Chris: If you ask people to describe the most iconic scenes from The Exorcist, you’ll hear about pea soup, twisting heads, skin writing, and levitation. Those bits are all fine for what they are, and some of them are terrifying. Nothing in the movie though — not one thing — is as scary to me as one little line, uttered by the demon who’s possessed poor little Regan: “Father, could you help an old altar boy?”
Friedkin did use some quick single-frame cut-in edits of freaky faces in a few places in the original. In the Director's cut, he strews them around quite a bit. Also, looking at that shot up above, there's clearly some sort of prosthetic on Regan's fingers/hands, right?
And BTW, kudos on the Ninth Configuration. Like the Exorcist, I read the book before I saw the movie (don't judge.) It's an amazing, crazy, profound bit of religious give and take, isn't it? "Do you know what 'entropy' is? Say it's a racehorse and I'll kill you."
BTW, I didn't think the review proper was a good place to clear this up, but if you watch the bonus materials on the DVD or Blu-Ray, you'll see both William Peter Blatty and Billy Friedkin refer to the case from 1949 on which the story was based as having taken place in Silver Springs Maryland and involving priests for Georgetown University, which is a Jesuit institution.
This is only sort of correct. The original case did involve a family from Silver Springs, MD. When the child--in this case a 13-year-old boy--began to exhibit behavior associated with possession, the family moved to the midwest to be with family there. In the St. Louis area, there were three sites where different exorcism rituals were performed on the boy--at the family home, at Saint Louis University (also a Jesuit school) and at the Alexian Brothers Hospital. The head priest who performed the exorcism kept a diary of it. Priests at Georgetown familiar with aspects of the case and the rumor of a diary had heard about it, which is how Blatty came to hear of it. The diary was apparently found during demolition of the hospital building, and some of what was in it was used by the author for The Exorcist.
I should also mention that the Warner book-cover Blu Ray version is fantastic in every way. Tons of extras, and includes both the theatrical release and the director's cut.
It's not, unfortunately, because it really isn't a horror story or horror novel. But both the novel and movie are worth a read/watch.
The story there is about a big old mansion owned by the defense department in the 1970's. They've sent men from all branches of service there, a select few, who the army/navy folks believe are faking mental illness or combat fatigue....but who are so good at faking it that they're unfit for active duty. They send in an army psychologist who has very odd methods, and the story becomes a bit of a "who's crazier" sort of thing. Been years since I read it, but in my high school days I found it to be incredibly funny, tragic, and the source of some fascinating discussions on God and religion. Worth seeking out.
Due to dumb RL I haven't been able to keep pace w/ 30 years of horror in 30 days, but thank goodness we're in the 70's! I re-watched this last night for the first time in about 15 years. So good. I never had the intimate connection to this film as many of my friends, as I've always been a disdainful heathen, but that bears little relevance to the awesomenity of this horror flick.
I forgot the bawdy and grounded nature of the writing.
"Shall we summon the writer? He's in Paris." "Hiding?" "Fucking."
Linda Blair is just magnificent. I hadn't remembered the hospital/scan scenes, the waiting for a diagnosis, and frankly those moments are plenty harrowing in and of them selves. The slipping away of the child is just soul-crushing. Max von Sydow is just such a presence. His moments in Iraq permeate the entire movie. I love the moment he views the statue from a dune with the dogs fighting in its shadow.
When this was rereleased in theaters my friends and I went to see it in Georgetown and then we went to the stairs featured in the movie. Standing atop those stairs at midnight was hella creepy. None of us were superstitious but we were all itching to get the hell out of there.
It's really hard to write anything about this film because it's almost all been said...and for good reason, because this is a masterpiece. There's so many things I love about this movie- including the Iraq prologue, which for me is probably the scariest thing in the entire movie. I'm not quite sure why. It's exotic, eerie, unsettling, and foreign. It sets up this tremendous opposition throughout the film, almost casting it as a boxing picture where the fighters are training for the prizefight at the end. Funny that you pointed out that he looks like a boxer...I think that's a subtle point. It's such a character-driven piece, especially in terms of Father Karras...it's such a measured, slow build up to that unforgettable confrontation in Regan's bedroom. Science and medicine are called in. Regan pees the floor (which I find really upsetting for some reason). Unseen forces lurk in every frame of the film and seem to spill off the screen into our world. This is a powerful, powerful film. The crabwalk thing, I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I would have LOVED to have seen that in 1973 because really, there had not been anything like that on the screen before. Nothing that extreme, in full view. But on the other hand, it does go over the top and it looks silly in a film that is anything but silly. My fun memory of this was watching it on network TV when I was really little- maybe five or six. It was probably heavily edited, I'm sure. When her head spun around, I remember that I was eating a donut. I remember turning around away from the TV and looking down at my donut. I NEVER have nightmares about anything, but I had nightmares about my bed floating up off the ground. FTR, yes, my parents pretty much let me watch anything I wanted. Not sure how that turned out. Anyway, let's tip the hat to one of the most critically maligned films of all time- Exorcist II: The Heretic. It's absolutely terrible, but I don't hate it as much as others seem to. There are some things that I think are actually quite effective. But also lots of things that are just ridiculous. I'd say it's an odd picture, but I believe John Boorman's film before was Zardoz, so there's that. Ninth Configuration, that's an interesting picture right there...
My grandmother lived in DC, so I walked by that stairwell many times. They eventually put a gate up, probably due to all the people climbing the "Exorcist steps".
Something that struck me this time, perhaps because I'm still reeling from seeing Gravity, is something I didn't recall from the party scene when she pees on the floor. She tells an astronaut "you're going to die up there". I'm not sure if that's some sort of prophecy about Father Merrin, with the "up there" being her room, or if she's just trying to freak out the astronaut, or if it's true and the astronaut is indeed going to die out in space. What a wonderfully weird little detail.
There's a scene at the hospital where she's not paying attention and she just wanders and hums. It's like the beginning of losing herself. So unsettling.
The warning to the astronaut is a reference to the sinister predictions the supposed boy victim R.H., subject of the infamous 1949 exorcism, made to random witnesses in the room during his exorcism. Happily none of the predictions came true. The astronaut turns up as a character in another Blatty project, “Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane,” which is the book “The Ninth Configuration” is based on. I read one mini-review of “The Exorcist” in a reference book years ago which brought up some things no other reviews or articles ever seem to mention: it was boasting of the rich rewards the movie offers if you look past the scare-filled surface. For instance, how do (the pieces) of the small Pazuzu figure, unearthed in Iraq, turn up at the bottom of the steps for Detective Kinderman to find? Who is the figure seen moving behind the curtains in Regan’s room when he looks up at the window? I’m intrigued by those unanswered questions and details in the movie. I also find it interesting to ruminate on the desecrations in the church, which you’re left to assume are the doings of Regan (who displays a penchant for sculpting bizarre creatures even before viewers are made aware something is not quite right with her) when Chris mentions to Kinderman that her daughter takes an art class in the church that was desecrated. In the book it’s much more spelled out: Kinderman examines one of Regan’s imaginative sculptings and manages to scratch off enough of its paint to do a test. Sure enough, the substance is the same as what was used in the desecrations. One improvement the director’s cut made (besides the scene where Regan wanders the doctor’s office, humming aimlessly) was to show Sharon, the Kitty Wynn character, listening to the Watergate trial on headphones in an attempt to block out the sounds of the exorcism upstairs, which brings up another point: I’ve always felt that the only place Friedkin slightly dropped the ball occurs in the big showdown scenes of the exorcism. I don’t quite buy the shots where the bedroom quakes enough to send the priests falling about and the plaster splits without seeing the effect it has on the other occupants of the house. Where are the reaction shots of Chris McNeil, looking terrified or pacing back and forth downstairs? Where are the shots of harried butler Karl and his wife, reacting to what is happening upstairs? I truly wish there were shots like that in the final cut.
