The Exorcist

what the film does

chris macneil (burstyn) is filming a movie in washington DC. her daughter regan (blair) begins behaving strangely: shaking, speaking in voices, exhibiting unnatural strength. doctors find nothing wrong. the symptoms worsen. regan’s face distorts. her skin breaks out in lesions. she speaks in languages she does not know. the medical establishment gives up. chris turns to father karras (miller), a jesuit priest and psychiatrist who is himself losing his faith after his mother’s death. karras investigates and concludes that an exorcism is warranted. the church sends father merrin (von sydow), an archaeologist who has faced this demon before, in iraq and in africa.

why this one

three reasons. first, the realism. friedkin shot the film like a documentary. the medical scenes use real doctors and real equipment. the angiography scene, where a needle is injected into regan’s neck and dye pumped into her carotid artery, is performed on a real patient (a volunteer) with a real needle. the sound you hear is the real sound of a real medical procedure. friedkin wanted the audience to believe that if the medical world could not explain this, then maybe the supernatural explanation was the only one left. the film earns the supernatural by exhausting the natural.

second, the performances. ellen burstyn was nominated for best actress. she plays chris macneil as a practical, non-religious woman who watches her daughter disintegrate. her terror is not theatrical. linda blair, who was 14, carries the physical demands of the possession: the levitation, the vomiting, the back-arching contortions. the voice of the demon (mercedes mccambridge) was dubbed, but blair’s body is on screen. jason miller as karras gives the film its emotional center. his faith crisis is not abstract. it is a man who could not save his mother and cannot save this child.

third, the atmosphere. owen roizman’s cinematography uses natural light wherever possible. the macneil house in georgetown is real, and the film was shot there. the cold is real (the set was refrigerated to 30 degrees for the exorcism scenes so the actors’ breath would be visible). jack nitzsche’s score is minimal: a few notes on a piano, the sound of bees, silence. the film’s most effective sound is the absence of it.

what stays with me

the iraq opening. father merrin is on an archaeological dig in northern iraq. he finds a small amulet: the head of pazuzu, the demon. the camera holds on his face. he knows what is coming. the sequence was shot in mosul, and the people in the background are real mosul residents going about their day. the collision of the ordinary and the infernal in that opening shot is the entire film in one frame.

on hand

the dvd is the warner home video release in the canon.