The Exorcist brought the devil...

Father Karras - I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities Regan has manifested. So far, I'd say there seem to be three.

Father Merrin - There is only one.

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It’s 50 years old this year.

The Exorcist remains the scariest movie I have ever seen. Granted, I’ve rarely watched horror films since…..for the same reason I stopped going into the ocean after seeing Jaws. I do not like being terrified any more than I like being swallowed by great white sharks.

There may have been scarier movies since. Like Jaws, Deliverance wasn’t a horror film per se, even though it singlehandedly ruined the banjo for an entire generation, and certainly turned me off camping and tighty-whities. But still, it doesn’t fit the horror mold. And honestly, no movie with Burt Reynolds without his mustache can be taken all that seriously.

I don’t count the slasher stuff either. Those films are scary too but after a while their mostly hormonal teen characters grow so annoyingly dumb that you start rooting for big dopey guy with the machete. The movies too often turn into unintentional comedies.

To be truly scary you need the DEVIL. The Exorcist brought the devil. Everything after it lives in its immense shadows….

It stands alone….like Father Merrin framed at the gates of the MacNeil house.

Even the iconic movie poster was terrifying…..

We knew the devil, of course. As Catholics he (this was a patriarchal society) was the thing we feared even more than nuns. He was down there with pitchforks and fire, waiting for us to fuck up. I was never quite clear if the devil was the one who would grab you by your ankles and pull you down to hell, or if God was simply tossing you overboard and using gravity. In retrospect that is quite the distinction to make, but I never thought to ask. I once blessed myself with my left hand and was slapped by a nun, so I was forever leery of making waves. But still, (at least before you started jerking off) as long as you went to mass on Sunday and didn’t eat meat on Friday’s during lent, the devil was a minor concern.

And then all of a sudden his PR went into overdrive.

So now here was a movie that gave the devil a face. It gave the devil a voice. He cursed more than Dave Grohl. His head rotated. He could levitate and throw furniture around the room and crawl on the ceiling like a spider. He jacked off with a crucifix. He could regurgitate pea soup on command. And he did so by taking over an angelic little girl who would later fall in love with the guy who sang “Jessie’s Girl”. The demon ultimately forced local hero Jason Miller to throw himself out the window and tumble down 97 steps, but not before telling the priest that his recently departed mother was currently blowing everybody in hell. I don’t need to see it again to get scared. Just thinking about it makes me scared. Talking about it makes me scared. Writing about it makes me scared. I’ve never climbed into an attic since I saw that movie. I don’t care what noises it’s making or how many rodents might be up there. The movie is terrifying in 1000 different ways. People were so shit scared they never noticed that Max von Sydow was a 44 year old actor playing an 80 year old priest.

Shortly after The Exorcist came out there was a movie called The Omen that featured some creepy little English kid named Damien (shamelessly stolen from Miller’s character in The Exorcist), who was dressed like Angus Young from AC/DC and was the supposed incarnation of the devil….and I’m happy to report that I’ve never seen this movie because I was already damaged enough. The Exorcist was my one and only wrestling match with the devil, and he beat my ass into submission. Even the theme music alone is enough to give me heart palpitations.

My older brother saw The Exorcist in 1973….and he surely swaggered into the theater with his group of teenage friends intending to face down all the hype. There were stories of people fainting in theaters. Becoming physically ill. Running out in terror. Lines stretched around blocks to see the film. It was an instant cultural phenomenon. As a teenage boy, your job is to scoff at such drama, preferably in front of girls, and then brag about it.

His night ended with him calling home from a pay phone in the lobby of the theater, instructing my parents to turn on all the lights in the house, and not to go to bed until he got home. He spent that night, and probably a few more after that, sleeping with the light on and his door open. I’m not sure he ever re-watched the movie again.

I was 7 years old at the time, knowing nothing about what was going on other than the phone was ringing later than usual and that the hallway light was suddenly shining through my cracked bedroom door. I was not allowed to turn it off. Only after me and my twin brother were assured that nobody had died did we crawl back into our bunk beds and fall back asleep.

Cut to the mid-80s. VCRs. The be-kind-and-rewind decade. Myself and a few friends were gathered in somebody’s dark basement, with a VHS copy of The Exorcist. None of us had ever seen it. We only knew it by reputation. We knew it from older siblings, or magazine articles. We knew it because one of its stars was born in Scranton. It was just one of those things that needed to be knocked off the list. We needed to scoff at all the hype, feel superior and brave, and then move onto something else.

That’s not what happened.

The only thing that kept me from running out of that basement was peer pressure. We all had to pretend we weren’t being scarred for life in real time, because that’s what guys do. When the movie ended, myself and a friend had to walk home. About 2 miles. Part of the walk took us down a long dark alley that seemed just the place for the devil to be lurking and levitating, and without saying a word to each other, we both took off in a fear-crazed sprint and didn’t stop until we’d reached the streetlights of Drinker Street. Once there we started casually walking again, pretending that what just happened didn’t happen. We’re still friends to this day, and have never discussed that night.

I’m almost certain that if we passed a pay phone we both would have called home and asked that the lights be left on.

In a bit…

—tf