The Exorcist
William Friedkin, 1973, USA, 122 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
The BBFC finally passed The Exorcist for video, uncut 18, on February 9th, 1999. Expect a release later in the year.
Any reasonable history brands the seventies as the last golden age of moviedom in general and the horror movie in particular. The preceding decade had those marvellous Roger Corman pictures and the defining Night Of The Living Dead, and the eighties just saw year on year of diminishing returns as sequel numbers spiralled. But in between we had Halloween. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Don't Look Now. The Omen. And we had The Exorcist.
So let's think about those last two. Both were huge successes, spawning two cinematic sequels apiece. Both toyed with the occult. One was made in 1973, the other in 1976. One was set mainly in America, the other largely in the UK. And one still plays today like the scary, well-oiled rollercoaster it always did, while the other is The Exorcist.
Received wisdom - and in that I include the irrefutable lore of the blessed BBFC - would have The Exorcist as all but possessed itself. In these frames lurks real, quantifiable evil; tapping the primal fear. And James Ferman, font of all that is good, declares ad nauseam that to allow Friedkin's feeble freakshow back onto video (where it lived, quite innocuously, for a few months back in the halcyon and unregulated eighties) would be a sprocket hole too far.
Unfortunately, as with the official so-called Video Nasties, that bizarre dictate has sought to bestow upon this tatty, over-earnest and frequently amateurish shlock-fest an authority it does precious little to deserve. What it does do, however, is lend Warners' 25th Anniversary reissue a certain novelty. In common with Kubrick's even more unavailable A Clockwork Orange, time flatters its legend.
If eighties horror has one thing to answer for (and there is so much more than that), then it's terror's insistence it go hand in hand with humour. Freddy Kruger was a facially disfigured kiddie killer until landing his own TV show and toy knife-glove franchise. Horror had had its teeth pulled. The Exorcist was serious. Relentlessly, grindingly. It is terror-cinema as po-faced lecture. Brown rice horror: expressly good for you. There is no light or shade to either William Peter Blatty's didactic novel or his achingly faithful screenplay; here was a flimsy exercise in religious propaganda that meant it. Thus, by extension, so does Friedkin's film - and that's where it all begins to unravel.
As a scary movie The Exorcist cannot play effectively outside of the constituency willing to swallow its demonic possession wholesale. Firehose vomiting, roundabout heads and David Copperfield levitations played for laughs or yeucks have currency, but served clean and sober for a non-believing audience, they read like so much over-earnest Bible-punching. The Exorcist is a horror movie by way of the Moral Majority. The Catholic Church and Mary Whitehouse must have positively applauded.
Much of its perceived power, however, comes not from the subject matter per se, but by settling the freaky stuff in the mouth of a 12-year-old girl. Give her a crucifix and tell her to bloodily masturbate and you'll get a rise. But to labour it is to make it the film's Achilles' Heel: make everything explicit. Regan is possessed and don't you forget it, Blatty says, offering no subtlety, no suggestion of mental disturbance, child abuse, or even that she's faking it. It's a film with no subtext beyond the rightness of the Church and the goodness of its participants.
Indeed, the only place it digs any deeper than Biblical mumbo-jumbo is in Father Karras' relationship with his dying mother. But even there Blatty is setting up pins simply to pitch them over. Jason Miller's performance is sweaty and hunched, but entirely without depth; he's desperately mugging for a director who thinks grandstanding is quality acting. The mother is used by Blatty as pretence, a guilt trip because he once read that a hero, even a flawed one, needs motivation. It does, against all the odds, however, provide Freidkin with his best - even vaguely inspired - imagery: Karras' dreams, and the mother appearing on the girl's bed. They do not, needless to say, last.
Even allowing for its advanced age, the film looks dreadful - a nightmare vision of the decade that spawned it. It has acquired a shiny new mix for this particular manifestation, but when all is said and done it's polishing a badly scratched record. (Anyone who criticises Titanic for making use of Celine Dion's emaciated tonsils should think on - here is a film still thinking Tubular Bells is cool.) And even in a picture where performances rarely rise above adequate, Linda Blair should be singled out for being woefully inept, while poor Max Von Sydow just seems grateful for his eventual (and appallingly mishandled) death scene.
That it's better than Boorman's truly grisly Exorcist II: The Heretic is proof of nothing. Strangely, it's the little seen third in the series - directed by Blatty himself - that earns the plaudits. Lumbered with a bolt-on exorcism to justify the family name it may be, but it's altogether more elegant and intelligent than either of its more famous predecessors.
Time has proved Friedkin nothing more than a second-rate TV hack who got lucky on two wildly over-praised projects. The French Connection is efficient like Tony Scott is efficient: a professional job. But just look to his witless Wages of Fear rehash, Sorcerer, insipid Miami Vice knock-off, To Live And Die In LA , or the thoroughly amateur and deeply reactionary Rampage for evidence. And there are still The Guardian (a horror flick even worse than Poltergeist) and the execrable (and incomprehensible) Esterhaus-penned Jade to consider. That last the 59-year-old scarily calls, 'the closest to my own temperament.' He's a vampire feeding again and again off of the mouldering corpse of the one performance of smoke and mirrors in his meagre canon that fooled most of the people most of the time. The Devil does, indeed, find work for idle hands.
As a seminar in the masochistic joys of Catholic guilt, The Exorcist might just have a certain so-bad-it's-good cachet, but it can scarcely hold a candle to the paranoia of Polanski's Rosemary's Baby or the glorious lunacy that is Dick Donner's Omen. There the Bible is held up to ridicule, taken as a fun-house excuse for a string of increasingly dotty and splendidly lurid deaths. And the second part is even better.
The young and the curious will undoubtedly flock to Friedkin and Blatty's batty fright-flick, deprived as they have been for most of the last 10 years - outside of the occasional midnight screening - of a chance to see just what the hell all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, what they'll get in exchange for a fiver and two plodding, interminable hours is a pious, scare-free sermon in preachy pedantry and projectile pea soup.