It's not just organizing jumble sales

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2001)

I remember all the hype when this film came out, how it was the most gruesome film of all time, people fainting and becoming possessed in theatres etc., but I was too young to see it then. I finally caught up with it a few years later at the mature old age of 19, and loved all the profanity, head spinning and puking, as you do at that age. Then two or three years ago I read Blatty's original book, and last year saw the film for the second time, and found as I enter early middle age I have quite a different perspective. It is not a sensationalist horror film at all, but a rather intelligent exploration of the nature of good and evil (apparently loosely based on a real case, the priests involved were staying on campus when Blatty was a college student in 1947). In a way it resembles nothing so much as an extended recruitment for the Catholic priesthood. Perhaps its tagline should be "It's not just organizing jumble sales ... you too may get to go one on one with Satan himself!"