The Exorcist Turns 50: Why Its Horror Never Ages

50 Years Of The Exorcist

The Exorcist is not a film about a successful exorcism, but about what we do in the face of uncertainty and the cynical grinning face of the demon called Doubt

IN The Exorcist, two priests battle the ancient evil that has possessed a pre-teen girl. At the climax, Father Damien Karras (played by Jason Miller) leaps from the child’s window, plunging down to his death, whilst exorcising the demon and saving the child. A hero.

In the years since the release of the film, the reputation of the Catholic church has sunk lower and lower, as scandal, corruption and abuse have become common knowledge. Yet, The Exorcist, which turns 50 this year, remains a household word, where other outstanding movies of the period have found themselves on the street.

The Exorcist is not Catholic propaganda. While the film’s director, William Friedkin, an agnostic Jew, described the film as being about faith, he meant the concept of faith itself – what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard considered “holding on to the objective uncertainty with infinite passion”.

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For Kierkegaard, faith was a venture, an action one takes in spite of – or because of – not knowing. Friedkin’s faith is not placed in anything named, but the film itself is riddled with uncertainty and culminates in action in the absence of certainty.

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A CRISIS OF FAITH & DOUBT IN AMERICA

The Hope At The Heart Of The Exorcist

By Aislinn Clarke

Friedkin was recognised as one of the premier directors of the 1970s’ all-male New Hollywood, alongside peers such as Frances Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Alan Pakula, and Peter Bogdanovich. This movement responded to the experience of previous decades with films that captured the uncertainty and irresolution of American life: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate.

If 1950s America was a teenybopper full of hope and confidence, the America of the late 1960s was a young adult learning that her parents are only human after all and no one is taking the wheel. Not even Jesus. Yet, The Exorcist retains a legacy and place in popular culture that the other paranoid films of New Hollywood don’t.

For Friedkin, uncertainty in our institutions and our understanding is built in. When Regan McNeil becomes possessed by a demon, her mother takes her to a doctor, but psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnotherapy don’t work. The latest medical advances don’t work either.

And neither does a medieval Catholicism: the demon chuckles at the priests’ efforts to exorcise it. It mocks them. It even takes a crucifix and – rather than shrinking from it, as any self-respecting screen monster should, it repeatedly inserts the crucifix inside the body of its host.

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The Exorcist is not a film about a successful exorcism, but about what we do in the face of uncertainty and the cynical grinning face of the demon — Doubt. It is not a film about a priest, but about a human being. When Karras takes the demon into himself and jumps from the window, it is literally a leap of faith. He can’t know that it will work, but he acts. Pazuzu, the demon of doubt, would prefer he didn’t act at all.

One of the film’s most chilling moments comes when Regan interrupts her mother’s raucous shindig to flatly tell a guest, an astronaut: “You’re gonna die up there.” Then she pees on the carpet like an untrained animal.

The American administration that presided over “one giant leap for mankind” was also responsible for Watergate: optimism gave way to cynicism and, in a cynical mindset, it is easier to do nothing at all. The demon here is a head-swivelling personification of imposter syndrome, it comes to remind us of our smallness, our irrelevance, our hopelessness. It speaks with such certainty.

Faith is about not being defeated by the limits of our understanding. We may not have all the answers, but we can be courageous and curious. Faith is action and the hope that action is worth taking. At a time when our institutions and frameworks for understanding the world continually let us down, perhaps we need this lesson more than ever.

While astronauts facing a journey into the unknown chasm of space may die up there, it is the giant leap for mankind that inspires them to go. The Exorcist perseveres, because it is hopeful, not hopeless. It says something necessary about humanity. It has faith in us.

Aislinn Clarke is a lecturer in Film Studies, Queen's University Belfast. This essay originally appeared on The Conversation and has been republished here under the Creative Commons licence.

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