A common mistake...

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 1998)

For all of those people who don't believe that this is a scary film, I think you must not understand the word "scary." See, the horror/sci fi genre throughout the years has branched out in two separate directions. The old movies in the 30s, 40s, and 50s were scary in the traditional sense. They were creepy and played off of traditional human emotions and storylines (good and evil, love and death, guilt and redemption). But then a movie named Psycho came out and suddenly it was no longer enough to make a creepy movie about an evil monster. Now you had to make a shocker about pathological crimes and sexual repression. "Halloween" continued this tradition of serial killer shockers, and it in turn led to the "Fridays," "Nightmares," "Screams," etc. What happened is that people thought that the only real scare was one involving a surprise. There isn't a single scary moment in any of those films, in the sense that the audience doesn't have a sense of terror that lasts past the moment that the image is on the screen. The only thing they offer is a set-up, release, and surprise formula that is now so much of a cliche that I think the entire genre needs to be eliminated. How often do we see the naked girl walking around in the dark, just to be startled by the cat, and then to get her head cut off just after the "scary" music stops? That is not a horror movie. It is a stupid little child yelling "Boo" at the top of his lungs.
The Exorcist is a scary movie and a horror movie. It is about the three most horrific of all inherently human topics--the existence of a benevolent God, death, and human weakness. We see intense, pained people struggling with these topics. And we see a world of ever-increasing evil and moral decay. The character of Karras alone could warrant an entire discussion. And how about the subliminal shots? I don't know if I have ever seen anything as scary--or as inherently cinematic--as those demonic subliminal shots in the middle of scenes that were already upsetting.
Despite for some weak (not boring, but unnatural) dialogue in the first hour, a masterpiece of filmmaking and storytelling...