The Exorcist

Directed by: William Friedkin

Premise: When Regan (Linda Blair) is possessed by a demon, her mother (Ellen Burstyn) turns to Father Karras (Jason Miller), a Catholic priest in a crisis of faith. He and an older priest (Max Von Sydow) attempt to help the girl by performing an exorcism. 

What Works: Like The Omen, The Exorcist suggests that evil is alive in the world and that rational methods are ill equipped to deal with it. The Exorcist goes further both in its attempt to undermine rationality and in its suggestions about evil. The battery of tests Regan is placed through exhausts scientific knowledge and the depths of depravity and evil the girl suffers through are extremely horrific. But the underlying point of the possessed girl’s extreme behavior and appearance is to suggest that evil's primary goal is to debase us and make us act as animals or something worse. The exorcism ritual is more than just a religious procedure, it is the attempt of good people to act in the face evil out of love for this girl. And, rather incredibly, the film manages to sell that. The Exorcist accomplishes its goals partly through the film craft; the make-up and sound effects sell the possession, but this is a skillfully written and tightly edited film that uses a lot of parallelism between Regan’s affliction, her mother’s concern, and Karras’ own crisis of faith to draw the journeys of the characters together. William Peter Blatty’s dialogue hits all the right notes, rarely lecturing on principles of good and evil and letting the subtext organically emerge. As a New Hollywood film, The Exorcist takes a slight step away from many other film in that it deals with the supernatural but it also deals with it in a very realistic style and it takes on these big themes of good and evil and presents them in a very intimate setting, dealing with personal issues of the filmmaker and larger cultural issues of the time.

What Doesn’t: There is a more disturbing interpretation of the film’s agenda. The symptoms of demonic possession have a lot of parallels to adolescence and puberty and some of the sexual metaphors of The Exorcist do hint at a misogynist streak underlying the movie. The scientists and medical technicians treat Regan’s burgeoning womanhood as a disease to be cured and when it can’t be stopped she is turned over to a pair of men to ritualistically dispel it, freezing Regan in a innocent stage of emotional development. This interpretation has serious implications for the Catholic themes of the film and it is worth considering.

DVD extras: There are two versions of the film: the original theatrical cut and the extended “Version You’ve Never Seen.” The original cut is only currently available in The Exorcist: The Complete Anthology box set. In single disc edition of “The Version You’ve Never Seen” includes trailers, a commentary track, and text features.

Bottom Line: The Exorcist remains an important film of the New Hollywood period and a very frightening horror film. While some of its messages may be mixed, this film’s ability to get under the skin of the viewer is still very powerful and the final confrontation between the priest and the devil is among the finest endings in the genre.