Review: "The Exorcist"

FRIEDKIN, William (Dir.), “The Exorcist – The Version You’ve Never Seen” Hoya Productions/Warner Bros. Ltd., 2000.

When this film came out in 1973, it was deemed the scariest thing ever to hit the silver screen. In fact, it was considered at the time, the scariest thing conceivable, which is saying a lot. People with heart conditions were told not to attend screenings, or to inform ushers of their condition before taking their seats. People came out of screenings believing that they had been possessed in the interim. Of course, this type of hysteria was nothing new: it had all happened when Hitchcock released “Psycho” a decade or so earlier, but in the disco-funk of the ‘70s few people remembered it from the first go-around. This wasn’t “Godspell”; it wasn’t “Jesus Christ – Superstar”; this was the God-squad on the back foot, struggling to go mano-a-mano with the Big D. There were no pretty songs and paisley shirts – this was the battlefield of Good versus Evil up close, personal and with all the foul language imaginable.

The origin of the book upon which the movie was based, was a series of events in which a young Maryland boy of about twelve manifested strange behaviour which led to him being exorcised by a Jesuit priest, the recipient of some upbraiding by the Church Powers because of his fondness for the bottle. William Peter Blatty chased the story and kept the essentials, changing just the window-dressing for his take on the events: the location changed to Georgetown in Washington D.C.; the family went from blue-collar to Hollywood royalty; the possessed had a gender-switch from male to female. Our priest became Damien Karras, a man experiencing a crisis of faith and looking to scientific rationalism for hope; his partner in battle is Father Merrin, a long-time exorcist with a heart condition and wise to the ways of the Evil One.

It’s hard to contemplate what the production company thought they were getting with this flick. Blatty was a limp biscuit with about as much personality as a dishcloth, while Friedkin was an out-and-out cowboy in filmic circles and hot off an Academy Award win for “The French Connection”. I suspect that Oscars were the last thing on the mind of anybody connected to the film – with the exception of these two guys. Between them they managed to lift the game from the comfortably B-grade, into the stratosphere.

Watching the film again, I was struck by how much of it is an aural experience rather than a visual one. In the opening sequence in Iraq, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) is assailed by the ringing of hammer-struck anvils, haunting calls to prayer, the buzz of market conversations, the savagery of fighting dogs. We are beset by languages and symbols, mostly impenetrable, but underscored by the constant wind and heat: there is, we are aware, something going on, but neither we, nor Father Merrin, can quite put our fingers on it. This whole opening section of the film is beautifully constructed and masterfully sets up the mystery: there is a strange statue of the ancient god-demon Pazuzu (fresh from its inadvertent trip to Hong Kong from the US!); there is an old medallion; there is a misbehaving clock and tension in the air. What does it all mean? There are no answers forthcoming, but it gives us many intriguing possibilities to play with later on.

When we shift scenes to the US, the language and the symbolism are all more familiar, but there is a constant undertone to things which puts them slightly off-kilter. The fact that things seem to hark back to the Iraqi dig is disconcerting: Regan makes a Pazuzu-like orange clay figurine, for example, and the desecrated statue of Mary has some Pazuzu-like – appendages. I’m not a fan of the ‘70s film aesthetic where things are improvised rather than scripted and dialogue gets a little shaky, but here it works a treat. Regan, the twelve-year-old girl, peppers her sentences with strange trills and drawls, like she’s experimenting with her vocalisation: this seems typically bratty and juvenile until Karras plays a recording of it backwards and works out what’s actually going on. For the rest of the dialogue, it’s all edgy and erratic, half-heard and mis-heard as frequently as not, and usually fraught with emotion as a result. The goal seems to be to make the language of the movie alien and dangerous, at odds with the social milieu, in order to throw us out of our comfort zone.

The main characters all seem to be comfortable playing roles rather than being real people. Regan’s mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is an actress and is constantly shifting personae throughout the film: actress, socialite, mother, employer, disgruntled ex-partner, battered victim, secretive witness. The beauty of this role is exactly this chameleon quality, because it elevates the character from that of a single note bewildered onlooker, to that of a possibly-knowing instigator of the events, or at least, one with vested interests. Along with Chris, most of the other characters are also wearing masks: the doctors are affecting worldly wisdom and unctuous bedside manners; Chris’s party guests and employees are all playing games; the movie director Burke Dennings is a complete dark horse with suspect motives at every turn. The only ones who aren’t playing games are the two priests involved in the exorcism.

Father Karras (Jason Miller) is suffering a crisis of faith. His mother is dying and is in need of care which he cannot provide. He relies on his powers as a psychiatrist rather than his connexion with God and stridently resists the notion of performing the Catholic Rite. Father Merrin – we are told – has had run-ins with demons before and, far from not advocating the exorcism, sees it as the only hope for Regan, but unfortunately not a process that he feels he will live through. Both these characters are direct and immediate; we see them as they truly are. Everyone else has something to hide. And it shows in how they speak.

The special effects of this film are a thing of legend. While other directors who were offered the chance to helm this film baulked at the apparent cruelty and exposure to adult concepts that the possessed child would be forced to undertake, Friedkin seemed almost eager to dive right in. Both Burstyn and Linda Blair were strapped into harnesses designed to throw them wildly about the room; both suffered lasting back injuries as a result. Jason Miller was startled by Friedkin secretly shooting a gun close to his head in the language laboratory scene, in order to gain an authentic shocked reaction from him. In fact, whenever you see someone in this film who is shocked, startled, in pain, bewildered, or lost for words, it’s generally because that’s how they’re really feeling at that moment, from Father Merrin’s discomposure at the language emerging from Regan’s mouth, to Chris’s anguish at watching Regan undergo various tortuous medical procedures. Friedkin, it seems, was keen to take “method” to the next level.

For the audience, this all strikes a chord: deep down, we can tell if someone’s faking an injury and here there’s none of that. Each time something terrible happens, there’s an ominous, loud sound-effect that signals it, from the grinding leather sound of Regan’s head swivelling around to the drumming of the bed legs on the bedroom floor. When the demon magically opens a bedside drawer to impress Karras, it’s the noise that makes us jump, not the movement: the action itself is far away in the background, largely hidden from view by Regan’s prostrate form. Friedkin sacked two composers while making “The Exorcist”: Bernard Herrmann demanded working conditions which were incompatible with the filming schedule (and which indicated that he would rather be doing anything else), while Lalo Schifrin kept writing material which was the direct opposite of what Friedkin was asking him for, to the point where – famously – Friedkin yanked the reels off the tape-player and threw them into the street outside the studio in frustration. The final musical score is almost innocuous, apart from two annoying instances of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”. Cobbled together as it is from various bits and pieces, it came back to bite Friedkin and his lawyers in a big way; but, for the purposes of the movie, it’s the best result.

Topping all of this though is the vocal performance by Mercedes McCambridge. Uncredited in the film, she plays the voice of the demon within Regan. In order to convey the exact rage and physical discomfort of the creature, she insisted on being tied up in the recording studio just as Linda Blair is bound on screen. She lived on a diet of raw eggs, cigarettes and whiskey (despite being a recovering alcoholic) to give her voice the right harshness and slurring quality, and when Regan vomits all of that pea soup, what you hear is Mercedes McCambridge actually losing her lunch. She had her own priest handy while recording and Friedkin is on record as saying that the scariest thing for him about the entire movie was watching her giving her all for the role. Legal squabbles about appropriate credit and opportunities for Oscar nominations have muddied the waters, but in light of the fact that this is a movie to hear rather than merely see, the mainstay of the piece is her bravura performance.

That the mavericks were clearly dominating the film shoot and that they had this almost adversarial attitude towards their cast (Friedkin actually belted Father William O’Malley across the face to get him in the right unsettled frame of mind to give Father Karras the Last Rites), is what makes the movie work. Just as the demon attacks the other characters, forcing them to react in confusion and bewilderment, so too did the ‘Friedkin-Blatty Team’ harass their players. The final result works a treat. Many of the actors have come out saying that they were made to feel angry, afraid, or ineffectual during the filming, but I imagine that most witnesses to demonic possession must feel much the same way.

“The Exorcist” is consistently rated among the top scariest films ever made and it definitely deserves a place in any fan’s top ten. Interestingly, the scenes which cause the most distress for audiences aren’t the ones where something supernatural takes place; they’re the ones where Regan is in hospital. I have a friend who is a doctor and he remembers being made to watch this film for its portrayals of the arteriogram and pneumoencephalograph procedures which Regan undergoes. While these procedures were not actually performed on Linda Blair, many people both on set and off thought they were. Nevertheless, they were recorded with such a high degree of accuracy that they’re used as training material for medical interns. (Interestingly, the bearded doctor who assists in the arteriogram sequence was an actual X-Ray technician who later confessed to killing seven men, dismembering them and leaving them scattered around Georgetown. He admitted to these deeds while serving twenty years for killing a film critic, but there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial for the serial murders. He was released from prison in 2004. If anyone asks you if you’ve ever seen a real live serial killer before, now you can say “yes”.)

Getting back to ranking this film, in dollars - adjusted to today’s money - this is one of the top ten most successful movies of all time, coming in at number nine (and with a budget of only $8M!). It was the first horror movie ever to win an Oscar, followed by “Jaws” (1975), “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Black Swan” (2010). Again, famously, Hollywood director George Cukor threatened to resign from the Academy if “The Exorcist” won Best Picture, so it received technical nods, many other nominations and the Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation. Frankly, I think they should’ve called Cukor’s bluff.

Controversy about the film has dogged it from the start, with urban legends about it being haunted – Billy Graham went so far as to say that the film negatives were possessed by the Devil – to statements implying that actors were killed as a result of being attached to the project. English actor Jack MacGowran did die shortly after shooting wrapped, as did Vasiliki Maliaros, the elderly lady who played Father Karras’s mother, but this is within averages for these kinds of events. Friedkin actually tried to get Thomas Bermingham, a priest and the religious consultant to the movie, to exorcise the film set; however, he just laughed, performed a quick blessing and got out of the way. People have said various ludicrous things to raise publicity and, apart from causing a wave of “Exorcist busses” in England - which took people to showings of the film in cinemas which hadn’t banned the movie, from their home towns where cinemas had - have had very little impact. The net effect has been simply to prevent releases of the movie on VHS or DVD in a consistent format.

Much was taken out of the cinematic release, and this seriously annoyed William Peter Blatty. In England, biased censors and holdover ratings from the US, saw the film inevitably trimmed, or ruthlessly classified. In the year 2000, Friedkin released a DVD version which replaced much of what had been lost, including the infamous “Spider Walk Scene”. This was a painfully-orchestrated sequence of several seconds which fell apart because, no matter what the editors did, in 1973 there was no way to entirely remove the wires holding the actor aloft. In 2000, CGI technology came to the rescue and did away with those pesky wires for good. The 2000 release – sub-titled “The Version You’ve Never Seen” – has its ups and downs: Spider Walk - good; phantom faces superimposed on various background surfaces – not so good. I’m not sure what Friedkin was going for with these questionable additions but it’s sloppy and takes away from all of the good things that the film has going for it. There is, apparently, an even more recent release with still more returned to the screen; if this is just more subliminal superimposed images of Pazuzu, then I’m not interested and neither should you be.

To sum up: If you haven’t gotten around to this film, then you should. It’s top drawer. It’s deeply unsettling and strangely gratifying, if only because the next time you’re trying to convince one of your buddies to go along with some plan or other, you can begin chanting “the power of Christ compels you!” and you’ll have the pitch and tone down perfectly in order to persuade them. There are a bunch of sequels and knock-offs out there, all testimony to the fact that Hollywood has tried to hothouse this piece of art into a “franchise”, but this is the real deal – accept no substitutes.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t read Legion, Blatty’s follow-up to the book he took $10,000 off Groucho Marx to write. As sequels go, it’s awful and will only ruin the way you feel about Father Karras. Spare yourself the grief – I wish I had!

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.