Has dated very badly

Rating: 6/10 (1 March 2013)

The showing in Chesterfield was sold out, just like the one in Derby which I had tried to book earlier. Clearly the reputation of this film is such that it can fill cinemas even 25 years after its original release. The word on the street and in the film mags is that it is still a great film well worth the price of admission. Casting my mind back all those years to the days when I was a slim young lizard, rather than the over-stuffed Gila monster I am now , I can still recall the terror that this film instilled in me. Even though I had seen it in a matinée and emerged into a sunny afternoon I was scared. And sleeping on someone's floor in a strange house, as I did was that night, turned out to be an endurance test of sweaty fear as I started at the slightest sound or tried to close off the evil visions that would not leave my mind. Why, even Barry Norman admitted on TV last week that it was the scariest film he'd ever seen.
OK. Audience reaction test first. Lots of shuffling and restlessness as the film dragged on and on. Many trips to the toilet and to replenish dwindling food supplies (they don't see popcorn in Chesterfield under normal circumstances. They can't even get eggs except in powdered form). Muttering and girlish laughter as some card jokes with his girlfriend. Then when the action eventually starts most of the audience find it funny and continue to laugh at all the scenes designed to send them into paroxysms of fear. On the way out the guy behind me is saying "It was rubbish. F***ing rubbish." Another guy is saying "Fifteen years since I last came to the cinema. I shan't be coming again after that!"
Me? I was mostly baffled by the fact that this was no longer a scary film. Not even in the slightest. It just doesn't work as a horror film. Where once I lost sleep over the contents of the film I now ran the danger of sleeping through the film. It was a big disappointment.
In its defence I would say that it is well made and well acted, particularly by Jason Miller as the young priest. The framing and cinematography is excellent. I particularly liked the longish prologue set in Iraq and the extensive close-up work involving the main non-possessed characters. In fact the level at which it worked best for me was in the story of how the priest has to struggle to maintain his faith and how the possessed Linda Blair plays on his guilt about his mother. This is by far the most interesting aspect of the film. Otherwise it's a film that looks very dated, is poorly structured, has plot holes bigger than asteroids the size of Texas and goes on and on and on. How could we ever have been taken in by this film? It's a mystery.
One question I am sure pro-censorship supporters would like us to consider, is to ask whether "The Exorcist" is no longer frightening because we have become desensitised through watching too many horrific events on film? I think this is correct. I also think it is something about which we should be pleased. We are desensitised to the kinds of horrors portrayed in "The Exorcist" because we all understand Linda Blair is just a young girl wearing contact lenses and gory makeup; that the demonic voices are merely the result of clever sound recording techniques; that the bed is shaking because there is a mechanical device making it do so; that defiling religious icons is a trivial act in a world full of fanaticism and people who kill for some crazy religious belief or other. We just don't care about the events portrayed in this film and why the hell should we?
An interesting film that has dated very badly.