‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (2024)

‘The Exorcist’ is a Clash of Belief Systems

Of all the heads to spin, why this one?

That question was at the core of the dispute between the director William Friedkin and the screenwriter William Peter Blatty during the making of “The Exorcist.” Their artistic argument was not merely about narrative or character, but the fundamental meaning of the movie.

Blatty, a devout Catholic whose screenplay was an adaptation of his best-selling novel, aimed to make a movie about how an evil demon tests the faith of a priest, Father Damien Karras, through taking over the body of an innocent girl. In an interview more than a decade ago at his Maryland home, Blatty told me that he aimed for more than scares. He took exorcism seriously, and perceived a real and urgent threat. “There are demons running all over that campus,” he said about Georgetown University, the school he attended and the setting for the movie.

Friedkin, an agnostic Jew, was less invested in the religious message but was fascinated by Blatty’s story, which follows an increasingly desperate mother as she tries to explain why her daughter is behaving strangely. After exhausting medical options, she contacts Karras, a priest questioning his faith.

To Friedkin, the seeming randomness of this girl was part of what made the movie so frightening. He preferred some ambiguity, so he cut out two scenes: one that spells out how the priest is being targeted, the other a comforting coda where a detective talks to a friend of Karras. These changes rattled Blatty, who thought they snipped the message right out of the movie. Friedkin told him: “I’m not doing a commercial for the Catholic Church.”

Blatty appealed to the studio to restore the changes but got nowhere. By its premiere, he felt his movie had shifted from being about the virtue and triumph of faith into exactly the kind of morally indifferent gross-out he didn’t want to make.

Blatty and Friedkin stopped talking to each other but later reconciled. (Blatty died in 2017, and Friedkin died this past August.) As a “gift,” Friedkin restored the cuts when the movie was rereleased in 2000. But the original, which you can still see streaming on Max, hits harder. Its abrupt ending and refusal to overexplain are strengths. Not knowing why this girl is being tormented is far more horrifying than the narrative satisfaction of pat closure.

The religious conviction of Blatty’s story still comes across, but with more dimension. “The Exorcist” works on multiple fears of the unknown: the confusion of a parent over the changes of a child approaching puberty; the intimidating jargon of doctors. But its most important fear, one achieved through the clash of aesthetics between Blatty and Friedkin, stems from the mysteries of faith. It holds onto the anxiety of inexplicable awe in the face of an overwhelming world, something horror and religion share.

Sometimes the best work comes not from an artist achieving a vision but compromising it.

It’s essentially a ‘women’s picture’

Filled with exquisite pain and drenched in tears, the classic women’s picture — “Stella Dallas,” “Now, Voyager,” “Imitation of Life” — follows a familiar trajectory. A beautiful woman struggles and endures; experiences romantic troubles and family issues; suffers deeply if magnificently while often sacrificing her happiness and giving her all for a man or maybe a child or both, which is pretty much what happens in that unsung maternal melodrama, “The Exorcist” — except that here the tears come with a generous serving of pea soup.

Of course “The Exorcist” is a horror movie, but, among other things, it’s about fraught female lives and deep emotions, and in rewatching it, I was struck by how much it shares with the women’s movies that I love. At center is Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a glamorous actress and single mother who’s raising her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), in a Georgetown townhouse that may have rats in the attic. The novelist William Peter Blatty based the character on his old Georgetown neighbor and fellow paranormal enthusiast, Shirley MacLaine, who starred in a very different mother-daughter weepie, “Terms of Endearment.”

The mother-daughter film that I flashed on while looking at “The Exorcist” again, though, is the original “Mildred Pierce,” the 1945 noir starring Joan Crawford that memorably mixes crime and melodrama. Like Burstyn’s character, Crawford’s Mildred is a hard-working mother devoted to a daughter whose ugliness nearly destroys them both. True, Regan’s problem is that she may be demonically possessed, but Mildred’s daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) is more terrifying because her cruelty toward her mother is so deliberate. It’s the devil that seems to slap Regan; it’s Veda who slaps Mildred so hard her mother falls to the ground.

The focus on Regan’s body in “The Exorcist” similarly ties it to female-driven melodramas in which ostensibly troubled (physically or otherwise) women are diagnosed and cured invariably by a male doctor or lover. Blatty was inspired to write his novel by an exorcism involving a teenage boy. Blatty seems to have changed the child to a girl to put some distance between his novel and the case; by making Regan 12 (she’s 11 in the book), the film further complicates the character. Looking back, I wonder if it was the devil or the vision of an out-of-control child-woman that freaked me out when I fled the theater at age 13.

It’s fitting that the biggest, most contested film to open in 1973 is about a life-or-death struggle over a female body, a fight that was also at the center of the Supreme Court’s biggest, most contested decision that year: Roe v. Wade. After “The Exorcist” hit, Friedkin told Variety that it was a “woman’s picture,” and while he didn’t elaborate on that comment I wonder if the Roe decision was rattling around in his head. True, Regan isn’t pregnant (for that story line, see “Rosemary’s Baby”), but her body is also no longer her own. In the end, medical science proves incapable of helping Regan, so Chris desperately turns to two Catholic priests to free her child body and soul, a turn that only solidifies “The Exorcist” as one great women’s film.

‘The Exorcist’ Is aSubversively queer movie

In horror movies, otherness is terrifying. Psychopaths, life-suckers, girls with freaky powers: They’re all monsters. That’s been a trope that was applied to gay people even when hom*osexuality could only be hinted at in cinema’s shadows. When Michael Landon’s character pleads for help in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957) — “I know what I am!,” he confesses to his doctor — he isn’t just talking about being a dreamboat in a varsity jacket.

I didn’t know any of this in the late 1980s, when I was a teenage closet case and my father took me to see “The Exorcist” at the Aut-O-Rama drive-in theater in North Ridgeville, Ohio, if my memory serves me right. I remembered being grossed out by vomit and shocked by the sexualized blasphemies that came out of little Regan’s pustulous mouth. I liked Father Karras, a handsome nice guy who loved Jesus, like I did. I couldn’t wait to see the movie again.

What I didn’t understand then is that like all horror films, “The Exorcist” is about traumas and how they originate, fester and can be overcome. I also didn’t recognize — and it took leaving Christianity and the closet for this to click — that the film, released four years into a post-Stonewall America, is subversively queer.

There’s gay stuff on the surface. Father Karras and Father Dyer are in a tender bromance. The film is so outrageous, it borders on camp; “Repossessed,” the 1990 “Exorcist” parody, parlayed that sensibility into gay sex gags and a joke-puking Linda Blair.

But the deeper reason “The Exorcist” resonates as queer is because it’s about a child consumed by an entity that the church is called on to excise, a hideous intersection of metaphorical queerness and real trauma that sounds a lot like conversion therapy.

Hear me out. When I was a Bible-believing teenager, I thought God was mad that I liked boys. The only way to treat this abomination, I believed, was to beseech Him to make me go straight. I tried. It failed.

That’s similar to what happens to Regan in “The Exorcist,” only her demon is an allegorical hom*osexuality. When Fathers Karras and Merrin try to cure Regan with the words “the power of Christ compels you,” they say out loud the quiet part that I whispered to myself. They tried, priests died, and it worked.

Ready for the really queer part? Unlike the first time I saw “The Exorcist,” I now root for the demon. That’s what horror can do: align your sympathies with the monster and against the presumed forces of good, not to learn evil but to understand it.

As I see it, Regan wasn’t an innocent girl overcome by an old demon. She was a young woman with new rage who gave voice to queer people who were tired of being told — by religion, parents, medical professionals — that they were sick and needed to be cured. Her message to the church and her well-meaning mom was a prophetically queer one: Back off. I’ve got power now.