The One True Horror Film

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2008)

In 1973, a comedy writer and a car-chase director got together to tell a psychological mystery, based on an actual incident the writer heard of when he was in divinity school.
Yeah, sounds like a real thrill-a-minute.
Every studio passed. When Warner finally gave in, the writer/producer seemed to go out of his way to do everything wrong. He hired priests to play themselves. He hired a 40-year-old to be an 80-year-old. The female lead went to a virtual unknown, and the male lead was given to a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright who originally thought he was being hired to write the script. The professionally composed score was literally thrown out the window, and replaced by bits and pieces of obscure music. A maniacal director was allowed to torture and terrorize the cast. A barefoot illiterate peasant was hired to do the sound effects.
During the first showing, the producers were certain they'd blown it when a large part of the audience walked out.
They debated whether to release the film at all, and some studio chiefs considered it an obscene embarrassment. But as they left the theater, they noticed something odd.
Every single member of the audience, including the walk- outs, was still in the parking lot. Not one person had driven home. They were gathered in a huge mob, discussing and debating and arguing about what they'd just seen.
In the following months, the results were unprecedented. In New York, the joke was that you had to get in line in New Jersey. Today, we would call them "Star Wars" crowds.
But "The Exorcist" came first.
Like "Citizen Kane" or "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is one of those rare moments in film history when someone does something totally different, yet somehow, by luck or sixth sense or divine guidance, seems to know exactly what to do.
Right from the start, the off-rhythm pounding of the Iraqi blacksmiths gets under our skin, a beautifully subtle way of suggesting something is not right with the world's heartbeat.
The indecipherable right-to-left Arabic writing also plays a role here, a relatively strange sight to American audiences, and a prelude to the backwards speech, backwards heads, and backwards nature in scenes to come. Reversal and conflict are constantly reinforced thematically, through juxtapositions of incompatible images: the sacred and the profane, the light and the dark, the natural and the unnatural. But it's not all subtlety. The prologue sequence ends with a heroic shot straight out of High Noon, as the exorcist suddenly finds himself face to face with the statue of a grinning, reptilian demon. Human flesh against indestructible stone.
Then a marvelous transition. Old to new. From Iraq to Georgetown. A movie actress switches on a light in a dark bedroom. And the sound of rats in the attic, even though the home's caretaker insists quite believably, "No rats." Scampering rats. Shrieking gulls. Lions devouring prey.
All the sound effects are chosen with a merciless attention to human instinctive psychology. They set the stage for evil.
Science alongside superstition. As a young girl becomes progressively sicker, her behavior ever more bizarre, there seems little difference between a medical laboratory, with its bloodletting and its whirling x-ray machines, and the rituals of a witchdoctor. We meet our young hero, the suffering priest/psychiatrist, further blurring the line between magic and reality. And he brings in yet another paradoxical combination: faith, and the loss of faith. By the way, his name is Karass, which is Greek for "cross". At least I think it is. Anyway, it should be.
The film's most powerful oxymoron is undoubtedly the most shocking, most horrible scene in the history of cinema. It makes one inescapable point. This is not a disease. This is not a dream. This is not even a lower-echelon evil spirit from some haunted house movie. Only the Devil can do this.
An interesting sidebar. During this scene, Ellen Burstyn is supposed to be sent flying by a vicious backhand blow. Of course, this was before the era of digital wizardry, so she had to be physically strapped into a harness and then pulled across the room. As the rehearsals wore on, she warned director Friedkin that she was starting to get hurt. Friedkin agreed that the next take would be more gentle. He lied.
He covertly instructed the special effects designer to "let her have it." She went flying like a rag doll, screaming in agony as she thudded to the hard wooden floor. And Friedkin, the consummate artist, dollied in to get that last close-up, before calling the paramedics. Now that's what movies are all about.
This movie is what movies are all about.