Devilish movie gets under our skins - The Exorcist Reviews

When a young girl (Linda Blair) becomes possessed by demons, her mother (Ellen Burstyn) turns to a skeptical young priest (Jason Miller) and THE EXORCIST he calls in when he finds himself over his head (Max Von Sydow). The most terrifying film of its generation, THE EXORCIST relies on jolting visuals and a deeply jarring spiritual premise to create a visceral horror that goes beyond the movie-watching experience. The film preys on our psyche by deliberately making our *disbelief* our greatest vulnerability. (Of course, the idea of possession is disturbing in that it suggests that you cannot be safe within your own body, because the bogeyman gets inside *you*.) Father Karras (the Jason Miller character) finds himself in a crisis of faith when the movie opens, and this movie plays to the atheist, post-Freudian values of the "modern" world, where even Catholic priests question their faith. The Vatican?s official film critic once told me that his favorite aspect of THE EXORCIST was its gritty portrayal of the embattled, faith-shaken, hard-working, hard-drinking urban priest. Father Karras cuts his way across the urban jungle, dodging beggars and confronting all of a secular society?s demons (including his own mother wasting away in a nursing home), so how could he be expected to battle real, actual devils? When Ellen Burstyn approaches him to explore the possibility that her pre-teen daughter is possessed, Karras is deeply skeptical. By this point, however, Burstyn has gone down an escalating path of expert consultations that have taken her daughter from hospitals to psychologists to explore all the possible explanations for little Regan?s worsening condition. The mother and daughter are themselves a slice of modern, godless life. The mom (Burstyn) is a working actress, lost in the amoral wilderness of a movie set. (Typical dialogue between takes: "Shall we summon the writer? He's in Paris." "Hiding?" "F-cking.") Burstyn is divorced, and the girl navigates twin orbits around her distant father, and her mother, and her mother?s boyfriends. This moral relativity is fatally disrupted when Regan begins to be plagued by supernatural phenomena and psychic attacks that escalate to the point where the family?s daily routine becomes impossible to maintain. One of the movie?s masterful touches is the gradual intensification of the supernatural elements. At first, Regan?s symptoms seem, if not mild, then at least explicable by psychological principles: she is acting out against her parent?s divorce. During a dinner social, she comes downstairs and pees in front of her mother?s guests. She grimly tells an astronaut guest: "You?re gonna die up there." In subsequent episodes, Regan is disturbed at night by an increasingly fierce presence. There are noises in the house, at night -- Burstyn suspects rodents Then, Regan?s bed shakes, and then rattles violently with her and her mother on it. Finally, Regan herself becomes gripped by a powerful force that whips her body around like a rag doll, and causes furniture to move around as if the whole house was a ship in a tempest. When Karras confronts Reagan, he is quickly outwitted by a demon that can speak backward and impersonate Karras? dead mom. "Your mother sucks c-cks in Hell, Karras," the entity taunts him. When he tries a formal introduction, the being is less than friendly. "I?m Damien Karras," the priest begins. "And I?m the Devil! Now, kindly undo these straps," an otherworldly voice intones. That voice actually belonged to the great character actress Mercedes McCambridge, who cut her chops on stage alongside Orson Welles a generation earlier, and was the only actor capable of *naturally* generating the full spectrum of sounds required to portray Satan in an era before digital sound effects. Many of the film?s other special effects will seem dated, but they were cutting-edge when the film was made, and produced a gut-wrenching terror ride for moviegoers. The shock cycle culminates in the famous exorcism scene, in which Karras and a more experienced -- but, less vigorous -- priest (the title character, played by Von Sydow) attempt to drive the demon out in a grueling, marathon session of the Roman Ritual (the Catholic exorcism). At one point, the two priests chant in unison, "The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!," while the stubborn demon levitates the bed, spins Regan?s head, and famously douses the older priest with pea-soup vomit. At the end of the film, little Regan is finally rid of her demons. But, you won?t be. (Carlos Colorado)