I was born at the wrong time for THE EXORCIST. I was (far) too young to see it at the cinema on first release, and by the time I’d come of age, the film, along with most every other film that could be remotely labelled as horror, was unavailable. For those who haven’t heard me moan about it countless times already, here in the UK in the early 1980’s, as the home video industry began to boom, legislation was introduced in response to public campaigning that resulted in stricter censorship rules being applied to video releases than cinema. The upshot of this was the removal from the shelves of most horror titles (the so-called video nasties).
It wasn’t until I’d reached my teenage years and had forged certain friendships and ‘under-the-counter’ connections that I was able to watch films like EVIL DEAD, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD for the first time. The (un)holy grail of films to be tracked down and viewed was WILLIAM FRIEDKIN’s 1973 adaptation of WILLIAM PETER BLATTY’s 1971 novel, THE EXORCIST.
I finally watched THE EXORCIST for the first time in 1989. I finally watched it again, and got around to reading the original novel, in 2024.
I think one of the reasons I didn’t go back to the film for several decades was a sense of ‘mission accomplished’. For an uncultured horror fan (as I most definitely was 35 years ago), watching it for the first time felt like job done. The things that made the film famous to a teenage boy were all present and correct, not least the foul language and projectile vomit. In the years that followed, I watched (and fell asleep to) EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, really enjoyed EXORCIST III, then despaired at both botched attempts to make a prologue – EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING and DOMINION. I’d forgotten there was a TV series – it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime, so I’ll check it out asap – and I’d intentionally ignored last year’s EXORCIST: BELIEVER, primarily because the trailers looked as bad as everyone went on to tell me the film was. Until now, though, I’d never gone back to the original.
When films are held in such high regard as THE EXORCIST, I often wonder if their reputation is warranted or whether it’s a manifestation of nostalgic groupthink. Not this time. In my opinion, THE EXORCIST fully justifies all the praise heaped upon it over the years
But I expect you already knew that.
This isn’t intended as a review or a recommendation, because even if you’ve only a passing interest in horror, I’m sure you’ve seen the movie and/or read the book or have heard enough about THE EXORCIST to decide whether you want to. It’s such a cultural reference point, and so much has been written and said about it over the years that chucking in my few cents worth isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference, but I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed it second time around, that I felt I had to write something for this site. My RECOMMENDATIONS page is becoming something of a personal catalogue of what I’ve watched and when.
On paper, I’m not the target audience for a possession story – I have very strong feelings about religion (not good ones), and an equally strong disbelief in ghosts, demons, and vengeful spirits. Also, if you’ve read my books you’ll know that I almost always focus on average Joes – everyday people who happen to be caught up in whatever flavour of dystopia I’m currently writing about. Here, Chris MacNeill, mother to possessed daughter Regan, is an internationally famous film star whose career is on the ascent and who frequently mixes with politicians and other luminaries: exactly the kind of character I usually struggle to connect with. Yet THE EXORCIST really worked for me.
The novel took me by surprise. It was sitting on my Kindle for an age before I started reading and, initially, I struggled with Blatty’s style. It felt all over the place at first, overwrought and with more semicolons per page than I’ve used in total over the course of writing more than twenty books. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, but once I’d got it I was hooked. The narration felt detached, oddly remote from the unbearable emotions of a parent watching her child go through an appalling ordeal, powerless to help. It felt almost matter of fact in the way Regan’s possession was described, and I think that’s why it had such an impact. The grotesque things the spirit makes the child do and say are described without unnecessary histrionics, and that added an unexpected layer of realism to impossible scenes.
This approach is in keeping with the attitudes of the characters, who exhaust all scientific and medical explanations for Regan’s possession before, eventually, they’re forced to accept the improbable and seek help from the church. And those characters themselves are similarly underplayed. At first, I found Chris’s superstar status to be a distraction, but as Regan’s condition deteriorates, the superficiality of the mother’s career and social standing is stripped away and all we’re left with is a terrified single parent, desperately trying to do the right thing for her suffering child. Father Karras, the young priest first approached to carry out the exorcism, is a trained psychiatrist struggling with his faith, as sceptical as anyone.
The novel has a slightly different focus to the film, with more time given to Detective Kinderman (who is investigating the murder of a film director at the MacNeil’s house), and his relationship with Karras. Karras’s internal conflict also occupies more space. The film’s unflinching graphic effects are part of the reason for its notoriety, yet the unpleasantness was actually dialled down from the page for the screen. Everything that is described in the novel and shown in the film is presented with a relatively unblinking eye and is there for a purpose – the head spinning, the vomiting, the self-mutilation… it’s shocking for sure, but none of it feels gratuitous. For me, there’s an almost documentary-like feel to the way the story is told, almost like we’re watching a case study.
Despite the plethora of sequels that followed (you can’t keep a good moneymaker down), I think THE EXORCIST still holds up today because it’s a fully self-contained story, that despite its sensationalist nature, is told in a concise, almost clinical way. In my opinion, the best genre stories succeed because they allow us to suspend our disbelief and fully invest in the unbelievable events we’re watching or reading about. More than fifty years after the publication of the novel and the release of the film, that THE EXORCIST had such an impact on a non-believer like me is testament to its success. It’s a cultural phenomenon that deserves its legendary status.
