30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 4: THE EXORCIST (1973)

The reason that The Exorcist stands alone as the best exorcism movie made to date—not to mention the scariest movie of all time—is that it takes place in a world where exorcism doesn’t exist. Very few filmmakers are able to maintain the credible presentation of demonic possession in a normal, everyday world without seeming silly. Some have tried, most notably Scott Derrickson’s blithely ignorant The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was about how we should all ignore science because a girl had a seizure.

Most movies about demons tend to come from a religious point of view; the genius of The Exorcist is that its director, William Friedkin, and writer, William Peter Blatty, take on the story from a secular point of view and are never quite converted. The tension builds as they present the possession and then gradually strip away any logical scientific explanation before leaving us with nowhere to go but the supernatural.

Regan (Linda Blair) is a happy adolescent girl, not without troubles. Her parents have recently divorced, and she’s just moved to Georgetown with her mom Chris (Ellen Burstyn), an actress. She finds a Ouija board in the attic, claims to be using it to speak to a friend named “Captain Howdy,” and soon she’s exhibiting strange and destructive behavior. When furniture starts to move across the house by itself, Chris begins to look into a spiritual option.

The movie proceeds with terrifying logic.  The idea of possession is not even an option at first; Regan is a lonely girl who's disconnected from her family and has no friends as a result of being dragged around the country by her mother, and is thus prone to psychological damage.  We witness as her behavior slowly ratchets up from merely eccentric to dangerous. The scenes at the hospital, where young Regan is subjected to every painful test she can go through, are horrifying in a way that is completely realistic. By the time we get to the exorcism, we completely accept it as the only reasonable thing to do.

Another way in which The Exorcist stands out among films of its type is that the demon inside Regan becomes a believable, chilling character in itself.  This is not "the devil," but a troublemaker who takes delight in messing with people on earth.  Mercedes McCambridge gives the demon a voice somewhere between that of a wise old man and a petulant child; it speaks with the knowledge of someone who's been causing this sort of mayhem for ages, but with an eerily playful tone.

Its conversations with Fr. Karras (Jason Miller), the troubled priest whom Chris calls in, are a chess game of two clever souls, though we get the sense that the demon might actually be holding all the cards.  The Church eventually sends in a professional exorcist, Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), who's performed one before.  Merrin knows how the demon works, but he is flawed too.

The climactic exorcism, which might have been supremely silly, is dreadfully logical and quietly tense.  We see that the demon is clearly affected by the exorcism, but could it be luring the priests into false security?  We never quite know what it's up to.  The conclusion, a triumph of real human compassion over Biblical mumbo-jumbo, is inevitable and crushing.

Perhaps the reason he movie is so effective is that Friedkin doesn't treat it as a horror film.  What's scary about it is not the pea-soup vomit or the moving furniture, or even the masturbating with a cross, but rather the capturing and endangerment of a little girl.  We are scared because Regan is scared, and Friedkin never lets us lose her presence.

**** out of ****

Note: The more I watch the film, the more I want to praise the 1973 release over the now-more-prominent 2000 reissue.  The new footage added to the film--featuring an extended hospital scene, a stairway conversation between Merrin and Karras, frequent flashes of imagery from Merrin's expedition to Iraq, and the famous spider-walk scene--adds nothing of note to the film and only throws Friedkin's carefully built tension off kilter.  The extra footage doesn't really represent Friedkin's cut, but rather Blatty's vision of the film, since these scenes are straight out of his novel; in fact, the extended final sequence, between two secondary characters, serves no purpose but to set up his sequel, "Legion" (which he filmed in 1990 as The Exorcist III).