Out of the shadows . . .

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2014)

I think The Exorcist has been sidelined in the recent decades by its reputation. Legends abound about moviegoers who ran screaming from the theater and needed psychiatric counseling after the experience, but those who refuse to revisit the film (or who avoid it completely) are missing the reasons that the film works.
Friedkin takes this bizarre story seriously and grounds his characters in absolute reality so the horror of the possession bubbles up out of their lives and doesn't come into the film as a stunt. Their reaction is much the same as ours would have been. I revisit the film about every five years or so and I always notice something different. This last time I was struck by the film's leisure pace. It takes a long time before we get to the actual possession itself and in that time, we get to know the characters whose lives will be torn apart by these horrible events.
I appreciated the slow passages early on in which little Regan (Linda Blair) is taken to doctors who subject her to medical treatments, MRIs, spinal taps and finally hypnosis. I liked a brief moment in which her mother Chris wakes up and finds her daughter lying next to her. The child moans "My bed was shaking." I appreciated the moment when the mother tells Father Karras that her daughter might need an exorcism. His reaction is completely reasonable as his eyes widen and he says "Excuse me?" He then tells her "The best way to obtain an exorcism would be to take a time machine back to the 16th century." He informs her that the church doesn't grant exorcisms without strenuous investigation because information about psychiatry and mental illness have long replaced such rituals.
There's something else I noticed upon revisiting the film recently: there is never an origin or purpose given for the possession. The demon has possessed the body of this young girl, but we are never told why. There are several theories: there's the reappearance of a strange statue of Pazuzu (a Assyro-Babylonian demon) that Father Merrian finds in the Iraqi desert; there are some early scenes the suggest that Regan has been communicating with a certain Captain Howdy through a Ouija board; but we are never given an explanation of what exactly has taken place. We only see the results. I think that's wise because it give the movie a slant of unpredictability and doesn't waste time bogging down the plot in overwrought exposition.
The climactic scene, which has become movie folklore, is where the special effects and makeup come to light but not in a showy way. The scenes involving the actual exorcism are so unpredictable because up until that point, we've been kept mostly in the dark about what this demon is capable of. We've seen the head swivel, the crucifix masturbation scene, we've heard the graveled voice of the demon, but it is only setting us up for the pure battle between the priest and the evil the dwells within this little girl.
The Exorcist is a horror movie that got it absolutely right and spawned a generation of worthless imitators who believe that the best way to make a horror film was to hurry along to the scary stuff to give the audience its money's worth. Friedkin wanted to make a film that made sense, a film that found a foothold in order to make the material much more terrifying.