Human and disgusting and frightening and fun all at once.

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2006)

I saw The Exorcist in a crowded theater when it was first released (and I was 22), and that night was one of the most entertaining I've ever spent at a movie. The audience shrieked during the shock bits, and then broke into nervous laughter at the utter grossness of it. Grossness in movies was unheard of in 1973, and so we were all seeing something new and fun.
This movie scared me so badly that, on the way home from the theater, I ran in the dark from the bus stop to my house, looking back over my shoulder most of the way. I slept with the light on that night. So I got my money's worth.
I love this movie because the main hero, Damien Karras, is such a likable and human character. Father Karras is a priest who has lost his faith. Paradoxically, he regains his faith in God and goodness only when he is exposed to supernatural evil. Karras is presented all through the movie as a human being, instead of the Godlike father figure that Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy used to play. We see him smoking and drinking beer and trying to talk his elderly mother into moving into a nursing home. Father Karras is the most realistic, and therefore the most sympathetic, priest ever to appear in a movie. If it weren't for that, The Exorcist would just have been a silly gross-out horror movie, instead of the classic that it is.