The Mephisto Waltz
and Season of the Witch, among other, more low-budget ripoffs, had come
and gone in the supernatural horror genre, leaving little in their wake.
But The Exorcist—with hot, Oscar-winning
director William Friedkin in charge, featuring Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Burstyn, and based on a bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty—capitalized
on more visible assets than those earlier cheap imitations, becoming the
highest-grossing horror movie of all time ($223 million in domestic box office,
or $1.5 billion adjusted for inflation in 2023), and the first horror film to
be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
These cold facts, though, don’t begin to convey how
audiences experienced The Exorcist, though. So, let me try this analogy:
In one of my college American literature classes, my
professor described the effect of Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon, “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God”: Even as the minister enumerated the torments of Hell
in the quietest of tones, listeners wept, screamed, fainted. “In other words," my professor concluded ironically, “it was a roaring success.”
So it proved with The Exorcist, in which, in the supposedly science-based late 20th century, thousands took fright over the struggle with a demon for the soul of a young girl waged by her mother and two Roman Catholic priests.
In the months after its release,
the media featured all kinds of stories about viewers’ reactions, including:
* Paramedics called to treat people who fainted and
others who went into hysterics;
* Burstyn herself went to the aid of a woman who
fainted in one theater—then, realizing the lady might have an even worse
reaction when she saw who was helping her, called on someone else in the
theater to assist;
* In a case eventually settled out of court, one
filmgoer who fainted and broke her jaw on the seat in front of her sued Warner
Bros. and the filmmakers, claiming that the film’s subliminal imagery caused
the incident;
*A plumber was kept on constant call in a Canadian cinema, because, as one theater manager informed The Toronto Star, "The smell in the bathroom is awful. People are rushing in and they're missing the toilet seat by inches."
*The film did not play in Iran, Burstyn related in her
memoir Lessons in Becoming Myself, because “each of the three times they [Tehran
Film Festival officials] tried to dub it, the dubbing cast got too frightened
and couldn't complete;
* None other than the Rev. Billy Graham claimed, “The
Devil is in every frame of this film.”
In the past 50 years, multiple cultural commentators
have sought to explain The Exorcist’s impact, or even what it meant to
them specifically (see, for instance, these New York Times analyses in
late October, with one calling it “Essentially a Women’s Picture” and
the other “A Subversively Queer Movie”).
I prefer wider perspectives, the better to demonstrate
the film’s broad-based appeal. As far as I’m concerned, the best summary of
this kind comes from Dublin-based pop culture critic Darren Mooney’s October
article in The Escapist Magazine, which identified aspects of the plot
directly relevant to its time, including:
*The generation gap. In the late Sixties and
early Seventies, the postwar concern with issues such as juvenile delinquency
now encompassed drugs, political dissent, and questioning of religion and the economic
system. Many parents were finding their kids unrecognizable as they matured—mirroring Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil trying to make sense of Linda Blair’s Regan. For many parents of the time, even the best scientific professionals (psychiatrists and doctors) seemed powerless to cure what ailed their children.
*The sexual revolution. One of the movie’s most
notorious scenes involves what the possessed Regan does with a crucifix. Yet she
also assaults a psychiatrist and spews sexual obscenities at her mother and the
two priests called on to save her, Fr. Lankester Merrin and Fr. Damien Karras. She is not yet interested in boys, but by raising Regan's age by a year, to twelve, the film places her on the cusp of adolescence, with all the sexual problems that may come with that. At the same time, some viewers have speculated whether Fr. Karras and his
confidante Fr. Dyer were gay, and whether Burke Dennings—the film director that
Chris used to babysit Regan—might have violated the child before his murder, or, alternatively, if the girl suspected that her mother might marry him.
*The breakdown of the family. It has been frequently
remarked upon that Regan is the child of a broken home, with Chris an actress called
on to leave the girl alone for considerable time when shooting a film. The separation anxiety that many children experience in such situations leads Chris and the
male authority figures she consults to initially believe that only psychiatric treatment (rather than
spiritual intervention) is called for to deal with the girl's problems. At the same time, failed obligations
towards family members in the last stage of life provide a perhaps even more potent
avenue for the demon to exploit, as Fr. Karras can’t stop blaming himself for
his aged mother dying alone.
*The Mideast as a breeding ground for unrest.
The film’s prologue occurs on an archaeological dig in Iraq, where Fr. Merrin
comes across an amulet of a demon (left unnamed in the film, but called Pazuzu
in Blatty’s novel)—setting up the confrontation between the cleric and the demon
in the last half-hour. Many viewers at the time of the film's release would have seen the disorders emanating
from the Mideast in the last several years (two wars aimed at Israel,
Palestinian terrorism, and—only two months before the movie's premiere—the Arab oil embargo)
as natural sources for disturbances and strife.
*Washington, DC as a symbolic nest of deceit and
corruption—and as the site of a real-life exorcism. Much of the film was
shot on location in the Georgetown neighborhood of DC. While a student at the
school in 1949, Blatty read about this ancient Catholic ritual performed on a
teenaged boy in the area. Years later, the writer changed the sex and lowered the
age of the victim, and, while updating the period to the present, kept the
setting and other details of the exorcism intact. In Friedkin’s vision, the Washington
of this time is a symbol of urban decay, rife with homelessness and crime—and many
Americans ardently believed that the White House was a focus of government-sponsored
crime in the Vietnam and Watergate eras.
Two other aspects of the
characters’ environment, I would argue, play a part in what is about to
unfold:
*Hollywood. Blatty, a longtime screenwriter and
producer, based Chris and Regan MacNeil on Shirley MacLaine (another globe-trotting
redhead actress) and her only daughter, Sachi Parker, and Dennings on the
English director J. Lee Thompson. While Chris is a caring mother, her active
lifestyle and the secular outlook of her friends make it inevitable that she
will have no strong set of religious beliefs that might help her cope with this crisis.
*The contrast between traditional Roman Catholicism
and a more modern, rational mode. This is represented by, respectively, Fr.
Merrin and Fr. Karras (played by the omnipresent character actor
Max von Sydow and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jason Miller). Karras,
a psychiatrist, now doubts the beliefs that drew him towards the priesthood. It
is Merrin who spearheads the charge against the demon, even telling the younger
priest to leave the room when he senses him wavering in their struggle against
radical evil.
The film’s visceral impact derived primarily from two
men: Blatty, a practicing, even conservative, Catholic, and Friedkin, an
agnostic Jew. The pair quarreled over the film’s ending but reconciled a
quarter century later (and Friedkin even agreed to include the ending Blatty wanted on the anniversary DVD).
It is to Blatty’s novel and the Oscar-winning
screenplay that we have the characters, setting and themes. But it is to
Friedkin that we owe the firm hand on the acting and atmosphere that elevated
this from B-movie schlock to a tense drama of faith pushed to the breaking
point.
Friedkin—brilliant and exacting, but also arrogant and imperious—drove cast, crew, and himself to dangerous lengths to secure his desired hyper-realism, pushing the film’s production schedule from 85 days to 224.
Today, Friedkin—who died four months ago— might be
seriously embarrassed by, maybe even “canceled”for, his bullying tactics and unsafe work environments.
But at this point in the early 1970s, European-style
“auteurs” of the New Hollywood such as Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola
and Friedkin were at their commercial and critical zeniths, enjoying perhaps
even more deference than past giants like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred
Hitchcock had been accorded in the past.
At the time of his death, Burstyn issued this graceful and, so far as it went, truthful, tribute to the director: “My friend Bill
Friedkin was an original; smart, cultured, fearless and wildly talented. On the
set, he knew what he wanted, would go to any length to get it and was able to
let it go if he saw something better happening. He was undoubtedly a genius.”
Nevertheless, in that drive to get “what he wanted,” Friedkin
abused personnel and endangered the health of Burstyn and others:
*He slapped a real-life priest, cast for reasons of
verisimilitude, when he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. Technical consultant Fr. William O’Malley, also acting, in the subsidiary role
of Fr. Dyer, wasn’t conveying the sense of shock that Friedkin wanted in the movie's conclusion. Suddenly the director struck the face of the cleric, then immediately ordered the cameras to roll.
*Burstyn hurt her back badly, even after telling Friedkin
that he was risking injuring her. In the scene where Regan pushes Chris to
the floor, the harness jerked Burstyn back too hard, resulting in a fractured
coccyx and pain that continues to this day for the actress. Friedkin's reaction at the time? Instructing
the cameraman to continue shooting Burstyn in pain, footage that ended up in
the film.
*Linda Blair also suffered an injury resulting in
lifelong pain. For a scene in which Regan convulses, a harness (again) led
to Blair fracturing her lower back, leading to long-term scoliosis.
*In separate scenes, Friedkin fired guns near Miller
and Rudolf Schündler (who played Karl) to startle them. Schundler blew his
lines and almost fell down the stairs; Miller got into a heated argument with
the director, telling him that, as an actor, he didn’t require such inducements
to a better performance.
*Friedkin delayed filming by firing the first production designer. What led to the decision: Friedkin's desire to change
the wallpaper in Regan's room and to widen all the door frames to allow for
more camera accessibility.
*Friedkin fired famed film composer Bernard
Herrmann. This may have been the most justifiable decision the driven
director made in running roughshod over someone who didn't meet his creative standard. For all his brilliant work on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's Psycho, Herrmann was also famously crusty. This time, the composer loudly derided the footage he would set to music, and said that the Iraq prologue especially had to go. Friedkin sacked him, and instead used Mike Oldfield's eerie and evocative "Tubular Bells," which became an instrumental hit.
Friedkin's despotic attitude, often heedless about safety, was of a piece with his behavior the year before in filming the classic chase scene in The French Connection. "I was like Captain Ahab pursuing the whale," he told The New York Post two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of that film's release. "I had a supreme confidence, a sleepwalker's assurance. As successful as the film was, I wouldn't do that now. I had put people's lives in danger."
With filming methods like these and those used in The Exorcist, Friedkin could easily have become embroiled in the kind of legal mess besetting director John Landis after the accident that killed actor Vic Morrow during production of The Twilight Zone: The Movie.
Instead, he was lucky to have helmed one of the great, gritty police procedurals ever put on screen, as well as The Exorcist, which, 50 years later, is still on the short list of the scariest movies of all time.
