Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 22, 2000, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There’s something vaguely ironic in the fact that William Friedkin, in his recent Fango interview, said that he originally trimmed scenes from The Exorcist to pick up the pace. Watching the film today, even ignoring the re-insertion of 11 minutes of that material, one is struck by how deliberate and dramatic a pace the movie maintains, how carefully it builds small details and character moments before finally exploding into the graphic setpieces everyone remembers. As the film continued, the same thought occurred to me that I had while viewing a revival of Rosemary’s Baby a few years back: There’s no way a studio would let a genre movie this “slow” into theaters today. (OK, there was The Sixth Sense, but sadly that’s an exception that helps prove the rule.)
It will be interesting to see how today’s audiences respond to The Exorcist, beyond the thrill of seeing that lost footage. By now, Friedkin and William Peter Blatty’s film has achieved such an iconic status that it has become household lore, not to mention the subject of countless imitations and parodies—is there anyone who knows Regan’s notorious “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” who also doesn’t know Saturday Night Live’s “Your mother sews socks that smell!”? These days, onscreen children don’t even require demonic possession to curse up a storm—so can the film shock viewers today the way it did back then?
Perhaps not—but after the barrage of soulless special FX extravaganzas that have passed for big-ticket horror in the last decade, one can’t be too thankful for a reminder that the best frights are generated through character. Seen today, The Exorcist’s terror comes not so much through the details of Regan’s (Linda Blair) possession but from the plight of her increasingly desperate mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), who can’t understand what’s happening to her daughter, or why no one in the medical community can do anything about it. (With this rerelease to be shortly followed by her wrenching performance in Requiem for a Dream, 2000 might well see the long-overdue rediscovery of Burstyn’s talents.) Just as much as David Cronenberg’s The Fly, The Exorcist presents a heartbreaking metaphor for a sickness that the loved ones of the afflicted are powerless to cure.
All of the performances—Blair’s corrupted innocent, Jason Miller’s troubled Father Karras, Max von Sydow’s stalwart Father Merrin, Lee J. Cobb’s skeptical Lt. Kinderman, et al.—remain finely tuned and persuasive, and Warner Bros. has done a superb job with their technical restoration. The fresh sound mix is particularly impressive; those “rats in the attic” now sound like they’re skittering all over the theater. As for those restored scenes, the highlight is, of course, the “spider-walk” bit, which comes at a completely unpredictable moment and proves a genuine seat-jumper. Also notable is a doctor’s prescription of Ritalin, that much-in-the-current-news drug, to treat Regan, and the quiet mid-exorcism moment in which Merrin reveals why he thinks the devil has targeted Regan, which adds depth in the midst of the grotesque spectacle.
The only addition that feels superfluous is the final scene, in which Kinderman strikes up a friendship with Karras’ colleague Father Dyer (Father William O’Malley). The intention was to restore an upbeat tone to the movie’s end and assert the triumph of good over evil, but that’s not necessary, and the reason is contained in another of the film’s most noteworthy qualities: its overwhelming respect for religion. Time and again, supernatural thrillers in the post-Exorcist age have cast forces within the Catholic Church (or other faiths) as agents of evil—a not illegitimate dramatic choice in some cases, it must be said. But the overriding feeling behind The Exorcist—through all its horrific, shocking, blasphemous sights—is its unwavering belief in the power of faith, in the unshakability of religious belief. The agents of goodness in The Exorcist may be defeated, yet the superiority of their moral stance—and their resulting ultimate victory over darkness—comes through as loud and clear today as it did 27 years ago.
