The Devil You Know

Year: 2005

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Gabriel Mann, Clara Bellar

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Now here’s the moment I’ve been waiting for! It was hard to get through that Exorcist: The Beginning review with a straight face, because I knew this twist was waiting in the wings. As many film nerds probably know, but I was secretly hoping you didn’t, The Beginning isn’t just one movie. It’s the top of a massive iceberg that reveals the lunatic depths of the Hollywood system.

You see, the Renny Harlin film actually began its life as an Exorcist prequel set in Africa and starring Stellan Skarsgård as Father Merrin. So far, so good, but get this: It was originally directed by Paul Schrader (the Taxi Driver and Raging Bull screenwriter who went on to direct such illustrious masterworks as The Canyons), but when he turned in his completed cut to the studio, they recoiled like a vampire at a garlic factory. Where was the blood they wanted? What was this (urp) psychological drama that was unspooling before their very eyes? Instead of scrapping the project, they kept the leading, setting, and basic plot as well as some choice selections from the original footage, hired a sexier supporting cast, ladled heaps of CGI carnage onto the project, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, when The Beginning T-boned the box office and began hemorrhaging money, they gave Schrader a pittance to complete his effects, and quietly released his original cut as Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist nine months later, hoping nobody would notice. And that’s how we got one of the most fascinating sets of films in Hollywood history. Where else will you find an example of two directors approaching the exact same material to make two completely different movies? It’s an exciting experiment in auteur theory: how did these two men apply their own personalities and artistic desires to the film? We almost never get the opportunity to compare and contrast directorial style like this, and it’s only incidental that the films both kinda suck.

Come on, you had to have expected that at this point.

I thought the plot section might be a breeze, highlighting a couple differences from The Beginning’s plot an calling it a day, but Dominion is such a fundamentally separate entity that I’ll have to start from scratch. Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) is a lapsed priest, having begun to doubt his faith after surviving the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Holland. Already the film is more coherent, presenting – wonder of wonders – a complete scene and using it to inform the character’s motivations later on. That may seem like screenwriting 101, but we’re dealing with Renny Harlin here.

Anyway, Merrin is now an archaeologist working at a dig uncovering a buried church in an African valley. Instead of the spooky, torchlit Indiana Jones funhouse of The Beginning, it’s a bright, clean building that’s eerie for why it’s there, not how it looks. Point Dominion. Opening the church seems to once again (or rather, once before) have unleashed an ancient evil upon the valley, targeting the innocent missionary Father Francis (Gabriel Mann), the camp doctor Rachel (Clara Bellar, who The Beginning recast with an actress more willing to wear low-cut tops), and especially Cheche (Billy Crawford), a wild, deformed boy who the villagers believe to be cursed, who Rachel is attempting to rehabilitate.

Quite literally, all hell breaks loose, as tensions erupt between the British soldiers and African tribesmen, a series of grisly murders rock the community, and Cheche’s accelerated healing turns out to be the result of a demon who challenges everything Merrin believes in.

Or rather, doesn’t believe in.

What Paul Schrader has delivered here is certainly worth closer examination. Although Dominion is only a truly great film when viewed in comparison to the maelstrom we call Exorcist: The Beginning, the psychological and philosophical concepts developed in the script are worthy of inclusion in the grand scheme of this disproportionately heady horror franchise. But the same could be said of Exorcist II: The Heretic, and look where that got us. Good ideas do not a good movie make, especially in the horror genre.

Dominion’s first priority is to provoke thought, not to scare us, but it does neither particularly well. Part of the blame can be shifted to the sawn-off post-production budget, a limp affair that resulted in a pack of CGI hyenas so lamentably ill-rendered that they’re essentially just one big pixel each. But the leading cause of the film’s total inability to translate from script to screen is the acting. I don’t know if this speaks to Schrader’s facility with his performers or if Renny Harlin’s casting director made the right call, but the ensemble here is uniformly unimpressive.

Skarsgård is a bit forgettable in both movies because Young Father Merrin is a bland character no matter who spices the broth, but he’s by far the best asset of the cast. Clara Bellar graces the screen with the delicacy and emotional resonance of a cheese sandwich, Gabriel Mann chews the scenery so thoroughly that it has to be inspected for termites, and the various extras called upon to recite dialogue are gloriously abysmal. The man tasked with playing a Nazi psychopath is so clearly uncomfortable with his role that he speaks like he’s giving a museum tour, and the crowd he torments are hardly any better, their bored utterances completely undermining the riveting tension captured in the dialogue.

“Holocaust? Oh, that seems pretty bad, huh?”

This tin of ham they call a cast strangles the script, which really does have some memorable moments. As tensions rise and people fall victim to the evil blossoming in the hearts of man, some truly shocking stuff goes down, stuff which Renny Harlin would cherry pick and toss into the barrel of The Beginning without actually considering if they fit into his version of the story (spoiler alert: they don’t). And although the climactic exorcism is probably the weakest of the entire series (discounting The Heretic, which didn’t f**king have one), it at least finally abandons the pretense that these scenes are anything but a poorly disguised conduit for theological pontification.

So. Dominion is a more coherent film than Exorcist: The Beginning. Which isn’t really a fair metric, considering that Salvador Dalí has made more coherent films than Exorcist: The Beginning. With the same script and a different director (a third director – could you even imagine? What if Hollywood stopped everything and only made Exorcist prequels from now on?), Dominion could have been a good, even great film. But as it stands, it’s just a rather interesting footnote in a long-running series of flops.

TL;DR: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is a better film that its jagged clone, but it's still a weak entry in an even weaker franchise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1153
Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

The Devil Is In The Prequels

Year: 2004

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As we near the end of our Exorcist retrospective, we find ourselves with a franchise in a state of desolation. 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic was a napalm sandwich of suckage, and 1990’s The Exorcist III suffered at the box office, partly because Part 2 stabbed the franchise in the eye and left it to bleed out in the gutter, and partly because William Peter Blatty seized his opportunity in the director’s chair to eradicate every last element that people loved about the original film. There’s a reason it was 14 years before the franchise showed any signs of life.

The Exorcist, in its fourth entry, went where any cash-strapped series painted into a corner would go: The past. Exorcist: The Beginning took one look at the shambles that the continuity had become and retreated right into prequeldom. That way we can spend time with a character we already know and like, and we don’t have to follow around a 40-year-old Linda Blair as she tries to piece together a coherent character out of the broken splinters The Heretic left her with.

If you thought I was done bagging on that movie, you were dead wrong.

So. The year? 1949. The place? Nairobi, Africa. Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård), 24 years before he would join Father Karras in banishing the demon from one Regan MacNeil, has (guess what) lost his faith. Gee, where have I heard that one before? Surviving the Nazi regime took its toll on his belief, so now he’s an archaeologist skulking around in smoky bars, wearing fedoras and running away from giant boulders and stuff (presumably).

He joins the crew of a dig site that is working to unearth a strange church recently discovered buried in the desert. Unfortunately, it seems like excavating this church has unleashed an ancient evil that is attacking the camp. Little boy Joseph (Remy Sweeney) comes down with a case of the Shakes. And the Rattles. And the Blankly Watches while His Brother Is Devoured By Hyenas. On site doctor and half-baked love interest Sarah (Isabella Scorupco) tries all she can to make him well, but this problem might just need to be solved by an exorcist. Also, tensions break out between the British soldiers and the African workers, because this is a Renny Harlin movie, and if something totally random and loud doesn’t happen every fifteen minutes, he gets hives.

I mean, I guess it worked for Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

For a movie where so much happens, Exorcist: The Beginning is still bracingly boring. I guess that’s what I get for picking a prestige horror franchise this month, even if things went downhill art-wise pretty quickly after the original. There are a lot of nominally interesting or disturbing goings-on, but the movie presents them with such lackadaisical nonchalance that you almost don’t even register them passing by. I blame the editing, which is like a Bonnie Tyler music video gone mad, endlessly sideswiping its own material by cutting away to a flashback or (more likely) something entirely unrelated, cutting back, cutting away to that same thing (nearly unchanged and equally irrelevant), cutting back, and so on like the world’s slowest strobe light. Every scene is chopped into little pieces with all meaning leached out of them.

Of course, it doesn’t help that most of the actual content is a grab bag assortment of studio-mandate gross-outs that have nothing to do with each other. There’s literally a scene that repeatedly cuts to a disgusting birth sequence that takes place in an entirely different location with a character who will never be seen again. Sure, it’s shocking, but it doesn’t match the film we’re actually watching and it actively impedes the scene in progress. It feels like you’re watching this movie on TV, only instead of commercial breaks interrupting the flow, it’s excerpts from Renny Harlin’s dream journal.

Especially that shower scene.

During the infrequent moments where the film settles into a scene for more than 20 seconds, things do get a little creepy. Although most of the effects are rendered with CGI that would look bad in a Pajama Sam game, for once the film’s overdark, murky cinematography works in its favor. Several scenes set around Joseph’s hospital bed provoke genuine fear with both subtle abnormalities and outré violence, much like the original film, though obviously at a much lower quality grade. Let’s not pretend Harlin could touch Friedkin with a twenty-foot, maniac-seeking pole.

The problem is that nothing in Exorcist: The Beginning is consistent. Its subtler scares don’t fit the howlingly bad screenwriting that has Father Merrin arrive at two separates conclusions about the same topic in the span of three minutes. Its weird affection for depicting the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust (Dr. Sarah is a concentration camp survivor) doesn’t jive with the bloodthirsty willingness to slaughter Africans and British soldiers in a shoehorned-in mutiny. And its faux-psychological overtones can’t support the stunted, forgotten arc about the priest’s faith. It’s like every outfit I wore in high school. Nothing matches.

And when it finally comes down to brass tacks (i.e. an exorcism), The Beginning restages the ritual a an Indiana Jones-esque romp through underground caves that involves a lot of punching. That’s how Harlin operates: in loud, carless inanities. It’s a massively muddled film that can’t make sense of itself, at best. At worst, it’s another useless cash-in strapped onto a franchise name that had already perished in destitution some 30 years before.

TL;DR: Exorcist: The Beginning is a loud jumble with some decent scares, but it's too blunt to be effective.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 958
Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

The Devil Can Cite Blatty For His Own Purposes

Year: 1990

Director: William Peter Blatty

Cast: George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The telling thing about The Exorcist III is that even though it’s creatively compromised, it’s also a course correction for the franchise. That’s how much Exorcist II: The Heretic was a massive supernova disaster. Directed by original Exorcist author William Peter Blatty and adapted from his novel Legion, The Exorcist III has run the gamut between being unfairly ignored and inappositely exalted. Now that we’ve arrived at this stop on our tour through the franchise, it’s time for ol’ Brennan to set the record straight.

No movie is as good or as bad as anybody thinks it is. You can take that to the bank.

The Exorcist III follows to aged characters from the original film: Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott), the detective who investigated Regan’s murder of a film director in 1973 – Spoilers? I guess. Look, you made it this far. – and Father Dyer (Ed Flanders, hi diddly ho), who was a close friend of young exorcist Father Karras (Jason Miller). The pair are now longtime friends, but Kinderman is being troubled by a rash of ritualistic killings that have broken out, imitating the exact M. O. of the Gemini Killer, who was executed 15 years ago.

Kinderman’s investigation leads him to a hospital where Dyer has recently been bedridden. As more people begin dying, his suspicion grows for a mysterious patient in the isolation ward (Brad Dourif), who seems to him to be the very spitting image of Father Karras…

At least in the theatrical cut.

You may have noticed (or probably didn’t, because you have better things to think about) that The Exorcist III is actually a direct sequel to the NOVEL The Exorcist rather than the movie itself, continuing a relationship between Kinderman and Dyer that was in no way established in Friedkin’s film. This is one of many ways Blatty attempts to reassert his vision of the franchise, an impulse that would see him butting heads with the studio at every turn. His novel Legion is vastly different from the story of the MacNeils, and the studio pressure to link the two films is an oppressive presence over the film.

The fact that Exorcist III intermittently succeeds speaks to the strength of his core ideas, because the flick is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not only was the studio being its usual bullheaded self, the truth is that Blatty really isn’t a very good filmmaker. He manages to craft some reasonably iconic scares here, but he frequently mistakes silence for tension. The most famous sequence in the movie comes at the tail end of a seven minute static shot that allegedly crates a rising sense of dread, but is so poorly framed and sedately performed that the boredom muffles the horror.

And the man has never been able to adapt his own novels. As we saw in the screenplay he wrote for The Exorcist, he has a tendency to abandon important details from the source material, resuting in a stunted narrative arc that leaves the audience behind in the proverbial dust. This problem gets even worse here, because his delightfully loony idea is that The Exorcist III is a theological murder mystery. More police procedural than horror film for the bulk of its runtime, this movie would be a fascinating turn for the franchise if it weren’t for one thing: most of the clues Kinderman uses to solve the crime aren’t actually in the script. That would be like Sherlock Holmes revealing that he knew the whole time that the killer had a key to the room but never mentioned it until the end.

Or if Twin Peaks waited five episodes to even tell you that Laura Palmer was dead.

But in spite of all this, The Exorcist III has an unusual amount of power for a third film in a franchise. The nightmare imagery at play here is so disjointed (one dream sequence features a young Samuel L. Jackson and a cameo by Fabio – how’s that for eerie?) and the offscreen killings so viciously macabre, the film musters enough tingle to keep the spine occupied.

Plus, the movie has a secret weapon. Although the film brags about the return of Jason Miller (a late addition in reshoots, added to increase the link to the original film and play with Kinderman’s perception of the incarcerated killer), his role is only occasionally plastered over the man’s true face. That true face belongs to Brad Dourif, best known for playing the psycho doll Chucky. But here he displays not one drop of the acid sense of humor of the Child’s Play franchise. 

No, Dourif’s Gemini killer is a literal demon walking the earth in human form- possession be damned. He is so downright terrifying in this role, with his callous voice slaloming through an unpredictable flurry of rage and calm, that I’m surprised he wasn’t considered for the next year’s Silence of the Lambs. He makes the entire movie without ever getting up from his cot! I’m almost certain that Heath Ledger had this film on a loop while he was preparing for the role of The Joker. It’s a tour de force of horror movie performance, one that argues against the Oscars ignoring the genre every year.

A dude from The Godfather Part III was nominated for Best Supporting Actor that year. You’re telling me we couldn’t have slipped a little Dourif in there?

With Dourif on board, this film could never be considered bad, and I suppose it helps that the dialogue is actually clever and engaging. The ending does devolve into a goody, studio-mandated exorcism that’s so shoehorned in, it requires a character who has no connection with the plot to suddenly teleport into the hospital with no provocation. There’s literally no way he could have known what was happening, unless he had Jean Grey psychic powers.

He doesn’t even go here!

After a bit of lovely deus ex machina (and, to be fair, isn’t that quite literally how all exorcism movies end?), the film quietly expires, blowing away like dust in the wind. It’s no classic sequel, but it’s good enough to till be in the conversation all these years later, even if the best thing about it is that it’s not Exorcist II.

TL;DR: The Exorcist III is a decent horror/crime-thriller, even if it highlights William Peter Blatty's weaknesses as a filmmaker.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1091

Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

Speak of the Devil

Year: 1977

Director: John Boorman

Cast: Richard Burton, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher 

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So. It’s 1977. You’re faced with the task of creating a sequel to The Exorcist, the blockbuster smash hit that defined a generation of horror films, was nominated for 10 Oscars, won 2, and was rhapsodically minted the “scariest movie of all time.” What do you do? If your answer is “not make it,” you’ve made the right decision. And, to be fair, that’s exactly what director John Boorman did when he helmed Exorcist II: The Heretic, which contains not a scrap of material recognizable as an Exorcist movie, even though it features the return of three actors and a major location.

The marathon is already going well, I see.

In Exorcist II, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is living in the city with her caretaker Sharon (Kitty Winn), because her mother was wise enough not to get locked into a contract for this one. She regularly attends therapy with Dr. Gene Tuskin (the reliable medical professional Louise Fletcher, of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), despite the fact that she seems more well-adjusted than any 16-year-old that I've ever met. When Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is sent by a Cardinal (Casablanca’s Paul Henried) to investigate the mid-exorcism death of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), Tuskin suggests the use of a joint hypnosis machine to sync his mind with Regan’s, because this is more of a sci-fi fantasy movie than anything.

Through this link, the dormant demon Pazuzu shows Father Lamont glimpses of Merrin’s past, when he exorcised a young boy in Africa. This leads him to the discovery of a generation of faith healers, Regan among them, who have been targeted by the demon. Also, there’s a lot of locust metaphors. Then, like, he’s seduced by the demon’s thrall or something? And he visits the original Georgetown house to make out with Regan’s stand-in? I guess? I literally couldn’t spoil this movie if I wanted to, because it makes no flippin’ sense.

Also, James Earl Jones is in it, which is cool I guess.

In addition to the script being an incoherent trash fire, Exorcist II is a black hole of talent, sucking every last drop of quality from a battalion of very capable filmmakers. I mean, come on. Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Paul Henried, Max von Sydow, and James Earl Jones are in this cast. They have 12 Oscar nominations between them. And behind the camera you have Deliverance director John Boorman, legendary composer Ennio Morricone, the cinematographer of Rosemary’s Baby, and so on. This should have been an outstanding success. But guess what happens when you have a director (and uncredited screenplay revisionist) who has an open contempt for the material? Not great things, I can tell you that.

Exorcist II is not only a bad Exorcist movie, it’s a downright dreadful film by any metric on Earth. This is perhaps best exemplified by a scene taken directly from the continuity of Friedkin’s film, filling in the details of Father Merrin’s death via flashback. Set in the same room on the same night of The Exorcist, it has not one whit of its raw power. The staging is brutally boxy and inelegant, and the whole affair is lit like it’s an episode of Married with Children. That scene is the most painful because it egregiously draws comparison to the original film, but this kind of slack handling is apparent from start to finish.

The effects are accomplished mostly by a series of clunky cross dissolves that wouldn’t pass muster in a Lucio Fulci cheapie, the score trips between atonal shrieking and a disturbingly lush romantic keening, and the acting is uniformly vacant. It’s so deeply broken that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint exactly where everything begins to go wrong.

Even the wording of the title is confusing and terrible.

If I had to pick one thing that’s the most wrong with Exorcist II, I’d probably pass the buck to the screenplay. I’m not sure anybody could figure out what to do with it. I admire the audacity of Boorman’s idea to make the storyline about a more positive force, but he was so caught up in his own self-righteousness that he never noticed that, despite the original’s dour storyline, there’s a very positive message at the core: the day is saved and  priest makes a noble sacrifice because he’s finally found his faith. That’s pretty much how horror films work. When you make the narrative positive all the way through, it’s not a scary movie, it’s an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And did I mention it’s bloody incomprehensible? The entire first act is just people sitting around an ill-thought-out hypnosis machine straight out of Star Trek and talking calmly in circles while they endlessly visit the same flashback. Then it catapults Father Lamont into Africa where he hallucinates a laboratory inside a medicine man’s cave, a development that is completely ignored by the movie, which chooses to accept both perceptions as the truth. Afterward, an inexplicable number of people run to Georgetown for no discernible reason, then are either killed by plot holes or packaged off into an ambiguous ending that feels like it wraps up an entirely different movie than the one we watched.

Not that Exorcist II feels like a singular movie for more than 12 seconds at a time.

It’s despicable claptrap, and I want nothing more to do with it. The only scene worth sticking around for is The Prom Night-esque interlude where Linda Blair tap-dances to “Lullaby of Broadway.” If I wanted a haphazard grab bag of random scenes full of over-the-top characters, I’d watch SNL instead. Exorcist II: The Heretic is an unscary, befuddling slog that is a failure as a sequel, as a movie, and as a paycheck for everybody involved.

TL;DR: Exorcist II: The Heretic is a failure as a sequel, as a horror movie, and as a piece of entertainment.

Rating: 2/10
Word Count: 1008
Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

The Devil Went Down To Georgetown

Year: 1973

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair 

Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Howdy, folks! It’s that time of year again, where the leaves change and a young man’s fancy turns to bloody chainsaws and mutilated corpses. This October, we continue a grand Popcorn Culture tradition of reviewing a classic horror franchise that hasn’t yet been explored on these here pages. Seeing how my Halloween marathon still hasn’t technically concluded, I decided to explore an easier-to-swallow series with a smidge fewer entries: The Exorcist.

This will be the first October marathon I perform in which there are no extant reviews for previous entries, though it’s not for lack of trying. The Exorcist is the only movie I’ve watched in the last three years that I completely failed to write up, having been so busy that my screening eventually became to distant and blurry in memory to reasonably critique the film. So I’m doubly happy today. I get to redeem myself while reviewing a horror classic. And I’m set to dive into another world of increasingly dubious sequels. And there’s only four of them.

Thank Satan.

In The Exorcist, like you needed to know, successful actress Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is living in Georgetown with her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) while shooting a film. Things turn bad when Regan gets sick and begins acting out, vomiting green slime, and… speaking in other voices? Controlling objects with her mind? Unsurprisingly, a battery of medical tests are not successful, and Chris decides to pursue getting an exorcism. On hand to help are Father Karras (Jason Miller), a priest/psychiatrist with a recently deceased mother who has been doubting his faith, and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), who takes forever to get anywhere, but certainly knows how to make an entrance.

It almost makes you forget you haven’t seen him in 80 minutes.

The Exorcist is in a tough position, having been labeled “the scariest film of all time.” As the years go by, religious sentiment is hemorrhaged form the American public and patiences stretch too thin to support a two-hour slow burner, attracting some millennial backlash to the film. Both of these parties are insane. No, The Exorcist isn’t the scariest movie ever made, unless you’re a Catholic grandmother. But it’s a damn good horror film that rightfully deserves its iconic status.

If you’re open to it, The Exorcist can tear through your nerves like tissue paper. Regan’s ever-escalating condition is a series of crudely effective shocks, but the real menace here is That Damn Hallway. Every time something gets worse, our heroes are forced to make the trek up the stairs, around the bend, and down That Damn Hallway toward an innocuously blank white door. Through repetition, the film conditions you to expect something terrible every time that door opens, but it lingers, letting the possibilities fester in your mind before the big reveal. The tension created by that hallway and that door is so palpable that you can choke on it.

That’s how The Exorcist works, by psychologically grinding you down until all that’s left is powder. It should really be arrested for assault and battery. In addition to the general body horror tinged with the tragic melancholy of a mother unable to help her daughter get well, there’s also a prolonged sequence of medical testing that’s some of the most disturbing, stomach-churning material of the year. The decade. The century. Of all time?

Well, it’s in the running.

The reason The Exorcist works so well, even today, on those two terrible fronts is that the special effects and make-up design are the work of a genius. That particular genius is Dick Smith (Death Becomes Her, Scanners, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, The Godfather 1 & 2, everything that’s ever mattered), whose effects are an ageless work of art, distorting the human form as far as it can go, rendering believable-looking impossibilities that still hold up forty years later. This is no small feat, and it’s a timeless, realistic nightmare of epic proportions.

Of course we can’t discount director/renowned psychopath William Friedkin. Although I have a distaste for his dubious methods of extracting performances from actors (firing guns near their heads, slapping them, and just generally behaving in a manner that would have the Marquis du Sade asking him to calm down), his control over image and sound in The Exorcist is exquisite.

The sound design is an apoplectic symphony, hammering you with harsh buzzing and thrumming that is abruptly whisked away into a vacuum. Sounds are blasted, silenced, swapped, and juxtaposed against the frame in a completely unpredictable pattern that keeps you on your toes until they’re worn down to the bone. And do I really have to spend much time elaborating on my aesthetic praise of the man who crafted this image?

Didn’t think so.

This confluence of filmmakers working full throttle doesn’t end there. The cast is uniformly terrific as well. Burstyn is an all-too human and fragile mirror for our own reactions to the horror, and Miller and Siedow sell a set of dialogue that toes the line between being unbelievably grave and deliriously campy. But perhaps the most invaluable performer is Linda Blair (with respect to Mercedes McCambridge and Eileen Dietz, who seamlessly provide voiceover and stand-in material), who gives one of the single best child performances ever put to screen. Even before the possession, she gives Regan a grounded naturalism that provides an all-important contrast to the bucking and cursing figure she becomes. Without her The Exorcist would fall flat on its face and the world would be deprived of a pivotal piece of culture.

That said, The Exorcist isn’t perfect. As much as it sings as a piece of cinematic psychological warfare, there are a surprising abundance of narrative and structural flaws. As the story skips through weeks and months, a lot of important material is let on the cutting room floor. We’re often told about things that have happened rather than experiencing them, and are frequently tossed into scenes without an important bit of context to help us understand why exactly we should be worried in this particular moment. There’s also the fact that the rich mother-daughter angle completely evaporates by the third act. 

But I noticed something odd in my notes. I didn’t jot a single thing down during the final half hour of The Exorcist, because I was so engrossed in what was unfolding onscreen, even though I’ve seen it a dozen times before. That’s the power of the film: it’s an experiential masterwork that jangles the nerve and ignites the senses, and everything else just falls away.

TL;DR: The Exorcist is a classic for a reason: it's a psychologically brutal, spine-jangling experience.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1132

Reviews In This Series

The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)

The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)

Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)