The Exorcist: If Evil’s Real, Then What?

The first time I watched William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) I became sluggish. Who’s to say if I fidgeted too? It’s been too long. I’m far removed from the days when I consumed every classic movie with reckless abandon, total disregard for when it came out, who directed it, what it was trying to do. None of that mattered to me. To this day, I can’t tell you a single fact about High Noon (1952), barring two things: 1) I’ve seen it; 2) It’s supposed to be very good. I was an old, crusty sponge—repellant everywhere I should’ve been absorbent. Friedkin’s movie bored me. A generation and a half of reactions and rumors had led me to expect debilitating fear. The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) did a better job of keeping me up at night.

Now, I am older, wiser. I have seen the films of our age from The Room (2003) to Megalopolis (2024). When I sat down to take in The Exorcist last week, I understood why it had bored me a decade or more ago: it’s largely a character study. Not of Reagan (Linda Blair), the little girl possessed by Captain Howdy and his merry men, but of Fr. Damian Karras (Jason Miller), a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist struggling with his faith, and of Reagan’s mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), an actress whose life gets upended by the inexplicable, the demonic.

The final thirty minutes, which form a contiguous set-piece exorcism, have their force only because of how deeply we feel for Fr. Karras and Chris. Doubtless, a little girl yelling obscenities and doing, well, obscene things with a crucifix is disturbing in itself. But how much worse do we feel when Reagan adopts Fr. Karras’ mother’s voice, when his guilt over leaving her to languish and die becomes, rather than a sore memory—a regret—a taunt, a force for total self-immolation? When Fr. Karras needs a break, he sits downstairs, and Chris asks him: “is it over?” Drenched in sweat and psychically broken, he can only offer a resigned “no.”

Fr. Karras returns to the room; Chris, then, functionally leaves the film. But we know how deeply that “no” must have crushed her. Irreligious, she spends a fortune in time and money seeking medical answers. When a bevy of perplexed psychiatrists recommend she try a psychosomatic exorcism, she accuses them of sending her to a witch doctor. By the time she meets Fr. Karras, she begs him to perform an exorcism on her daughter. Can you imagine? Reduced to begging a quack, a quack who refuses to undertake his own magical ceremony? Worst yet for Chris, the exorcism proves real. Whatever one might say of God, demons exist and have some power in the world. How do you go back to acting, even if you get your daughter back?

I feel deep sadness for Chris and Fr. Karras. Still, days after watching the film. I feel their lives torn apart, brought together through abjection and near dissolution. The exorcism dramatizes this psychological, this bodily, fact. It doesn’t exceed these realities or go for cheap thrills. It offers the audience a hair-raising, visual set piece through which to come to terms with the destruction of a few people’s lives.

The author of the novel upon which the film is based, William Peter Blatty, was a Catholic. The film carries—even from the irreligious Friedkin—the force of Blatty’s faith. Spiritual struggle feels real, feels crippling in a way it rarely does in other films. The Exorcist dare to imagine how the reality of evil might change lives, cut one off from reality permanently, isolated from the mass of people ignorant of this painful truth. What could be scarier than that?