For all its blood, vomit, and obscenities, The Exorcist was a blockbuster of traditional values
Image: Photo: Sunset Boulevard Film Features The Popcorn Champs
There’s a scene about halfway through The Exorcist, the highest-grossing film of 1973, where Father Damien Karras pauses mid-prayer. Karras is a Jesuit priest, but he’s also a psychiatrist, employed by Georgetown University to counsel the other priests. An actress named Chris MacNeil has come to him, desperate. Something is wrong with MacNeil’s daughter. MacNeil thinks that maybe she’s possessed, even though she knows that seems impossible. Karras says that, if he were to give anyone an exorcism, he’d “have to get them in a time machine and get them back to the 16th century.” But Karras meets this girl, Regan, and something is definitely wrong.
In church, thinking about all this, Karras gives the liturgy of the Eucharist, and he pauses for just a second. Something crosses his face. In that heartbeat, while talking about the body and blood of Christ, Karras seems to recognize something about Catholicism—about its connection to some ancient druidic barbarism. He seems to decide that only ancient mysterious good can combat ancient mysterious evil. Right away, he goes to his Church superiors and recommends an exorcism.
If you grew up in the Catholic Church, as I did, then you might have spent your childhood thinking of these vaguely mystic rites as mundane, even boring. I was probably a teenager by the time I realized that most American Christians weren’t consuming the transfigured flesh of their savior every Sunday morning. But The Exorcist—a movie made by an agnostic director who’d grown up in a Jewish household in Chicago—dials deep into those centuries-old traditions and finds something romantic in them. Pauline Kael derisively called The Exorcist “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells Of St. Mary’s.”
The Exorcist is a terrifying, repellant, physically exhausting, expertly made movie, and its massive, overwhelming box office success is frankly baffling. The film, admittedly, had a lot of things going for it. It was based on a runaway bestseller novel; its author, the screenwriter William Peter Blatty, had based his story on a famous tale of an almost-certainly-faked exorcism in St. Louis in the ’40s, and he’d sold the film rights before the book had even been published. Director William Friedkin was coming off of The French Connection, a hit action movie that had won the Best Picture Oscar. Still, it was a grueling, troubled shoot that led to a grueling, troubling movie—not exactly a feel-good romp. And yet The Exorcist became a cultural phenomenon.
There’s some alternate reality where The Exorcist starred both Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, the studio’s first choices for the roles that ultimately went to Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller. Friedkin shot those ideas down. He offered the Chris MacNeil role to Audrey Hepburn, but she’d only take it if she could shoot the movie in Rome. Instead, Friedkin ended up making the movie largely without stars. None of the leads were especially glamorous. Ellen Burstyn had been nominated for an Oscar for 1971’s The Last Picture Show, and Von Sydow had cut a stark, heavy figure in Ingmar Bergman films, but Miller was a total unknown, a playwright who’d never acted on screen before. And Friedkin supposedly auditioned hundreds of girls before he found Linda Blair, the 12-year-old who he would transform into a murdering demon.
Friedkin was, by pretty much every account, a horrible asshole on set. He injured both Burstyn and Blair during the possession scenes, jerking them around with stunt wires. He pulled tricks like telling Miller that the stream of projectile pea-soup vomit would hit him in the chest, not the face, so that he could get Miller’s authentically disgusted reaction. He also pissed off Catholic crew members by slapping Father William O’Malley in the face before filming one particularly dramatic scene. (O’Malley was one of several real priests playing fictional priests in the cast.) He built the bedroom set in a freezer so that he could see the actors’ breath.
Friedkin also blew through his budget, spending it twice over. And when execs at Warner Bros. saw the seething, spitting, genuinely disgusting final product, they didn’t think they could sell it, releasing it in only 30 theaters nationwide at the end of 1973. They were as surprised as anyone when the movie took off, eventually outgrossing My Fair Lady and becoming the biggest hit in studio history.
There are a lot of reasons for that. The Watergate scandal was dominating headlines when The Exorcist hit theaters; President Nixon would resign in disgrace eight months later. Maybe, between that and Vietnam, people were newly awake to a certain kind of pervading societal rot, something that the spectacle of The Exorcist might’ve mirrored. If you really wanted to reach, you might even play with the idea that audiences wanted to see something evil cast out of something pure, like they wanted Nixon out of the government.
But there’s also a compelling argument that The Exorcist works as some kind of reaction against feminism. The girl in the movie hits the age of puberty, and she immediately becomes a bodily-fluid-spewing heretic. She screams obscenities and degrades religion. Her single mother, a woman who comes from Hollywood and who isn’t rooted in any sort of faith or tradition, eventually needs the help of clergy to fix her kid. So maybe reactionary audiences saw The Exorcist, on some primal gut level, as a reactionary movie.
There’s also, of course, the simple truth that The Exorcist is a great movie. There are logical problems with it. The film’s opening implies that the older priest, Father Merrin, has somehow loosed the unnamed demon that takes over the girl. But it never explains how; the choice seems entirely random. We never quite come to understand what the demon wants either. That demon mostly seems like a teenage edgelord, just saying fucked up shit to make people uncomfortable. But even when you know all this—and even when you’ve seen all the decades of quotations and parodies and ripoffs—the spectacle of the little kid who needs to be saved is visceral, gripping stuff.
Friedkin treated his actors terribly—none so badly as the radio veteran Mercedes McCambridge, who played the voice of the demon. McCambridge had quit drinking and smoking before playing that role, but to get the right haggard intensity in her voice, she drank whiskey, chain-smoked, and ate raw eggs. She recorded her parts while tied to a chair. And then Friedkin didn’t credit her, at least not at first. (After lawsuits, McCambridge got the credit she was due.) But maybe in part because he put those actors through the ringer, Friedkin got raw, intense, believable performances. And there are little touches—the shot of Merrin arriving while shrouded in fog, the use of Mike Oldfield’s eerie prog instrumental “Tubular Bells” instead of the Lalo Schifrin score that Friedkin had commissioned—that will stick with you forever.
But the thing that most strikes me about The Exorcist, upon rewatching it, is that it’s a weirdly traditionalist movie—not in its implicit rejection of feminism but in its simple story mechanics. In The French Connection, Friedkin’s previous film, the protagonist cop is an obsessive fascist who endangers civilians, shoots an unarmed man in the back, and isn’t even that good at his job. By the end of the movie, the suave drug dealer gets away, and Popeye Doyle accidentally kills an FBI agent. In The Exorcist, by contrast, two Catholic priests sacrifice themselves to save a little girl. The Church bureaucracy hears what’s happening with this demon, and they immediately volunteer help. Two priests and a drunk movie director die, but the forces of good win. A happy ending! The system works!
The Exorcist might have blood and vomit and shock value, but the film doesn’t represent the counterculture. After a couple of artier early movies had flopped, Friedkin, a former documentary filmmaker and TV director, had decided that he wanted to entertain people, the way movies had once done. That’s what led Friedkin to The French Connection, and it’s also what led him to The Exorcist. It’s a mainstream entertainment.
The Exorcist almost sneers at the politics of the ’60s and at the way Hollywood embraced them. Chris MacNeil, we learn, is in Washington to shoot a movie about student demonstrations. She’s clearly the star, but the one time we see her filming a scene, she’s telling students not to shut down their college. As she’s acting out that melodrama, the actual Georgetown students and staff walk past, half-interested. Later on, MacNeil dismisses her own film: “The Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story.”
The Exorcist also seems to deeply distrust all signs of modernity. When possession first starts to grip Regan, MacNeil tries to get her the best medical help she can find. But Friedkin depicts the hospital system as a series of nightmares almost as bad as the possession—an arterial spray of little girl’s blood, an unfeeling robotic scanner buzzing over a sleeping body. And psychiatrists are no help either. Even when they finally recommend exorcism, they dismiss it, explaining that the practice “has been pretty much discarded, except by the Catholics, who keep it in the closet as a sort of embarrassment.” The doctors are willing to admit that exorcism sometimes works, but “not for the reasons they think.”
So the Catholics have to come to the rescue. Father Karras is himself a serious and traumatized man, one who lives in poverty and who’s just seen his mother die a terrible death. Father Merrin, the older priest who’s had some experience with demons, is old and weathered, and he knows he doesn’t have much time left. But the two of them go face-to-face with primitive, uncanny evil, and they defeat it, though they both die in the process. Later on, Regan, who remembers nothing, sees a priest’s collar and goes to hug and kiss him—an image that we will never see again in popular culture.
It’s funny. The Exorcist seems like a transgressive work of art, but it’s built on reverence of tradition. It has trust in institutions. The blockbusters of this century have faith in institutions, too, but those institutions—the Avengers Initiative, the Rebel Alliance, Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft & Wizardry—are all fake. They’re offspring of our shared fantastical dream life. We know better than to put collective trust in something like the Catholic Church, or the armed forces, or the police. We’ve seen where that leads.
Historically, we tend to regard the early-’70s auteur era as this giant quantum leap, this moment where all these young directors challenged received wisdom. And that moment did lead to some truly great movies, including The Exorcist. But there’s nothing jaded about The Exorcist. Instead, cynicism would arrive later. Just over a decade after the film, for instance, another blockbuster would do very different things with demonic possession. When an ancient evil takes over the body of Sigourney Weaver in 1984’s Ghostbusters, it’s mostly an excuse for Bill Murray to be funny. That’s all the time it took for a terrifying cinematic spectacle, a sincere confrontation with old and unnamed things, to become a joke.
The contender: A lot of important films, like American Graffiti and Serpico, came out in 1973 and made a whole lot of money. Other hits from that year might not be important, exactly, but I’ve still got a lot of affection for them—for the James Bond blaxploitation goof Live And Let Die, and for the Disney Robin Hood. But my favorite of the year’s hits is the one that made nearly as much money as The Exorcist, taking it to a photo finish.
The Sting, that year’s winner for Best Picture, is a sort of spiritual sequel to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, reuniting director George Roy Hill with stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It’s got the same tone; it’s a banter-heavy caper about charismatic outlaws that relies on movie-star chemistry and sets the action only a few years further back, into the ’20s. And it has a blast with its tricks and devices, setting the movie-stars-getting-away-with-shit blueprint that something like Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven would later follow. It’s fun as hell.
Next time: Mel Brooks’ raunchy, anarchic bash Blazing Saddles gleefully eviscerates two American traditions, the Western and racism.
343 Comments
My dog is usually fine with the TV blaring away. Only two things have ever affected him : the supermarket self-service till that beeps at the start of episode 2 of Sherlock, and The Exorcist, which caused him to walk off and hide under the kitchen table, whimpering.
There’s all kinds of horrible animal noises on the sound track. It’s no wonder pupper was disturbed.
“Two priests and a drunk movie director die, but the forces of good win. A happy ending! The system works!”Not if you count the sequels! Only the first two are worth your time though. Exorcist II: The Heretic because it’s directed by the guy who did Zardoz and Exorcist III because it’s actually good and in the movie it turns out the demon reanimated Father Harras and stuck a dead serial killer in their with him as well.
Kinja won’t let me edit this but I meant to say Father Karras.
Sure it’s Kinja?
PAZUZU!!!!
Best time I’ve ever had at a movie was watching “Exorcist II” with the audience heckling the movie and shouting “Pazuzu!” anytime it was said. I was sore from laughing for a week. My GF said at the end, she almost puked from laughing so hard.
Father Carrots.
Also: obligatory “Exorcist III is better” post.
There’s a new Arrow blu-ray of Legion/Exorcist III coming out in the UK soon. Mark Kermode and Kim Newman were tweeting about recording a commentary this week, I think for the Director’s Cut version. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Exorcist-III-Blu-ray-George-Scott/dp/B07Y97FMJB
“Two priests and a drunk movie director die”At any point in that story do they walk into a bar?
You’re thinking of “The Omen”
Are they really worth your time though? I remember not being enthralled by them although it’s been a LONG time since I’ve seen them. I remember the third one being particularly inane.Maybe I need to revisit them. I forgot the Zardoz guy (which I do like) directed the sequel.
2 was definitely weird as shit so that’s probably why it’s should be seen. Plus it had James Earl Jones in it.
That’s the one that ends in Africa or something, right? And Linda Blair has to do…something?I’m going to try and re-watch it again this weekend, but my memory keeps telling me that it’s pure crap. And not in the enjoyable way a film like Orca is…
Yeah the only redeeming quality of the second movie is how weird it is. IIRC, it’s revealed that Father Marrin was has been possessing Reagan since the end of the first movie for reasons, the demon summons a swarm of locusts, and Reagan banishes the demon by waving her hand above her head.They also had a scene where Linda Blair actually stands precariously off the edge of a skyscraper.
I have some vague memory of a very shocking scene where she steps on a spike and it goes thru her foot
Exorcist 2 may have been…something, but at least it inspired this:
I was so frightened by the original Exorcist that I would close my eyes during certain scenes well into my twenties. Then my wife and I watched the Exorcist 2, and the next time I saw the original movie all I could think was, “Heh. Pazuzu. What a dumb name.” The sequel is so campy, like an Exorcist drag show. It arguably ruined the original movie for me, but I’m actually okay with that.
My friend and I thought the first one was hilarious and we got a ton of dirty looks from other people in the audience when we would laugh at certain scenes. My sister walked out of “The Exorcist” as she would Alien 6 years later.
The second movie is awful and only worth watching if you’re interested in seeing how drink Richard Burton could get and still stand up and recite lines. The third one is extremely good and contains the single best jump scare in cinema history. My brother saw it in the theater and still talks about how not only did the audience scream during that scene, they screamed twice. Like, people were so scared they inhaled and screamed again before getting hold of themselves.
I’m sold. I’ll try to watch them both this weekend. I mean, I AM a fan of the schlocky and bad film in general, so either way it won’t be a waste of my time.
The third movie is a good story with a bad script. I’m not a fan of Blatty’s direction either, though the jump scare is literally the only time I’ve ever found myself on my feet in the theater (facing the exit) without realizing I had jumped up.The film is at its worst whenever Blatty decided to add things that weren’t in his book. It gets corny fast.As much as love Brad Dourif’s acting, the Exorcist III would have been so much more intense if Blatty had left the killer’s casting as Jason Miller instead of just hiring him for one scene. Just the sight of him in that cell after the way the first film ended still gives me chills.
IIRC, the studio forced him to add the exorcism at the end. Hence why the non-book related subplot with the priest was added.
If that’s true, I’ll take one black mark off his record. That scene was wretched. But the film earns others.
The second movie is unbelievably bad. Like, not even in a good way.
I disagree, it was hilariously bad. Richard Burton looked like he was already dead, a fair while before he actually died.
And let’s not forget, the single best-executed (pun intended) jump scare in film history:
I didn’t jump then, or now. I basically had little reaction. I don’t know why, but that movie did nothing for me at all, it was just there.
Exorcist II is puke.I agree with you about Exorcist III. It manages to capture some, but not ALL of that feeling of dread that pervaded The Exorcist.That one long shot of the nurses station ALWAYS gets me, you know the one.
Fuck off
There’s some genuinely disturbing scenes in III. Has more of the first movie’s feel to it. Doesn’t II does try to explain the origin of the demon with some cult led by James Earl Jones?
My recollection, warped by time, is that the biggest appeal of The Exorcist at the time was that it was a legendary grossout movie, and people went to see it for the shock value. You went to see it to say you had seen it.
There had been violent big studio movies in the six or seven years before the Exorcist, and movies with a bunch of sex and nudity, but I don’t think there was much in the way of big budget, high production value shock movies. People went for the thrill of seeing little Linda Blair puke pea soup, twist her head 360 degrees, and tell the priest what his mother was doing (“collecting rocks in Hell” as the TV version I saw put it).
*Makes note to add “rockcollector” to repertoire of SFW insults*
mother father chinese dentist
Semi-related recently watched ‘Pulp Fiction’ on late night netwrok TV, which had “Say what again…I double dare you sorry sucka.”
That same network showed “Boogie Nights” as well. I really want to interview the local network exec who made that decision.
As Melonfarmer lines go its up there with Die Hard II TV’s “ Yippee kai yai kimosamai “.
The first one has “Yippee-kai-yai, Mister Falcon”. IIRC, they actually renamed one of the bad guy thugs to Falcon to justify it.
And “I’m tired of these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!”
I liked what didn’t sound anything like Jackie Gleason in the TV version of “Smokey and the Bandit”, where he says, “Bandit, you scum bum!” instead of the actual line, which would be played without any problem now.
A long time ago I remember reading bits of the TV edited script for Blue Velvet. “Heineken! Freak that stuff! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” That would be a very weird thing to watch on network TV.
I think it was TNT’s broadcast of Pulp Fiction that had my favorite overdub: “You’re about to redline? I’m a mickey-fickey mushroom-cloud-laying mickey-fickey, mickey-fickey! I’m the Guns of mickey-fickey Navarone!”ETA: I love that my phone wanted to autocorrect “fickey” to “fucked” or “fucker”. It’s taken a while phone, but you get me.
Yeah, it’s notable that the demon never went after the family like in The Poltergeist. It was just kind of there to be gawped at.
I prefer the Saturday Night Live parody version’s “Your mother sews socks that smell!”
Girl: “Your mother is in here, Harris.”Fr.Harris: “Mom, would you get of here? I’m trying to work!”Mrs. H: [pulls bedsheets back, gets out of bed] “Oh, you’re no fun!”Girl: [waves] “Bye, Mrs Harris.”
[later pukes pea soup on Fr.James Woods]
Fr.JW: [pukes pea soup right back]
Fr Harris: [everyone pukes pea soup on everyone]
“Your mama” was the actual phrase. More inflammatory. Spoken to Richard Pryor. “She’s talkin’ bout my mama!”
The option for ‘cooking socks in hell ‘was right there …..
The one I saw on UHF movie night as a kid had it as “Your mother darns socks in hell!” — an insult I still use, I might add.
“collecting rocks in Hell”
*drops monocle*
The Big Lebowski: “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!”
When I heard her say that the first time I saw it on TV, I busted out laughing. Same reaction I had when I heard the real deal at the theater. My friend and I went to see it without our girlfriends as both of them were Catholic and just terrified of it. My soon ex-GF didn’t see it for years, but my friend and I told her how funny we thought it was, and she went. She was pissed at both of us for a long time about that.
You mean like people went to movies to watch Deep Throat in 1972?
Correct. The very idea of shock at the cinema was still a new idea. The R rating gave new freedom to filmmakers. The shock value was a definite novelty and a marketing coup at the time. This was one of the reasons that the cinema of the Seventies is so distinctive: Shocking, even grim tales were box office magic. It was also near the end of the Vietnam War, the throes of Watergate and the start of a long-winded recession. People in general were pissed and scared and appreciated films that reflected the way the world was going at the time.
So maybe reactionary audiences saw The Exorcist, on some primal gut level, as a reactionary movie.I’d always wondered about this, and then I heard William Friedkin ranting about Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton on Joe Dante and Josh Olson’s wonderful podcast “The Movies That Made Me” and it basically confirmed it for me. Friedkin has a brilliant eye for directing, but as can be gleaned from the on-set accounts laid out in this article, he’s a fashy asshole and a pretty reactionary fucker. The last 30 minutes of Sorcerer really slaps, though.
I think Friedkin was a lefty when he started out, though apparently he later changed his mind about Paul Crump.
I definitely think he was a result of the death of solidarity that the 70s brought, a lot of nominally lefty people bailed, just like Phil Ochs said they would. It’s also possible that I’m wrong and that the success of The Exorcist is what led him on the path toward right-wing religiosity, he’s definitely got a weird relationship with the Catholic boom in the wake of his film’s success.
‘The Big Chill’ in 1983 can be seen as former hippie radials devolving into suburban Reagan Republicans. A lot of hippie culture was largely driven by narcissism, not politics so they tend to follow the mantra of “I Me Mine”.
Yeah, McCarthyism really did work to root out any class politics from their movement, which became completely self-focused and so the ladder-pulling bullshit was only the natural conclusion.
Only saw The Exorcist for the first time a few years ago. It was one of those that has always been on my list but just never got around to. But it was playing at a local theater as part of an October horror-fest and my partner insisted we go, as it was one of her favorites. The problem with waiting so long to watch this was I had seen so many parodies of this over the years that it clouded everything I was seeing on screen. Wish I could have seen it fresh, but it was hard to not see Richard Pryor on SNL yelling ‘What did you say about my mama’ among others.
Your mama sews socks that smell.
I had a very similar experience a few years back when it was playing as part of a local theater’s weekly retro double feature. The third act was impressive, from a technical standpoint, but everything leading up to it…I like Friedkin, I like 70’s movies about ugly men wearing ugly clothes and muttering at one another as much as the next guy, but almost nothing about it worked for me. When the lights came up, my friend turned to me and said “So, if you’re not Catholic…that movie loses something, huh?”
As you’ve said, it’s impossible to come at any work of art that looms so large in the greater public consciousness without having to hold it against not only the outright parodies, but the subsequent works that wear the original’s influence (or have stolen from it outright) on their sleeve. Approaching The Exorcist now means you’re going in expecting the stuff you really only get in the final 15-20 minutes, all of which has been thoroughly defanged through time and repetition.
(To be fair, my reaction may have been genetic. My Mom has told me more than once about going to see it at release, when she was a teenager, and spending 2 hours laughing at how – as Breihan aptly puts it – edgelord the whole affair is. She always preferred The Omen, and I’ve gotta agree.)The second movie on the double feature that night? Rosemary’s Baby. Now THAT is an effective, relentless exercise in tone and tension that hasn’t lost anything.
I conquer with you on both The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby. Found them both far scarier and disturbing than The Exorcist.
A similar thing happened when I took a film class in undergrad. The professor told us in previous classes he wanted to show westerns, but when he showed any John Wayne movies, the class would just laugh because they had all grown up with parodies and impressions without ever seeing the original. Our class’s Western was Butch and Sundance. Not going to complain.
“I conquer with you” would be a badass expression.
I LOL’d as I was lacing up my Grammar Nazi boots. Good catch.
Frankly I think it brings more to the table for non-Catholics. There is SO much symbolism, lore and pageantry to the Catholic faith that make it largely impenetrable to even Christians outside the denomination. The film having to rely on all of that as a framing device for everything that happens in the film, and Karras and Merrin having to cling unwaveringly to their faith (including Karras’ willingness to sacrifice himself) in the face of something terrifying and deadly, brings a richness to the story that a simple good versus evil story never could.
One of the things that really got me about the Exorcist as a teenager was how closely it tracked with the religion I was raised in. This review mentions the demon’s lack of plan as a plot hole, but that’s inaccurate. The whole point of demons in Catholicism is to antagonize people – that’s it. Catholicism is a cosmic nightmare where powerful things exist for no greater purpose than making people miserable.
I saw it in my teens, on DVD, alone in the dark at home during a storm—young enough that not too much of the pop culture parody stuff had gotten through. Its reputation as “one of the scariest movies of all time” loomed large, but that was about it. I tend to agree with the “If you’re not Catholic, that movie loses something” sentiment.Because Reagan clearly wasn’t Reagan, it was hard to think of her as suffering. Because the demon didn’t seem to have much motivation besides being mean, it didn’t feel like a threat. Not being religious myself, the mere presence of a demon can’t freak me out. I guess maybe if I ever became a parent, I could try to reexamine it through the lens of, “I’d hate to find myself in that desperate of a situation,” but I remember it leaning much harder on the priests than the family (it’s been 15 years since I last saw it, so my recall might not be great).I can admit it’s well-crafted (although a lot of that gets cancelled out by Friedkin’s abuses, in my book), but in my opinion it’s the most over-hyped, underwhelming horror movie of all time.
I’m not Catholic and didn’t grow up religious but I still found the film scary as hell, largely for Regan’s gradual transformation and their helplessness against the demon. I first watched it as a teenager and haven’t revisited it in a while, but I can imagine how it’d skew into silly after she’s tied up and the demon is just saying edgelord-y things. The lead-up is what sticks in my mind though: when Regan’s bed is shaking (how simple and almost mundane it is creeps me out), when she crashes her mom’s party, the crucifix scene, Karras visiting his mother in the mental hospital. And while The Exorcist still looms large in the public consciousness, the height of the parodies was probably before my time, which could be another factor.
I saw it first in many years ago while I was in college (HBO, not broadcast TV). I lived alone at the time and it creeped me out very well (not as well as Alien or The Haunting of Hill House, though). Fortunately, I got to see it again about twelve years later with a group of college students who had grown up with all the jokes about it. They went in jaded, with jokes and jeers, but by the time the film got intense I had dimmed the lights and headed off other distractions. The movie hooked them, and by the end, they didn’t make jokes about it any more. When I saw it in the theater re-release, there was no-one there who didn’t know what to expect, but the audience literally screamed when the telephone rang. And the spider-walk (which is in the book, but was cut from the first release) really freaked people out. While some people aren’t creeped out by the content, mechanically, the movie is damned near perfect. It’s not a film you should watch while your attention is divided.
How do you feel about the 2000 re-release? Cool, or unnecessary?
Nice to see the cleaned up print. As I recall, the only notable change I saw was adding the spider walk, which brought it a little closer to the book – I can’t consider that to be a bad thing. It was fun to see the audience shaken up by something they didn’t know was coming.
I saw it first in many years ago while I was in college (HBO, not broadcast TV). I lived alone at the time and it creeped me out very well (not as well as Alien or The Haunting of Hill House, though). Fortunately, I got to see it again about twelve years later with a group of college students who had grown up with all the jokes about it. They went in jaded, with jokes and jeers, but by the time the film got intense I had dimmed the lights and headed off other distractions. The movie hooked them, and by the end, they didn’t make jokes about it any more. When I saw it in the theater re-release, there was no-one there who didn’t know what to expect, but the audience literally screamed when the telephone rang. And the spider-walk (which is in the book, but was cut from the first release) really freaked people out. While some people aren’t creeped out by the content, mechanically, the movie is damned near perfect. It’s not a film you should watch while your attention is divided.
i had the same reaction to Kill Bill. saw it some 5 years ago, after seeing about a thousand parodies of it’s best moments
Have you seen 2 yet? If not, you still should. Most parodies are of the first movie. And 2 is the better of the pair anyway.
yeah, saw both back to back i think. from what i remember, found both lacking. when i think about it, i prefer tarantino post inglorious basterds
I was, and still am to an embarrassing degree, a total horror wuss. I couldn’t make it through the PG rated Jaws without covering my eyes. But I made it through The Excorcist largely unscathed. Admittedly, it was years later, and on TV, but I just think so many of the film’s scares depend on a belief in the supernatural, and I just don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I can be terrified by a guy in a dollar store devil mask if he’s jumping out of the shadows at the right moment, but him just saying “I’m the devil”? Yawn.What did terrify me, at the time, was the film’s TV commercial. If I recall correctly, it was nothing more than that scene shown above, with the title character walking through misty fog up to the house, to the accompaniment of Tubular Bells. No quick clips of other scenes, no voice over narration, just that scene. Like the Alien trailer years later, it didn’t tell you a damn thing about the movie, which just convinced you it was some scary shit.
I always thought The Exorcist was a reaction against the drug culture that emerged in the ‘60s (I don’t even know who my kid is these days) if not the counterculture era as a whole. So feminism fits in the larger context. But I still think the movie is closer in spirit to Go Ask Alice or the Insight episode in which a college student’s young sister visits for the weekend, tries pot or acid (they were interchangeable on shows like this) for the first time at a dorm party and ends up jumping to her death while trying to fly.
Have you ever seen The Exorcist …. on weed?
Pep pills.
Believe that flying actress was Helen Hunt.
No, that one was an After School Special. She thinks snakes are chasing her and she runs out of the second story window at her school.Ask me how many times that played on tv when I was growing up as a latchkey kid. :)Still, though. I’ve never tried acid. So.
Ah… the 70s were a horror show of jumping out of windows (remember Burnt Offerings?), killer bees, and quicksand.
The killer bees were COMING FOR US ALL. I got so anxious about them and the acid rain that was going to melt my skin off that I mostly refused to go outside as a child.
My TEACHER told us that killer bees were coming. WTF was she thinking?
Oh, mine too. We had a whole, like, week devoted to it. They were coming, they were going to kill us all, we’d all end up like Macauley Culkin in My Girl.
Back in those days if the killer bees didn’t get us the satanists would.
Classic SNL monologue
I’d say this type of analysis of horror, particularly horror that predates this trope/analysis (modern horror, particularly with prestige aspirations, often incorporates it), misses the central mechanics and role of horror. Jaws wasn’t the product of some cultural hatred of beaches and the ocean and Psycho wasn’t preceded by a public craze against personal hygiene, but rather both were using contexts in which there’s a plausible threat (and one that comes up in the daily life of the audience). You see this misunderstanding most frequently when it comes to sex, an act of incredible vulnerability most people partake in. Living With Yourself, out today, uses self-help and questionable/shady alternative health treatments.
With The Exorcist, the most plausible explanation is that it was a clever way to insert a glass elevator ride into the depths of hell (this is another distinction of the movie: you’re watching the progress of this disquieting and horrific thing, but the whole thing is contained without threat to any insert character until the very end) into the seeming security of a normal American home (well, probably top tertile, but it was still normal enough for any member of the audience to see it as similar than his own, and it being slightly nicer and in a slightly nicer neighborhood just emphasized that they should in theory be even safer than you). It did this using a contemporary opening to the occult in American (at least pop-)culture and the fact that Catholicism (particularly the Christian belief in demons and hell) is mainstream in American society but still known for arcane practices like exorcism. The run through the gauntlet of modern medicine was both a way to keep plausibility (the idea of going to a priest first is foreign to American society, although I’ve heard that there are some corners of the lower classes of Latin countries) and back the victims into a extremely obscure corner.As an addendum, Wicker Man should probably be read the same way, less an attack on feminism than an exploitation piece playing on the fact that a lot of (often left-wing/counterculture) utopian-societies/new-religious-movements (the societies generally had their own unique cosmologies, and the religious movements had their own utopian society complexes) were making the news for being crazy cults either mistreating members or committing terrorism (it’s kind of funny that it came out pretty quickly before the best-remembered examples of this, Patty Hearst and Jonestown, and the central twist, flirty fishing, would be initiated by a real hippie cult the year after it came out), to the point that an actually anti-cult movement had started up. Altemont may have also played some role, as it was an infamous case of something premised as an idealistic free-everything fest (basically Woodstock repeat) turning deadly. Its main change from the way the cults usually operated was that the victim was an outsider investigating in their midst, almost certainly because audiences would have trouble fearing for the safety of the kind of “chump” who would join a cult. A modern version would probably be based on the Fyre festival or high-profile scam like Theranos (which will be quickly recognized by the totally-not-Elizabeth-Homes using implied accusations of prejudice to shut down those questioning her), although self-help groups would also work, given that they’re the facade most cults now use.
I’m also not sure it was a pushback against anything. Hollywood will coopt anything that will help it sell, including 60s idealism. This movie did what all the great horror movies do – introduce a situation with no real explanation and no rational way out. What’s happening shouldn’t be happening, not in a nice Georgetown row house. So of course you see a doctor, and they tell you it’s psychological and that an exorcism will have the desired placebo effect – until you realize it really IS a possession and an archaic ritual beyond your understanding is the only possible solution. It made Burstyn and the audience accept that Catholic teachings and rites were literal. But I see that as in service to the story, not some sort of commercial for Catholicism.
Hollywood will coopt anything that will help it sell, including 60s idealism.
Although this was after Altamont killed most of the public’s appetite for that in December of 1969. It’s actually kind of amazing how that event was perfectly timed to differentiate to mood of two decades right in between them like that.
“This movie did what all the great horror movies do – introduce a situation with no real explanation and no rational way out.”And audiences did what audiences do — watched the shit out of it. Because we love this (I am in that “we,” I love horror and I think The Exorcist is great). I think the sociological factors are there for this and for a lot of movies that make a big splash, but people lean on them harder for horror because it’s more comforting to think Watergate made people watch a little girl get tortured than to think they just wanted to watch it because it’s a cool story.
If you look at Blatty’s later life and writings, he clearly intended it as a commercial not just for Catholicism, but pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Sociopolitical subtext was a key component of many films made by “New Hollywood” directors like Friedkin in the late ‘60s-early ‘70s. It’s what he and others like Coppola, Penn, Bogdonavich, etc. took from European directors like Godard, Antonioni and Clouzot (Friedkin’s fave). And even if Friedkin did not say to himself “I want to critique ‘60s culture in the guise of a horror movie” I think his feelings about drugs, sexual equality, and the changing dynamics of the American family strongly informed his decisions in The Exorcist.As for Psycho, I do think Hitchcock was aware at some level that the film addressed decaying Victorian values that some still clung to in the post-war era. Conversely, Jaws was almost deliberately designed by Spielberg as a straightforward entertainment free of subtext.
I do think Hitchcock was aware at some level that the film addressed
decaying Victorian values that some still clung to in the post-war era.
I think this is a misread of the period. The cult of domesticity in the postwar era wasn’t a remainder from the Victorian Cult of Domesticity, but rather a revival if not all new Cult of Domesticity created in reaction to an era of profound change, chaos, hardship, and inequality/middle class decline (a middle class in ascendance/dominance generally drives movements for domestic piety, most likely because they’re the class whose main interest is raising families in a stable environment that reflects their morals and beliefs, such as the Victorian Cult). This can be very overtly seen in comparing adaptations of shared source material from before and after WWII, such as Mamele v. Disney’s Cinderella.
However, don’t forget in Jaws the situation is made worse when the mayor and the town’s business leaders cover up the shark’s existence because they don’t want to lose tourist money. That element of the story definitely addresses the public’s post-Watergate cynicism about government and other once-trusted institutions.
Of course, The Wicker Man has had an ongoing cult film life specifically among neo-pagans, for depicting them as triumphant bad-asses.
“Next time: Mel Brooks’ raunchy, anarchic bash Blazing Saddles gleefully eviscerates two American traditions, the Western and racism”You hear that folks! He’s saying ‘Blazing Saddles’ is near!
No, he said the sherrif’s a [church bells]!
can’t hear you – someones ringing the bells.
btw Blazing Saddles was the biggest movie of 1974? I had no idea it was any kind of hit, never mind the biggest of the year!
But it was a hit! In honor of its achievement, it is my privilege to extend a laurel and hearty handshake . . .
I had the exact same reaction
Blazing Saddles wasn’t a hit because anyone wanted to buy tickets. People bought tickets because they were only pawns in the game of life.Come to think of it, it’s a weird coincidence that the top hits of 1973 and 1974 both involved a man named Karras.
“Don’t shoot him. You’ll just make him angry.”
Adjusted for inflation, it’s the 4th highest grossing R rated movie ever!Blazing Saddles came out in Feb. 10 months later, the 4th highest grossing movie of 74 came out – Young Frankenstein! Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder had 2 of the 4 top movies. They made about $210M in 1974!Chinatown also came out in 74. It made less money than Benji. One of the best movies of all time was outgrossed by a movie staring a dog!
But Benji solved crimes and helped people with their personal problems and drove a muscle car.
And never drugged and raped a 13 year old. You’ve convinced me!(disclaimer I’ve never seen Chinatown but have seen Benji)
I re-watched Benji recently with my younger two daughters and what threw me off is that the Dad is in one of my all time favorite MST3K episodes “The Beatniks” – he’s Moon! Who gives this all time great scene: (Sorry I couldn’t find the MST3K version)
Which of these are true?:a. Roman Plolanski drugged and raped a 13 year old girl;b. Chinatown was and remains one of the greatest films ever made, as close to a “perfect movie” as Hollywood has ever released;c. Both a and b are true.Answer: c.
DON’T YOU DARE FUCK WITH MY BENJI.
So for years, screenwriters’ agents would dissuade their clients from comparing their screenplay in pitch meetings. Largely because it was such a succès d’estime.
The fact that screenwriting guides would, for years afterwards, hold Robert Towne’s script up as essentially the most perfect example of the craft ever, probably helped add to the perception that it was a bigger hit than it really was. The irony of that is the the ending with it’s classic closing line, was Polanski’s idea, not Towne’s
I was curious about that too. Here are the ten top-grossing for 1974:1) Blazing Saddles (119mil)2) Towering Inferno (116mil)3) The Trial Of Billy Jack (89mil)4) Young Frankenstein (86mil)5) Earthquake (79mil)6) Godfather Pt 2 (57mil)7) Airport 1975 (47mil)8) The Life & Times Of Grizzly Adams (45mil!?)9) The Longest Yard (43mil)10) Murder On The Orient Express (35mil)In case anyone is curious, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was at #15, Chinatown was at #19, and The Conversation was at #31. Anyway, ka-ching for Mel Brooks I guess.
What are you worried about? This is 1874. You’ll be able to sue her!
Howard Johnson is right!
Look, we’ll let in the N-words and the racist term for Asians: BUT NO IRISH!
As an actual Irish person that line always makes me laugh.
Welsh-Irish descent here, and yup…that’s a great line. Although the assumption is that they meant those dodgy “Irish Catholics”…
He said the Sheriff is NEAR….
These are people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know…morons.
I’d like to extend this laurel and hearty handshake…
It couldn’t be made today! I’m woke, just so you know.
Yes, because Cleavon Little died.Watch this interview. He is so fascinating.
You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today because everyone would be saying “but we already made this movie in 1974!”
oh sure you could. The miracle was it was made then – it was considered the most offensive, subversive, awful movie of 1974. The kind of movie that Nice People didn’t see. I once read the appalled contemporary reviews of The Producers – the reviewers are so shocked, you’d think they where watching kiddie porn.
I hope Tom forgoes his usual pungent analysis for some authentic frontier gibberish.
YOU PROVINCIAL PUTZ.
‘Scuse me while I whip this out.
“You shifty n_____! They said you was hung!”“And they was right!”
The early ‘70s indeed were heady days.Excuse me: Hedley.
It’s one of the few movies where just thinking about scenes and lines makes me start giggling. It’s so damn good.
The ending suffers from the same problem as Holy Grail. But it’s still so damn good.
I really think it succeeds where Holy Grail fails, feeling like a satisfying resolution in spite of all the fourth wall trampling, and not just abandoning its own narrative with a big shrug.But we’ll have time to discuss that next week.
“Qualifications?”
“Rape, murder, arson and rape.”“You said rape twice.”“I like rape.”
Forget that shit, here comes Mongo!
I refuse to believe Blatty had anything against women.
But Her Pea Soup!
Russia, if you’re listening, I would love for you to hack her Ouija board! Captain Howdy is a friend of mine. Of course, I like girls who don’t get possessed by demons.
Oh… well that sure raises a few questions.
Okay. I just saw “The Exorcist” in a whole new light right now.
If it’s secret, then how does convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza know about it?
I met D’Sousa once. What an asshole he is. Exactly what I expected. He was doing some sort of book plugging thing and my GF and I went over and talked to him. Waste of food and water.
Exorcism stories are almost always traditionalist propaganda.
I think The Exorcist tied in to a fair amount of Vatican 2 backlash that was going on at the time. The emphasis on the true power of the Church being connected to Latin words is something that would have been loved by the types still gnashing their teeth over masses being conducted in English. Also, old school Catholicism is all about spooky imagery in a way that old line Protestant and Orthodox churches never embraced as deeply.
This film would also (for better or worse) launch Linda Blair into the exploitation film actor pantheon. Down the road we get such glorious trash as “Roller Boogie”, “Savage Streets”, “Hell Night”, “Born Innocent” (which is TRUE TV trash) and I’m pretty sure a few WIP films to boot.
Also some softcore female prison movies. According to a friend.
I, sadly, know the exact film you speak of…and you better believe there’s a shower scene. I’m on a FB group that is all about exploitation and VHS trash films, and she is absolutely a queen among it’s members.
I have a friend who may be interested in joining that group.That’s a joke. I have no friends.
It’s something like “Grindhouse Sleaze and 80’s VHS Trash”…recommended if only for the fact that where else are you going to find folks who know about stuff like “Island of Death”, “The Mad Foxes”, “The Headless Eyes” and debate whether 80’s Fulci is better than everything?(Seriously…those folks love them some Fulci and the NY Ripper specifically…)
All those movies are so bad, yet boring, and depressing.
Savage Streets maybe bad, but boring? I think we may have different taste in films. I mean,it’s got a ton of sleaze and violence in it. It’s cheesy but it’s never dull, which is all I ask of a bad movie…
I meant more the Island of Death kind.
Island of Death is vile and depressing, but never boring…Also, I think we’re in the handful of people who’ve seen that sick bastard. I have an uncut version of it somewhere…
I used to have a girl who worked at the video store I mostly went to pick the worst trash movies for me to rent. Some of them were boring, some were bad enough to be funny, but a few of them were fantastically bad, and the sex stuff made it into my memory bank and I can recall the whole scene with dialog 35+ years later. There’s a girl on a boat with some guy in a movie I saw about 1980 or 1981, it was trash, but that girl was perfect looking and as bad an actress as she was, she took her clothes off very well.The guy was blackmailing her and he didn’t want money, he demanded sex or he would tell her new hubby what a whore she had been, with pics for proof. I couldn’t find the movie in any of the books back then, and when IMDB came into being, I couldn’t remember any of the other people, so I’ve never been able to see if she’s been in anything else. Sad to think she’s like 60+ now. She’s one of the very few actresses I’ve never eventually found. Last one I was looking to find a long time without luck for about 30 years appeared as a 60 something grandmother on one of those recreated crime shows playing a woman whose daughter was murdered by her ex and the mother and kid were being stalked by him. I knew her first name was Teri, but I had no idea what the last name was. Sadly, time was not kind and when I finally looked her up, she had basically taken 25 years off to “be a wife”, and then gone back to work at 57 or so. Back about 1982 or so, she was amazing looking.
If an actress I liked took her clothes off, it was worth seeing. Mostly because I have a photographic memory and can recall every single woman I’ve seen naked from about 4 years old (Neighbor, not a good experience at all) to the last one I saw on cable a few nights ago. A lot of them I don’t know the names of. Ask me to remember a phone number? Forget it. This gift comes in very… um…handy at times.
Don’t really get the Fulci love. The Beyond is the only one of his films that seem made by a competent director, and it’s nightmarish qualities cover a lot of the holes and issues found in his other works.
I don’t get it a ton either, but if you genuinely like sleaze films I understand it. The NY Ripper and his Zombie are both genuinely vile but entertaining films. I think a lot of it is the aesthetic you’re looking for. In that group I named above, a LOT of folk on there will tell you that they prefer Fulci to Dario Argento which seems insane to me. I mean, Argento makes horror and violence almost seem like ballet, whereas Fulci’s approach to those two themes is more akin to watching an old burlesque dancer who just shakes her boobs back and forth.
Well this sounds like a good way to meet some nice people with common interests.
Sure… a “friend”…
WIP = Women In Prison. One of the many exploitation subgenres with which I have familiarity
Of if you like them (ostensibly) younger, there’s Reform School Girls (with Wendy O Williams!)
Plus Sybil Danning! Man, look at that pic. That’s a LOT of 80’s.
If Sybil Danning’s involved then it may as well have a date stamp on it.
So young!So bad!So what?
..when those movies were at the work in progress stage , were they W.I.P. W.I.P?
Sadly we’re way past the heyday of those films. I just watched one a few weekends back from the 80’s where a stunt woman whose daughter is killed in prison by Mac’s Mom from Sunny gets incarcerated to get revenge. It was some glorious cheese.Do you know the one with Erik Estrada by any chance? I can never remember that title and I’m too lazy to Google it
No, I just remember classic women like Pam Grier, Sylvia Kristel, Laura Gemser, and Linda Blair being in some of them..
Laura Gemser aka “Black Emmanuel”….those film are in their own category of sleaze.
Man, after I got randomly logged out of kinja the other day I considered finally quitting commenting here, but then I see one of the old heads talking trash movies and had to find my burner password. The Estrada one is Caged Fury, it has stuck in my mind for a number of reasons. One, it came out it 1989, past the heyday of sleazy WIP movies (which I would put as the mid-70s to mid-80s). Two, Erik Estrada is kind of ostensibly the hero of the movie, but he barely does a damn thing and has a beefy sidekick played by sentient mustache/mullet combo Richard Barathy to do all the fighting. Three, its got James Hong and Michael Parks! And four, and this is the real reason it has its hooks in my brain, the plot twist ends up being completely and unnecessarily ludicrous. Like many WIP or youthful delinquent movies, innocents are framed or railroaded through court to get them imprisoned to be exploited for labor/sex/$. BUT in Caged Fury, it turns out the whole court and prison are an elaborate sham, and its all being filmed for (presumably high paying) clients to watch and enjoy. If I remember correctly, at the end when they break out of the prison its just like a random warehouse in L.A. or something. I remember sitting back after the ending and my head spinning as I pondered the logistics and motivation for this bizarre scheme.
I just got back into logging in over here. I’ve definitely missed it, and although there’s a few annoyances like Recognitions and other super woke folks, it’s gotten better. I’ve been over at the Pajiba site but they’re too political over there. I also still miss ZMF and his ownage.Anyway, great recall! And I do remember the corrupt system now that you brought that up as well, and damn but you’re right about Estrada in it now that I think about it. I love all those late 80’s movies where former 70’s stars are clearly trying to make a quick buck. Pretty sure Jan Michael Vincent is in about half of them.keep coming back here! Maybe we’ll start getting some legit pop culture discussions and so forth again, as opposed to listening to what a dumpster fire everything that is. (I mean it generally is, but I can just turn on the news for that)
I think “Exorcist 2″ did more to trash her career than the original did.
I believe that – I know it’s generally regarded as one of the worst big studio film released in the 70’s. That being said, I’m a sucker for trash and/or crap including stuff like Inchon, so I’m going to give it a re-watch.
Exorcist 2 is one of those fascinating train-wreck films that for one moment hits you with an image so breathtaking that you can’t believe that at the next moment everything surrounding it is absolutely ridiculous, encompassed in pretty much the entire African sequence.
Oh, God, “Born Innocent”. I was in the 4th grade when that movie came out and my parents made me watch it because they thought it would be “educational”. They regretted it when I cried pretty much nonstop for about three days afterward.
That’s…pretty terrible. My similar traumatic experience would be my Mom thinking at age five I should watch “The Mouse and His Child”. That fucking thing bothers me to this day.
In their defense, I don’t think they realized how horrifying it was going to be until afterward.
You forgot her VHS informational career. Like How to Get Revenge.
“Savage Streets” was a favorite of 12-year-old me.“Roller Boogie” is a favorite of forty-something me. I recently picked up the Blu-ray of “Skatetown USA” and am fixin’ to have a disco skating double feature picture show in the near future.
As a 70’s kid I vividly remember that Robin Hood, and very fondly. Although in general my memories of Disney are the Sunday night “World of Disney” on ABC and the many, many pretty terrible live action films from that era. I also look back fondly on those though.
Quite honestly one of the things I’m looking forward to on Disney Plus are some of those old Sunday World of Disney movies.
There’s a ton of Kurt Russel films from that era that need to see the light of day..to say nothing of crap like “Super Dad”…(which also has Kurt Russel in it!)The one film from that era I remember liking was “Witch Mountain” – the lead male actor seemed to be everywhere back then as well. I remember he was in an all time odd Wonder Woman as an example.
And Paris Hilton’s aunt! I remember very much liking the Witch Mountain movies back then and watching those Kurt Russel films like The World’s Strongest Man and the Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.
Definitely. It was pre-VHS and Cable (although I grew up on Long Island by Cablevision so I had relatives with cable and we got it relatively quick) and those Sunday Night movies were pretty much a ritual. I use any excuse to post it, but my all time favorite intro as a kid (and especially during Monster or horror week) was…
Another kid from Long Island. 430 movies Monster Week was my intro to Kaiju. The TV guide was the indispensable resource of our lives.
I loved the TV guide. I’d go through it and circle all the horror movies that I wanted to watch. My Dad was relatively cool in that I could stay up as late as I wanted as long as I went to school the next day. I used to always be on the look out for good late show movies to say nothing of:
My dad took me to horror movies even as a little kid of 5-6 years old. My grandmother would get into it with my dad about it and grill me asking if I had nightmares from them, “Nope, they are just movies, not real” was my answer. In 3rd grade, I had seen some movie where torture on a rack was part of it, and the evil guy burned a girls boob with a branding iron and I was telling some other kid about seeing the boob and how the girl looked just like the teacher(great looking) and the teacher heard me and freaked out. I was grilled by her for about 20 minutes, then a phone call home from the Principal got my mom worked up, as she didn’t know about the boob, and my dad and I went stealth after that. We would see the movie we wanted to see, and tell mom and grandma that we had seen some Disney POS. When I was about 12 or so, we told her what we had been doing, and she gave my dad a dirty look and said, “So what else have you been lying about my dear husband?” He just laughed and kept eating. The last movie I saw with my dad was the second time we saw “The Godfather”, a couple of weeks after seeing it as a family. It was the only time I remember him seeing a movie a second time at the theater. He died later that year.
I had the opposite in that my Mom was a hippie and it was the 70’s: they would take me to pretty much any movie they went to, sometimes scaring the crap out of me. I can vividly remember going to see Jaws at 5 in the drive in and swearing off beaches for the rest of my life. So my only memories of Disney are those live action films that they’d run on Sunday Night, but as they were before my parents divorced I do have fond memories of them. Once my parents were divorced (by age 9) the old man flat out did not give a crap what he took me to see and we’d go catch really trashy double bills at said drive in with tons of copious nudity.
4:30 is an odd time for a movie on TV to start.
Was her aunt the kid who gets shot in Assault on Precinct 13?
I have never actually seen the original Assault, but I am referring to Kim Richards of Real Housewives fame and according to IMDB, she was in the movie.
Yup, that’s her as a kid.
I’m hoping Condor Man and the movie with Chunk from the Goonies who has this super bike , please tell me I’m not the only one to remember that movie
OMG Condorman! I haven’t seen or heard that in over 30 plus years! I can remember watching that and “SuperFuzz” off an old VHS as a kid repeatedly. No idea about the other movie but it DOES sound a little familiar.
I DO!
I got you, Fam.
I saw Condorman in the theater!
Both the kids from the Witch Mountain movies (Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards) seemed to be in *everything* in the ‘70s. They were really good child actors.Man, I loved those movies as a kid. They hit 2 big pop culture fads of the time: psychic powers and UFOs. If only they’d had a bigfoot in them.
Kim Richards grew up to be pretty gorgeous, if my memory of “Tuff Turf” is accurate…Your noting of the big pop culture fads from back then makes me wonder if they also could have had a CB and some sort of ape/monkey as well.
If you like crimped hair.
Don’t EVER expect to see “Song of the South”, though….
Or those old nature programs where no animal gets killed.
Those “Made for TV” movies could be pretty good:“Brian’s Song”. “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”. “Duel”. “Don’t be Afraid of the Dark”.
You don’t have to convince me: I’m a huge fan of made for TV movies, especially from say 1969 to 1982 or so. You ever see “Pray for the Wildcats”? It’s got Shatner, Andy Griffith, Mr. Mike Brady and Marjoe Fucking Gortner as four middle aged dirt bike enthusiasts who go to a Mexico and raise hell. The hardest to find (although I have an .AVI copy somewhere) is “Cotton Candy” directed by Ron Howard that is all types of awesome cringe. It centers around a battle of the bands where the ‘bad’ band keeps playing a rocked out cover of “I shot the sheriff”…God I love that stuff. I’m going to go watch “The Terror at 37,000 Feet” after I re-watch those Exorcist sequels…
Pre-cable TV often did what only cable TV does now. The TV miniseries Shogun, Rich Man Poor Man, Smiley’s People, Roots, The (original) Bourne Identity, etc.
THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE
Wow…that brings back memories…I remember watching that with my little Sister in the late 70’s.
Disney Robin Hood has some cheap stuff — I believe there’s overlap with the Jungle Book’s backgrounds and the story is pretty thin — but it is unbelievably charming and it has Roger Miller narrating it, more than enough for classic status in my book.
It has a lot of the same supporting voice cast, but damned if it didn’t work to a tee. The interactions between Peter Ustinov and Terry Thomas are solid gold.
I know Robin Hood gets a lot of flack for featuring recycled animation, but damn if it isn’t the best Disney animated movie of the 1970s in spite of it. It has a hell of a lot of charm. Those Roger Miller songs certainly help. (Though, that boring as hell love song doesn’t do the movie any favors.)
I fully agree with you. And you’re right: that one slow love song is the only part that really annoyed me as a kid.
Yeah, I know this era was seen as a slump for Disney, but as a kid I watched the shit out of my Robin Hood VHS.
I watched a ton of that stuff and I absolutely loved that film as a kid…but I get why it was the ‘down years’ when you watch stuff like “Gus” and “Super Dad”
I somehow avoided virtually anything that was live action Disney. Homeward Bound is really the only one I can remember watching and loving. I also was very much a Nickelodeon kid
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1973 Post: 1 The Exorcist, Warner Bros., $193,000,000 2 The Sting,Universal, $159,616,327 3 American Graffiti, Universal, $115,000,000 4 Papillon, Allied Artists, $53,267,000 5 The Way We Were, Columbia, $49,919,870 6 Magnum Force, Warner Bros., $44,680,473 7 Live and Let Die, MGM, $35,400,000 8 Robin Hood, Disney, $32,056,467 9 Paper Moon, Paramount Pictures, $30,933,743 10 Serpico, Paramount Pictures, $27,274,150
I love Magnum Force.
That is all
I definitely remember seeing that on TV when I was about 12. I wasn’t allowed to watch Three’s Company but I became a huge fan of Suzanne Somers after seeing her pool scene.
Well, a man’s got to know his limitations.
“A man’s got to know his limitations…”[SEX DOLL FALLS OUT OF WINDOW]
coincidence that in Live and Let Die, Roger leaves the Walther at home and packs a Magnum instead?
That’s a solid year.
Wow that’s a solid year I’ve never seen The Way We Were but even after 46 years those films all still hold up today. The also ran list is still pretty good:Enter the DragonMean StreetsThe Paper ChaseBadlands The Last DetailDon’t Look NowPat Garrett and Billy the KidThe Day of the JackalWestworldSoylent Green
wow indeed. Did any Hollywood year ever have a top 20 that solid?I think i need a 1973 film festival.
Worth noting, when adjusted for inflation, that Exorcist number is about 16% higher than the domestic box office receipts for Avengers Endgame. It is one of the absolute biggest films of all-time.
Hey, I like all those movies! I’m surprised, there’s usually at least one clinker on these lists. Best year so far?Just listened to the Tarantino podcast and he mentioned that 1973 was the year he was sent to live in Tennessee, so he missed out on seeing these movies first time around. He sounded like he was still upset by that, all these decades later.
That’s a pretty strong year. I loved Serpico especially.
I saw every one of these, some I actually wanted to . 1,2,3,4,6,7,and 10 I enjoyed. 8 and 9 were tolerable, but 5 was one of those, “How the hell does time seem to stand still watching a POS like this?”. How often I look at my watch is a tell to anyone I’m with if I like a movie or not. Checking it once or twice, GOOD. Checking it dozens of times, BAD, The Way We Were was a watch checking frenzy. My GF picked the damn thing and by the time it ended she was totally pissed at me for supposedly ruining the movie “Checking your Fing watch every minute or so like you have OCD!”. Later on, another GF would pick dud after dud with “Heaven’s Gate” probably maxing out the watch checking during a movie just due to it’s length and incredibly boring story.
Also, Obligatory Previous Movies Featured In These Articles Ranked Best To Worst By Me Post:1. The Godfather (1972)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. The Exorcist (1973)
4. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
5. The Graduate (1967)
6. West Side Story (1961)
7. Spartacus (1960)
8. The Longest Day (1962)
9. Billy Jack (1971)
10. My Fair Lady (1964)
11. Cleopatra (1963)
12. The Sound Of Music (1965)
13. The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)
14. Love Story (1970)
My Fair Lady over Sound of Music? That’s a paddling.
Well, Christopher Plummer would agree with me! So there!!!!
He sure would. I like the man but he is in absolute get off my lawn old man mode whenever someone brings up Sound of Music.
This list is fine in the “Best of Cinema” list but if it’s the “Movie I’d Watch to The End While Flipping Through The Channels” list (I haven’t flipped through the channels in probably 20 years) the only one that would make the list is Butch and Sundance. After that maybe Excorcist (been a long time), Sound of Music (Julie Andrews), Sparticus? The list of movies I’d likely want to watch with my sons isn’t too different from your list, I guess. We’ve watched four together so far. Not likely to watch at least four of them.
Billy Jack should be ranked somewhere below 10,000.
As should any and all musicals, a legal form of torture and a total embarrassment.
Well it has trust in one institution the church but that’s because it’s a film about exorcism being real. But others such as medicine/science are seen as helpless at best, actively part of the torture the demon is putting Regan and her mother through at worse, and the torture of both them is a key point in the argument that the film, rather then being anti-feminist actually roots much of Pazuzu’s evil in misogyny.
I saw this movie when it came out, and couldn’t sleep for a week. Then I read the book, and couldn’t sleep for a week.
In the novel Blatty takes pains to instruct the reader not just in the Catholic Church but in the workings of Hollywood, which he was clearly fascinated by, and it gets rather pedantic. (The priest questions the girl in Latin, a language she would not have known, and when she responds correctly he thinks “Maybe she’s just reading my mind,” as if that is more likely.) That quotation on the DVD box aside, I am not convinced by your view that Blatty was categorically anti-feminist or particularly anti-Left. The actress mother might have been making a movie about a campus uprising, but by 1973 the Left had run out of steam and nobody was interested in taking over buildings. A lot of people hated Nixon, including Republicans (sounds familiar), but he was hardly seen as an evil entity, just vicious. Moreover, the possessed girl isn’t pubescent but 12 years old, and by the standards of the time certainly intended to be regarded as a child, which makes her screaming obscenities and being forced by the demon to ram a crucifix into her vagina the more horrible.
My take: cynical and lurid.
I’m with you 100% on this. Reading the book is informative. The book is very lurid. Friedkin tones down some of the more lurid aspects in his film. And, for sure, Regan was a child. I don’t buy the anti-feminist accusation. It gives the book and the movie a little too much credit, in my opinion. It’s not so deep.It’s amazing this is a mainstream movie for the reasons Tom identifies, but kind of abandons, at the beginning of his article: it’s “terrifying, repellent and physically exhausting.” It’s essentially just an exploitation movie gussied up with the trappings of something more serious.
Eh, 12 is the traditional age for the bat Mitzva, reflecting on both physical changes and the fact that that’s the age at which juveniles are changing from full children, who generally parrot what you say and only want to help (in their own stupid way), to an adolescent with some independent thought and opinions. You could very easily see/use the demon as representing that new independence (and associated personality change, usually into an asshole), although that seems more like something a writer would put in as a PERCEPTION of a clingy and authoritarian parent character (likely a mother, as those are more generally seen as valuing the innocent incompetence of full children, whereas fathers are generally seen as bonding with adolescents) a la Carrie.
Having read both the first and second Exorcist books I think the movie does well because Blatty’s dialogue and character development are flawless. There are few authors that can make what should be boring exposition interesting and witty. The part from the novels that I always remembered was the Jewish police man talking about how his mother in law brought a live carp home to cook and put it in the bath tub to keep it fresh until she was ready.
“Pauline Kael derisively called The Exorcist “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells Of St. Mary’s.””Did this woman like anything!? Everything I’ve heard about her makes her look like a female Jay Sherman, who thinks everything stinks.
She also doesn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon!
Now that is a deep pull, take your star.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-Refuses-to-Die
She loved all kinds of movies. People hated her for the movies she loved as much as for the movies she panned.
When she didn’t like a movie she didn’t just dismiss it but went on for pages about why it was bad.
Kael was the epitome of the critic who was an excellent wordsmith but could never really understand why they did or didn’t like a movie: so she would come away with a negative visceral reaction, and then find something to pick on to justify it.
That is incorrect. She was very clear on what she liked and disliked about a film. You could disagree but you always understood what her argument was.
You can’t seriously be this big of a dumbass
Much of that had to do with the fact the editors at the New Yorker apparently had a “hands off” policy with her (especially in her later years). Her reviews became so endless that it probably would’ve taken less time to simply watch the movie.
I can’t find it online now, but there was an article criticizing her stance on “A Clockwork Orange” and “Straw Dogs” vs “Dirty Harry” and “The Cowboys”, since she liked the former even if she also described Straw Dogs as fascist.
My problem with her was her reviews weren’t just how she felt about the movie they were what was wrong with the audience if you disagreed with her.
The Cowboys was a bad film. It is clearly worse than the the other three.
I get the feeling she’d do very well today, as she’s basically a literate version of the guy who makes a living as the lone dissenting voice on Metacritic preventing 100%’s and 0%’s.
She had a very high opinion of herself
I’m always reminded of a scene in that Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself. They asked a friend what he thought of Pauline and he says I don’t know her, I never met her, but man fuck her.
Eh. It’s just movies. You don’t have to be right to make a good point.
Her picture is in the dictionary next to “why people hate east coast intellectuals”.
“Did Pauline Kael like anything?!?!?!” is the most unintentionally funny comment anyone’s ever made on this site
She liked plenty of movies, she was just 100% unpredictable . There were some directors who she consistently praised, including (oddly) Brian DePalma.
She liked Re-Animator, and that’s good enough for me.
Jay Sherman loved films that were ART!
Did this woman like anything? Yes, she did. Go read her books and find out.
“had based his story on a famous tale of an almost-certainly-faked exorcism in St. Louis in the ’40s,”source for this? everything ive ever read about the inspiring events is to the contrary
There’s one major assumption to be made, so depending on which way you fall it’s either certainly faked or potentially true.
i get the idea of faith playing a role in whether you believe exorcisms or possession are real. but the author states this as though the kid or priests copped to the events as a sham later on, which is something i had never read before. otherwise, at best, the author asserts that faith/possession/exorcisms in and of themselves are fake because God is not real, which is something this post never discusses and is a backhand to anyone who does have faith.
Not disagreeing at all. If you do have faith, then you’ve made assumption B and the St. Louis story very well may be true. If not, it’s obviously fake on its face.
im not either, i think my real problem is the author goes out his way to seemingly take a slight against religion/faithful for no reason and without any context to the actual substance of the post.
The St. Louis story, like The Exorcist, involved claims of moving furniture and levitating objects. And that wasn’t moving furniture of the type where your friend invites you over for pizza and beer and then surprises you with the news that they need help moving to a new apartment on the top floor of a four story building with no elevator.The Catholic Church itself looks at claims of possession involving stuff like this with extreme skepticism. It’s not antireligious to call this almost certainly bogus.
i understand the churchs skepticism on exorcisms (along with miracles etc) – they go thru levels of testing before anything is sanctioned by the church. but I dont see how one can call this bogus unless the church says so, or the poeple involved cop to it, which to my knowledge neither has happened – really the opposite. I read an article a while back when the last priest involved in it passed saying up until his death the case was overwhelmingly real.
The Catholic Church itself demands a very high standard of evidence for something like what was alleged to have happened in St. Louis, including a rigorous scientific examination. The word of a priest untrained in science is not relevant in their opinion, and apparently before his death the priest refused to make a definitive claim.
The case would have been more likely to be accepted if it had simply involved the boy claiming to be possessed without the paranormal activity, but even then would have required a full psychiatric examination, which didn’t seem to happen. The addition of the paranormal elements would only add to the doubt.
although it did pass some of the rigourous testing as cardinal Ritter (then archbishop) assigned Bowdern to the case. so it wasnt just some freewheeling priests who did this.
Your best bet is another movie, Meet Me In St. Louis For A Potentially Fake Exorcism.
It was based on a young boy who lived in the DC area, or moved to the area… i can’t remember which. He converted to Catholicism. My mom used to dance with him at Catholic youth dances in high school.
I know this. He was treated at georgetown before moving to ST Louis.
Are you saying exorcisms can be real?
source for this? everything ive ever read about exorcisms is to the contrary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_Roland_Doe
It pissed me off that he used this line. I’d been using it for years before while helping customers on the phone when they came upon an inexplicable problem. My line was “okay, I have put you on hold to call an old priest and a young priest.” Not many people understood but the ones that did could have a de-stress moment.
SPOILER: Mike Meyers was one of those customers.
I think it’s less useful to see the premise of The Exorcist as a reaction to something than as a threat, basically a way to make a secure normal American family just like yours completely miserable. That’s why so many similar movies using non-Christian religious beliefs flop, as they aren’t as mainstream (and therefor plausible) in American society as Catholic/Christian belief.
Similarly, sex in horror movies is the time when you’re facing the ground and paying no attention to your surroundings, showering is a time you can’t see most of the room you’re in or really hear what’s going on, and the ocean is full of mysterious creatures that are right at home and you can’t see unless they want you to. The Wicker Man is basically “hey, did you hear about how all those utopian-societies-cum-countercultures-cum-new-religions-cum-fringe-left-movements turned out to be completely exploitative and/or terrorist groups flirty fishing and brainwashing members in the news last night, and how that Woodstock clone out in Altemont has a death toll? Well, here’s a way it could even happen to you, a non-gullible idiot!”For Blazing Saddles, the “they couldn’t make this today” discussion needs to be done with an awareness of the internet-points-outrage culture (people out for an excuse to act offended online, usually to Show How Much They Care, and the support they enjoy from the trope that all offense is valid) and the pre-release outrage machine (basically feeling free to speculate about what something MIGHT contain and then get offended at the filmmakers over it), both very much on display recently on the topic of Joker.
This:
Fantastic discussion. The one they did on Exorcist 3 was also great.
Agreed!
Hmm, the notion that a pubescent girl turning into a monster can be seen as ‘anti-feminist’ is an interesting point. I’m reminded of the TV shows ‘Bewitched’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie’, stories of women as strange powerful beings that the male leads struggle to contain within the bounds of social convention.
I have a VERY feminist friend who watched the Exorcist, and her only comment was “Absolutely everyone smoked. The woman, the priests, the cops, everyone. EVERYWHERE. That’s disgusting.” Be careful of attributing today’s perspectives to ancient examples. The ‘anti-feminism’ on display here was a symptom of the times, not a deliberate statement about it.
Oh yes, there’s a difference between unspoken (often unaware) subtext and an open polemic. I doubt the makers of ‘Bewitched’ realized they were writing a story about binding women to social convention as away of suppressing their true natures.
Even the doctor smoked. I remember re-watching it in the late 80s and thinking, is it supposed to be satire? Or was that just normal for the time?
Father O’Malley worked at my high school. It was so cool to just see “that Exorcist guy” walking around campus.
The film’s opening implies that the older priest, Father Merrin, has somehow loosed the unnamed demon that takes over the girl. But it never explains how; the choice seems entirely random. We never quite come to understand what the demon wants either. That demon mostly seems like a teenage edgelord, just saying fucked up shit to make people uncomfortable. The book, and some of the subsequent sequels, made the connection between Father Merrin and the demon clearer than this film does. Merrin, when he was a much younger man, had performed an exorcism of Pazuzu from a child in Africa. The demon was doing what demon’s do, causing heartbreak, agony and corruption of the innocent. If it ended up getting with personal revenge against the priest who defeated it in the past then more the fun.I can’t remember if the demon was actually named in “The Exorcist”, but I don’t think Friedkin ever really cared to represent it other than as an ancient mysterious evil unleashed upon the modern world.
Yeah, I think even in the film the prologue is clearly about Merrin recognizing an old foe is loose, not loosing it in the first place.And the substance of the words (and the vomit) being slung isn’t really the point — the point is it’s not Regan. She’s been replaced by trash for fun, it’s an insult and a horror.
I always took that opening scene as pure cinematic dream-logic – it’s not clear whether Merrin is seeking out relics of the demon or if he just happens to find them, but either way it establishes a self-contained visual language that the rest of the film can reference. It’s like a good comedy that keeps adding punchlines to a running joke. Also that whole sequence is visually unnerving in a way that took me years to sort out. Saving Private Ryan gets (rightful) praise for its use of a narrow shutter angle, but those Iraq scenes in the Exorcist are still my favorite use of that technique. Things just don’t look or move quite right.
I still think the opening sequence is the most unsettling part of the movie.
I am always delighted when I re-watch “The Sting” at how well it holds up even after you know the ending. On the morning of the big con, when Hooker and Gondorf are getting dressed, you actually see Hooker put something into his cheek. On your first viewing, you pay no attention to it, but the next time you see the movie, you realize that it’s (SPOILER ALERT)……the blood capsule that he bites on after he’s been “shot.” An amazing little detail.
The Sting is one of those movies where, if I stumble across it playing on TV, no matter what part they’re at I watch to the end. It’s endlessly delightful, the script is razor-sharp, there’s not an actor in it who isn’t perfectly cast and at the top of their game, it looks great, the music – while not really period-appropriate – is wonderful, and the ending is perfect.Paul Newman was 48 when he made the film, and Eileen Brennan was 41, so the age difference isn’t that glaring. I imagine that if they remade it today with a 48-year-old playing Gondorff, the actress playing Billie would be around 25.It’s hard to pick a favourite scene, but top of my list would be where J.J. and Kid Twist pretend to be painters and take over an office so they can meet with Lonnegan somewhere that looks authentic, on very short notice. And the little scene where Jack Kehoe as the Erie Kid does his interview with Kid and tries to hide his broken nose, and Kid realizes how he got the broken nose and gives him a spot on the team, even though Erie has almost no experience.
The Exorcist was a little before my time – as a Catholic schoolboy growing up, it was The Omen films and books that scared the shit out of me.
Two things. While I’m sure Audrey Hepburn would have been great, its jarring to imagine the famously swee5 and near angelic actress going through all this shit. Second, that scene at the hospital is so much creepier when you find out the radiologist was a serial killer.
An actual serial killer?!
Yep. Paul Bateson, who was convicted of stabbing and cutting up a journalist. He is strongly suspected of doing it six other times. It inspired Friedkin to make Cruising. He got out of prison in the last ten years and nobody knows where he is. Bateson was featured on Mindhunters this year.
holy shit
Yeah, fucking hell as if the movie wasn’t unnerving enough.
When I rewatched the movie in medical school the scene where they cannulate her carotid artery was so realistic that I spent some time Googling to make sure they didn’t actually have a doctor do that to Linda Blair (this is Friedkin, after all). Googling that scene was both reassuring and… not reassuring.
That is hands down the scariest scene in the film. All the demonic stuff is creepy but that scene is played so realistically that’s its hard to watch.
I saw this movie during the summer between 5th grade and 6th grade. I had nightmares for 3 months after that. It’s the only movie that legitimately scared me.
There’s a Johnny Carson quote from around this time: “If they buy the premise they’ll buy the bit.” He was talking about sketch comedy but it could apply to horror films as well. That’s what’s unique about The Exorcist compared to the usual horror fare (especially from back then). It gets under your skin and unsettles you.
I figured its popularity was due to a combination of “people like to be scared and see the latest shocker” in an era when that wasn’t as common, and the Satanic Panic starting to pick up. Or was that later? I know D&D and such got hit hard by it.
The Satanic Panic came some years later. Besides, this would be almost the antithesis of that, since it was the kid possessed by a demon and not adults worshipping one.
Sure — I just imagine it would’ve attracted younger people who thought their parents’ freakout at all things supernatural would be fun to antagonize by seeing the movie.
We never quite come to understand what the demon wants either. That
demon mostly seems like a teenage edgelord, just saying fucked up shit
to make people uncomfortable.
I contend that because it’s a f***ng demon and as demons do, what they want is to torture people, physically and emotionally, destroy their spirits. The story chose the demon king Pazuzu as the possessing entity here, which in scripture is the bearer of storms and drought, of course this could be taken metaphysically, not necessarily literally.
“Pazuzu as the possessing entity here, which in scripture is the bearer of storms and drought”
I have to admit, I’ve never seen The Epic of Gilgamesh referred to as “scripture” before, but I like it!
Scripture applies to any sacred religious text. In this case, ancient Mesopotamian but whatever.
The original movie never names the demon (because the name Pazuzu is very silly, and it adds to the hilarious campiness of the Exorcist 2). The priests don’t seem to believe it’s the devil, but the movie never actually contradicts that assertion. But it was odd to read that line (especially since the writer of the article says he grew up Catholic). It’s completely in line with Catholic teaching that a supernatural being would torture a child just for the sake of torturing her. Catholicism is weird like that. The randomness of it is part of the point. In the extended version the priests even have some dialog that makes that exact point (and honestly puts too fine a point on it).
I probably saw The Sting at too young of an age, because I found all that 1920s slang baffling.
For the life of me I don’t understand the purpose of Lee J. Cobb’s Lt. Kinderman character in this movie. You can fast-forward through every scene he’s in without affecting the narrative. He accomplishes nothing and is completely extraneous to the plot.
I’m not a fan of ‘The Sting’. I don’t dislike it particularly but it came across as rather stagy and cinematically out of date, ten years behind the times. They leaned heavily into ‘Redford and Newman together again’ which only served to remind me it wasn’t Butch Cassidy. Basically The Sting is equivalent to a superior made-for-TV movie.
I think “The Sting” works because it is stagy and probably 30 or 40 years behind the times.
Maybe this, and water under the bridge with lots of gross horror movies floating in it, is why I’ve never found The Exorcist so viscerally disturbing. Creepy, intense and really good, but not so much a shocker. It always felt a little bit like somebody else’s story, a transgression against a set of values that weren’t particularly mine. The struggle between one community’s sense of good and right versus a violation of all that is fascinating, but the stakes don’t read all that high to me, though maybe I’d feel differently watching it now that I have a daughter (who has totally puked in my face before). Speaking of which, in terms of why a movie registers as SCARY, I wonder vaguely about the psychological ley lines in Catholic culture of being faced by a unhinged, vengeful child. All that bad shit was certainly going on in the 70s. Just a thought.
“It was based on a runaway bestseller novel; its author, the screenwriter William Peter Blatty, had based his story on a famous tale of an almost-certainly-faked exorcism in St. Louis in the ’40s…”
How do you know? How much research have you done into the STL story? Do you know the connection between the DC metro and STL? Do you know the connection between the priests involved in STL and how story that got to Georgetown Univ, where Blatty was a student?
The only other role I know Mercedes McCambridge for is the role of Emma Small in Johnny Guitar, another film in which she was legendarily mistreated (by Joan Crawford). She did seem to have a talent for evil, going by those two movies.
When I was 7 my twin brother and I started to chanting to my very, very frightened 9 year old brother “the devil lives in your closet” until and he hyperventilated and subsequently vomited. He still refuses to watch the exorcist 30 years later.
Just thought it was worth sharing.
I can’t stop laughing at this.
“almost-certainly-faked exorcism”
Almost?
Nearly all 70s and 80s horror is.
Is what?
steeped in “traditional values”.
When I was 12 and getting into metal, this movie scared me into going to church every week for half a year.The use of Tubular Bells is genius. To this day I wonder if that music is actually scary or it just seems that way because of the association.
“The film’s opening implies that the older priest, Father Merrin, has somehow loosed the unnamed demon that takes over the girl. But it never explains how; the choice seems entirely random. We never quite come to understand what the demon wants either.”I have watched the film more times than can possibly be healthy, and I take exception with both points. The opening isn’t intended (I believe) to suggest Merrin unleashed the demon, but that he is predestined to fight and die against it. Having nearly died in a previous exorcism, the demon is manipulating events to give Merrin readable signs that he will soon have to get back onto that horse, for the last time. And as for what the demon wants, it’s stated outright in the text. The demon wants Karras, the lapsed priest. The “what a wonderful day for an exorcism” scene leads to the demon admitting that it will bring “you and us” together, meaning Karras and the demon. Karras loses his rosary and uses his fists in his last moments before the end, reverting to his secular instincts (remember, he’s a boxer; no detail is unimportant) and not his faith to combat the demon. When you add in the suicide, Karras is not saved but will instead enter damnation to save the girl. Even the last rites mostly fail because Karras can’t respond. If you think the film is about saving a little girl, it looks like a happy ending. But if the girl is only a pawn to get to the priests, it’s a total win for the demon, which is why the “feel-good” ending between Kinderman and Dyer was excised in the original (far superior) cut—it’s a treacly little note at the end of a tragic finale.
Good to see somebody gets it.
This should have way, way more stars than it does.I would argue that although the demon’s relationship with Merrin is “personal”, so to speak, the whole fight between the demon and the priests is because they are, quite simply, the enemy. All those secular people — the doctors, the cops, the Hollywood people including Chris herself — aren’t part of the battle, they’re just collateral damage. They’re useful to the demon in that the priests care if they’re hurt so it’s a weak spot for them. While the demon needs to defeat Merrin because that’s unfinished business from their last encounter, Karras is particularly tempting because he has lost his faith (whereas Merrin never did) due to his mother’s suffering before she died so he’s already halfway defeated. It’s a real victory for the demon if he can get Karras to lose his faith entirely — instead, he regains it and so his sacrificial suicide is a “win” for him. Unless you want to argue that faith isn’t really faith if it’s presented with proof that makes you believe, like a demon. But that’s all Jesuit-y and shit, and I’ll leave that up to Blatty.
The Exorcist does what very, very few horror films even attempt to do. Combat manifestations of evil with religious good. It is very rare that you’ll see character use a religious symbol, a prayer, holy water or calling on a priest or rabbi to fight a monster, outside of a traditional vampire story. Why? Because for most people, it risks coming off as very corny and preachy.Imagine if in The Blair Witch Project, Heather was a self-professed atheist, but in the depths of her terror, she made a simple cross out of twigs, started praying…..and the sun came out and a rescue party found her. A completely trite ending that the vast majority of audiences would reject. Yet, here was the Exorcist, with two priests performing an arcane ritual to banish a demon from a little girl. And it worked. Audiences loved it.
Do you even fuckin’ realize that Ocean’s Eleven is an inferior remake of a Rat Pack classic?Idiot.
The fact that The Exorcist, which depicts the ultra-traditional Catholic Church coming to the rescue, and The Sting – an old-time Hollywood throwback if ever there was one, and American Graffiti – which basically imagines an evening in a small American town 11 years prior and presents itself as an almost archeological study of an exotic, long lost culture – all scored big with audiences in 1973 is should hardly be surprising.As Breihan points out, Watergate was raging full force. But it wasn’t just that. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam War was tumbling towards its protracted, humiliating end. The tumult of the late 60’s (and early 70’s) age of demonstration and rioting was fresh in everybody’s mind. The Arab oil embargo and resulting recession were causing people to question basic assumptions about America’s independence and prosperity. Civil rights and the women’s movements had radically reshaped American society – mostly for the good, but upending many traditional social structures and conventions in the process.Now wonder then, after all the upheaval the country had been through over the preceding 10 years, that films with nostalgic or traditionalist themes found a large audience during this period.
Nostalgia for Hollywood producers’ lost youths is also an extremely powerful force. They will all claim that the era of their adolescence was “America’s last innocent age”. Hence, directors in the 90s and early aughts stating that the 1970s, truly a horror show of a decade if there ever was one, were a time of innocence. Rather than, you know, they were just too young to appreciate all the turbulence and crap that was going on.
Hell, people were even nostalgic for the 40s, despite this decade containing 5 of the 6 most destructive and deadly years in human history.
Now wonder then, after all the upheaval the country had been through over the preceding 10 years, that films with nostalgic or traditionalist themes found a large audience during this period.If only we could get another batch of nostalgic films about “when America was great” in place of all this MAGA shit.
Well, nostalgia’s a pretty tricky business. A lot of what the MAGA folks are chasing is an image presented by movies like American Graffiti, rather than an accurate memory of the way things really were.
“…through the ringer…”wringer
Nice article. I was very young at the time, but even some evengelicals approved of this film because “it showed that the devil is real.” This was just at the beginnings of the satanic fear mania that would explode in the 80s in the wake of the McMartin preschool fiasco.FWIW, I have similar feelings about Scarface. For all its violence, it had the same morality as the original – drugs bad, criminals will get it in the end.
Tubular Bells. The album me and my friends allegedly smoked hash oil to every night of the summer of 1985.
When reviewing the Exorcist, Pauline Kael ended by musing about the casting process for the role of Regan. She wrote (paraphrasing) “The producers claim to have looked at over 200 little girls for this part. What did their mothers think when they brought them in to screen test? Certainly a lot of them had read the book and knew what the story involved. Did any of those mothers of the rejected girls go to see the film and think “That could have been MY little Janie up there on the screen stabbing herself in the vagina with a crucifix!”I’ve often thought that the success of the Exorcist had something to do with the aftermath of the Manson family murders. Manson and his “girls” had a pretty lengthy trial that finally ended less than six months before Blatty’s novel was published. It also lingered in the public consciousness for years afterwards. One of the most iconic images from it was the sight of his three female co-defendants strolling into the courtroom in baby doll outfits but singing the praises of a lunatic would-be messiah. While Manson’s girls were a little older than Regan, they still projected an image of corrupted children, good little girls gone down a seriously wrong path. There was certainly a particular fear in middle America that perhaps their own little precious daughters might fall under the sexual spell of a hippie madman (one who literally claimed to be Satan incarnate). A novel and later a film about just such a girl falling victim to a literal devil but being rescued by the forces of the establishment was just the right reactionary message a lot of people wanted to see at that time.
“But there’s also a compelling argument that The Exorcist works as some kind of reaction against feminism”*squinting & see-sawing hand from side to side*
It’s success is “baffling?” This is exactly the kind of thing I expect a person to say when they – quite frankly – don’t have the ability to imagine (nor remotely understand) the historical moment they are writing about. This is very disappointing.
1973 was the same year as the musical ‘Jesus Christ Superstar..Playing on the radio was Seals & Crofts “We May never Pass This Way Again.” In 1971 ‘Desiderata’ had been an incongruous hit in the charts. The American public was primed to have their pants religiously scared off them.
“The American public was primed to have their pants religiously scared off them.”Well said. And the de-pantsing was impressive. People couldn’t get out of them fast enough. Of course Rosemary’s Baby was just merely delicious. .With The Exorcist American parents could re-imagine puberty as a violent, uncontrollable phenomenon, a corrective to the ‘wildness’ of the Boomer generation. And, of course, the genre exploded, producing more and more highly choreographed violence, ala The Omen (more warnings about childhood as a destructive force). This was my generation and these films, imo, were a call to a return to order.
The Exorcist is three movies in one: -Father Karras’s kitchen sink drama if grief and loss-of-faith; -Father Merrin’s historical ghost chasing drama; -Regan McNeil’s gross and visceral (and more compelling) possession thriller.These disparate stories never meld in any way to comment or build on each other. They share characters, but nothing else. The possession story is also the only one with any real resolution, in part because this story somewhat randomly kills off the main characters from the other stories.
I confess I never caught Father Karras’s reflection on the Eucharist, so that may be the one place there is any substantial back-and-forth.And ultimately, the demon has no motivation for posessing anyone, much less Regan. But all the posession material is so immediate and visceral, it really commands your attention.
I find it weird that of the two 70s horror films “based on a true story”, this one gets so much praise, while Amityville gets torn apart as “fakers trying ot make a buck”.The REAL subject of this film is a guy who still ties to hide his identity, but it has been uncovered. He works for NASA. The newspaper articles that were turned into a book this story was based on were never questioned.Meanwhile, George and Kathy Lutz were never told about the murders in their new house, which may have triggered what happened to them. The journalist then hypes up certain facts to sell papers, then hypes them up even more to sell books, which Hollywood then fabricates 90 of the movie to sell tickets. George and Kathy sued Anson over fabrications in his book, and tried to tell their version, only to be shouted down by film fans. Now their children are still dealing with this rats nest of lies. Two of the boys made documentaries, I saw the back cover of one dvd, that basically shit on him.
I only say this because I had one friend experience something similar to Lutz’ and he later became friends with them before they died. He believes their version.Others I know investigated the hospital “John” was treated at, which have since become low income apartments, but the actual floors are sealed off. One* claims he was given “special access” and the documentary he did work on, the camera guys were being so intrusive, they pissed off their host, who never mentioned that they could have had “first film access” to said areas. When they investigated the actual house in Bel Nor, StL, something attacked another friend involved on camera. Yet the guy who lives there now still has no issues with whatever lurks there. Different friends have been invited to his annual INVITATION ONLY Hallowe’en parties and experienced nothing.*(the one guy claiming the “special access” thought he was more famous than he was. The two-faced SOB has since fucked off to Mexico with his husband, which he was fooling absolutely NO ONE on hiding that, either.)
https://hdfilm24.com/18-bright-nights-big-titties-adult-xxx-720ps-dvdrip-download/
I’m late to the game here, but I just wanted to add that I really like that Regan’s demon doesn’t have a larger plan or motivation. It’s content to just possess the child and torment her mother and anyone else who comes to help. Unlike every other movie where a demonic possession is just the first step in a world-threatening scheme, the stakes in the Exorcist are relatively small and personal. It unexpectedly makes the priests’ efforts and sacrifice more impressive than if they were trying to thwart an apocalypse.
“releasing it in only 30 theaters nationwide at the end of 1973”This was a normal release pattern for a major motion picture at the time. A few years later, they started booking major releases wide. But in 1973, new films would open in a single theater in each major market and play for several months if successful. After the first run, it would go wide to drive ins and neighborhood theaters.The studio may well have been nervous given the cost of the film, but they didn’t really hold back on the release.