A film that bears your soul open to its wounds...

Rating: 9/10 (29 April 2016)

I've wanted to write something about the film 'The Exorcist' for quite some time now. With over a thousand reviews I wasn't sure if I could add anything new or original, but perhaps there is.
The Exorcist was a cultural phenomenon, appealing to and playing on the most primal fears of millions around the world. Only three other movies have been capable of attaining some of the levels of primal dread that infuse the whole of the Exorcist, and they are the 1963 version of 'The Haunting', 'The Legend of Hell House', and (believe it or not) the first instalment of 'Paranormal Activity'.
The Exorcist was released back in 1973, and at that time I was a curious thirteen year old, but being a tall fellow, I passed for eighteen, so with 2 other friends and my then girlfriend, we managed to get into the cinema and watch the original theatrical release a week after it opened here in the UK. I was already a thoughtful and deeply internalising young lad. I don't mean to say that I had psychiatric problems or anything, I didn't, just that I have always had a penetrating observation and intuition. I suppose you could say both my girlfriend and I were equally intelligently sensitive, and we had both read the book.
The Exorcist hits home on a number of levels, primarily because it is a visceral assault upon both eyes and ears. The director, William Friedkin, gave the film a pseudo-documentary realism, employing techniques of imagery and high and low sound that had not been fully utilised in movies before, but certainly some aspects of it employed in his earlier film 'The French Connection'.
I wasn't to realise at the time, but the most poignant scene in the movie did not appear in the original theatrical cut, and only some 30 years later was it added in the Director's cut. I am writing about the scene with the two Jesuit priests sat on the stairs, just after the first part of the exorcism. Friedkin was wrong not to include this scene in the original cut, because it contains all the dread of the film, and also the required hope the audience craved for as relief, not just from the visceral assault on their senses, but also, as something to take home with them as protection and defiance against their primal superstitions and fears.
Father Karras, asks of Father Merrin, why this little girl had been chosen by such an evil and chaotic force? The whole film rests on Father Merrin's response, which is itself an exorcism when he states in a very tired and world-weary quietness, "Â…that it is to get us to despair. To make us think that God could not ever truly love us." Perhaps, the reason why 'God is dead' as Nietzsche declared is because we chose the concept of God to be dead? Numbed and deadened into its rejection, and the vacuum it left could only be filled with all the aspects of despair and purposelessness, and an absence of anything meaningful in our lives. It places us in a limbo of emptiness, and today's modern world utterly reflects this. It is nothing more than a mask of glitter and sparkle, but on the inside, it is rotten and putrid and infested with malignant despair. It is sterile, but we pretend it isn't.
At the end of the film the child is saved through the sacrifice of the lives of the two Jesuit priests, but there was no winner of the battle. It was simply one of many spiritual skirmishes, and such scuffles of the spirit continue today, and that is both fault and blame of all religions, because of their canons and dogmas. Religion highlights the one important aspect of humanity that it never actually teaches, and that is, humanity is possessed, both figuratively and metaphorically, and evil souls are running the world. Is there a ritual of prayer to answer such sickness?