prophesies some unnamed person's death, following which she urinates on the floor. Soon after, the bed to which she'd been returned begins shaking violently, and, in rapid succession, objects have begun to hurl themselves across her room and she has begun, in a strange croaking voice, to mouth a stream of blasphemies and obscenities (far more shockingly foul than any I've heard in Hollywood films before), and to exhibit extraordinary feats of strength in turning aggressively on those around her. A number of medical authorities are consulted, during the course of which episodes we see what was to me the most excruciatingly unpleasant thing shown in the film, an explicit description of a spinal tap. But though the movie has been criticized for its allegedly sadistic appeal, I detected no sadism—that is to say, no invitation to enjoyment of the girl's suffering—in this or any other episode, including one in which she masturbates and bloodily mutilates herself with a crucifix. The spinal tap, like the film's other horrific elements, is the kind of thing that causes spectators to turn away in revulsion, or might if they weren't being held so mesmerically; and its explicitness serves the purpose of letting the audience know from early on that this film will be an unflinching witness, turning away from nothing.

The medical consultations prove of no avail, and finally, as a last resort, an exorcism is suggested. By this time, the mother is convinced that her daughter was responsible for the grotesque murder of the director of the film on which the actress had been working, and is in a state of utter desperation. She goes for advice to a priest with secular training as a psychiatrist who works at giving psychiatric counseling to troubled fellow clergymen, and who has been undergoing his own personal crisis as a result of guilt feelings arising from the recent death of his mother. The priest consents to see the girl, who by this time must be strapped to her bed to prevent her from harming herself and others, and has become hideously disfigured by self-generating lesions which we see erupting on her skin like fissures in an earthquake.1 In the course of being interrogated by the priest, she—or rather the being that is possessing her—claims to be not merely a demon but the devil himself, and speaks in a strange language (it is actually English in reverse) and, to profoundly sinister effect, in the voice of a derelict whom we had seen previously appealing to the priest for a handout during a scene in a subway station, and that of the priest's dead mother. At one point, during the height of these sections' intensity, the priest is brought by one of the domestic staff to see the girl's sedated body, on which the words “Help me” are spelled out as he watches, as if being scratched from within into her flesh. Reluctant at first, the priest is finally persuaded that an exorcism is called for.

Approval for the rite is granted, but it is to be performed by someone experienced in such matters: the elderly (and ailing) priest introduced in the prologue, who now happens to be back in America, with the young priest to serve as his assistant. The exorcism commences amid furious resistance from the possessed girl, whose appeals to the doubts and guilts of the younger priest grow increasingly insidious. (The older priest instructs the younger one never to engage in conversation with the possessed person, but to absorb himself wholly in the prescribed ritual.) Things go badly, and all seems lost when the younger priest, temporarily relieved by his superior, returns to the girl's room later to find the older priest dead. In an access of rage, the younger priest (who has been portrayed as an athletic, powerfully physical figure, and played with an unrelieved intensity by Jason Miller) turns on the girl, and begins to pound her violently with his fists (an act which the audience greets with immense satisfaction, as the tensions which have been gathering find release). “Take me!” the priest exclaims, “Take me!” And. at this, the devil is sensed to leave the girl's body and to enter the priest's, who instantaneously hurls himself through the bedroom window to his death on the pavement far below. The girl's possessor has been exorcised; and in the brief, hushed, concluding moments which follow, we learn that (apart from her spark of vestigial recognition of a priest's collar as a symbol of beneficence, which seems to me a maudlin touch) the girl remembers nothing of her ordeal.

The Exorcist is thus about an exorcism which succeeds. But is it? To take it as this leaves too much out of account, most immediately the peculiarly muffled (“ambiguous” would be too high-flown a word) quality of its apparently triumphant ending. For if this is a victory over the devil, what kind of victory is it whose site is littered by the corpses of two priests, and whose beneficiary is an ordinary young girl at best unchanged by the experience she's been through? The “positive” reading of the film also fails to answer a question which might not be a legitimate one to ask of life (where criteria other than rationality may obtain), but is, I think, appropriately asked of The Exorcist, a work of art, or artifact, of someone's conscious devising. That question is “Why?”—why is this little girl the one possessed? Psychological indicators scarcely suffice—the girl's home, though broken by divorce and liberated in its language and mores, is hardly depicted as an example of dolce-vita decadence; indeed, the movie star is a loving and attentive mother. In any case, the film makes it unmistakably clear that the girl isn't just mentally disturbed, she is possessed.

I think that to ask the question, Why this girl?, in light of the film's muffled ending is to find the answer: the girl is a vessel, the devil's route to the priest, a priest wracked by guilt who at one point declares he's afraid he's losing his faith, and whose final attempt to take on the devil in individual combat might be seen as a surrender to pride as much as an instance of heroism. In seeing the film this way, a vital link is clearly provided by a dream the younger priest has before his involvement with the possessed girl, in which one of the diabolic artifacts unearthed at the archaeological excavation makes an otherwise inexplicable appearance.

Indeed, the very title of the work hints that it is one in which appearances will be deceiving, for it leads us to believe, from the way the older priest is introduced and reappears, that the titular exorcist will be he. But, in fact, the exorcist proves to be the younger priest. Given that, like the older priest, he dies, and, further, that he dies by suicide (at a time when he may already, for reasons of his own, be drawn to self-destruction), can one say that the film is about a possession which fails? For, whatever theological fine points may be involved, the destruction of the priests, and, above all, the act of suicide do seem to carry a kind of unequivocality. And here the film, which has been criticized for occasionally being softer than the novel (which I've since read), is harder: in the film, unlike the novel, the priest's life isn't prolonged so that he may be given the last rites of confession and absolution. He does remain alive long enough to press the hand of another priest who rushes to his battered body in an attempt to aid him. But since the dying priest may still be possessed (for surely the devil can't have been outrun by the mere speed of a leap from a window), this last fraternal gesture (toward a “worldly” priest, whom we've previously seen in the actress's social circle) is itself profoundly equivocal. Is the gesture of fraternity being extended by the dying priest, or by the devil?

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Whether the film's audience consciously apprehends any of this in its experience of the work I don't know, but what that audience is nevertheless being given is, I think, a depiction of the rule of the devil, or of evil, or of chaos in this world, a celebration of the power of these things—by whatever name one calls them—to work their will. To say this is not to imply that the film's audiences are mere empty vessels into which such content is being poured, or celebrants at some sort of new Black Mass; it would be presumptuous in the extreme to assume that the film's image of the world is being granted those audiences' uncritical belief.

But in one particular, the film's image of the world is given an exceptionally striking credibility, and that is in the privacy and domesticity of its horrors: the sense of their existing, like skeletons in closets, unknown to anyone but a few principals behind the façades of pleasant houses on pleasant streets (not to say in the substantial Georgetown residences we associate with the pillars of society). And though it would be presumptuous to posit any too simple a relation between The Exorcist and its audience, it would be equally presumptuous to dismiss the film as no more than another horror film with a new gimmick, though, considered artistically, this is all it may be. After all, there have been films as sensationally horrific and as frightening as The Exorcist before. But a film doesn't achieve The Exorcist's phenomenal success without striking some responsive chord in its audience; and such success usually has less to do with shaping an audience's beliefs than with affirming what an audience believes already. And so this film, heading for its unique position among others, paints its picture of a world of hidden horrors, a malevolent world beyond our comprehension and control. One might err in making too much of The Exorcist just as in making too little of it, but nothing would be more presumptuous, I think, than to conclude that those people turning out in record numbers to see it are merely experiencing the thrills of a novel horror movie: to assume, because we cannot know exactly what they are feeling and believing, that they are feeling nothing, believing nothing.

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1 Some critics have held against the film the fact that its impact depends so much not on the work of the director but on make-up and special effects. Yet, while this charge is doubtless true, it hardly seems to me damaging. In fact, the makeup is brilliant—Max von Sydow's as the elderly priest no less than the possessed child's—as are the special effects, about which my chief reservation has to do with their occasional tendency to call attention to themselves as tricks by their very ingenuity: a levitation, however well done, falls into this category, as does a 180-degree turn of the girl's head the second time. (The first time we're caught too much off guard to reflect much on the mechanics.) Otherwise, the only outright mistake is in giving some substance vomited by the girl the consistency of homogenized porridge, and then tempting the fate of a spectator's laughter by a repeat performance in a different color.

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