About halfway through this refurbished Exorcist which I probably hadn t seen in its entirety in well over a decade I realized why I was appreciating it on a deeper level. The Exorcist , you see, is not a horror movie. It doesn t belong in the same class as Cheez Whiz like The Omen or the more recent Stigmata , two other religious-dread flicks. No, these days I read it more as a drama with supernatural underpinnings. It unfolds slowly perhaps, for today s audience, too slowly fleshing out the humans who will soon do battle with a demon.
Some bits are still cringe-inducing.
The most needless addition is a bit of chat at the end between a priest and a detective, which is meant to echo an earlier conversation. My biggest gripe with Exorcist Version 2.0 is, oddly, the way it sounds now. This gravely alters the movie s tone, in ways subtle and obvious. Part of what freaked people out about The Exorcist was its contrast between the naturalistic and the supernatural between deceptively calm moments and loud, crashing horror. The movie s eerie quietude is gone, replaced by a generic This scene might be boring and talky, but scary stuff is coming up horror-movie soundtrack.