The Exorcist: Friedkin's Faith-and-Filth Machine

The strangest thing about The Exorcist, half a century after it opened on Boxing Day 1973 and sent people fainting and vomiting into cinema aisles, is how patient it is. The reputation is all bile and blasphemy, the head-spin and the crucifix, the green arc across the bedroom. Watch it again and most of its running time is a slow, grey, unglamorous procedural: a mother trying to find out what is wrong with her daughter, and a doctor after doctor after specialist failing to tell her. William Friedkin shot a demon film as though he were shooting a documentary about the American health system, and that decision is the whole trick.

Friedkin had just made The French Connection, and he brought its method wholesale into a story about the Devil. William Peter Blatty adapted his own 1971 novel and won an Oscar for the screenplay, but Friedkin’s contribution was tonal: he stripped the material of gothic furniture and staged it in the flat, overcast realism of a New York cop picture. The famous line about the film is that it is a story about faith told by a director who did not seem to have any. That tension is the engine.

The realism is the horror

The scares everybody remembers are surgical, and I mean that literally. Before Regan MacNeil is strapped to a bed and dosed with holy water, she is strapped to a table for a cerebral angiogram, and Friedkin shoots the medical procedure — the needle into the carotid, the jet of blood, the clatter of the machine — with an unblinking, clinical steadiness that is more upsetting than anything the demon later does. He understood something most horror directors miss: an audience braced for the supernatural will drop its guard at the ordinary. By the time the possession is undeniable, we have been softened up by real medicine, real bureaucracy, real helplessness. The Devil, when he arrives, arrives into a world the film has already made unbearably solid.

Owen Roizman’s cinematography keeps the whole thing cold and documentary-plain, and Friedkin’s methods to get there have passed into legend: he refrigerated the bedroom set to below freezing so the actors’ breath would fog on camera, fired guns off-set to jolt real shock out of his performers, and reportedly slapped a priest-turned-actor before a take to get the face he wanted. Some of this is indefensible on any modern set. All of it shows up on screen as a texture you cannot fake — a cast that looks genuinely rattled, in a house that feels genuinely cold.

Then there is the sound. The Oscar for Best Sound was the one award the film’s craft most obviously earned. The demon’s voice, dubbed by the actress Mercedes McCambridge over Linda Blair’s performance, is a layered, animal, wrong-frequencied thing that seems to come from a body several sizes too large for the girl producing it. Dick Smith’s makeup ages and splits Regan’s face across the film like rotting fruit. And Friedkin famously threw out a commissioned score and reached instead for a few minutes of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a spindly, secular, faintly hippyish piece of prog that has no business being frightening and is now permanently haunted because of this film.

A film about two men losing

Sell The Exorcist as a shock machine and you undersell what makes it last, which is that it is fundamentally a story about a priest who no longer believes. Jason Miller plays Father Damien Karras as a Jesuit and psychiatrist strangled by guilt over his dying mother, a man of God who has quietly concluded that God is not answering. Max von Sydow — then in his mid-forties, aged up to play the ancient Father Merrin — is the counterweight, the exorcist who has met this thing before and carries the exhaustion of someone who knows the fight is real and possibly unwinnable. Ellen Burstyn, as Regan’s mother Chris MacNeil, grounds the entire picture in a performance of secular, sleeves-rolled-up terror; she is an atheist actress in a movie town, and the film routes its horror through her refusal to accept a diagnosis she has no framework to believe.

The reason the possession scenes work is that the film has made us care whether these three adults can hold their own faith together long enough to save a child. The obscenity — and it is genuinely obscene, the crucifix scene still an assault — functions as a test the demon sets. It wants to make the sacred unbearable, to force decent people to look away. The film’s argument is that the horror is not the levitation or the projectile bile; it is the erosion, the way despair is offered to Karras as the easier option in every scene.

Where it comes from, and what it fathered

The obvious ancestor is Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which five years earlier had done the crucial work of dragging Satan out of the crumbling European castle and into a respectable modern city where doctors and neighbours are complicit. Both films locate their dread in institutions — medicine, the family, the apartment building — and both understand that a woman’s insistence that something is wrong with her own body is the scariest engine available. But Blatty and Friedkin took the further step of making the Church a live combatant rather than a defeated bystander, which is why The Exorcist plays as tragedy where Rosemary’s Baby plays as trap.

The deeper root, though, is older and stranger: the case files. Blatty built his novel on a genuine 1949 exorcism performed on a boy in Maryland, and the film’s power comes partly from the way it treats the ritual as a real, documented, bureaucratic procedure with paperwork and protocol. That documentary instinct — the monster as a thing to be investigated and recorded — runs straight down to the folk-horror seriousness of The Witch, which takes a Puritan Devil equally literally and equally coldly. And the specific idea that possession is a mask worn by grief, that the supernatural is the shape a family’s pain takes when it has nowhere else to go, is the whole thesis of Hereditary decades later. Ari Aster is unthinkable without this film’s example.

The verdict

The Exorcist has aged into something more interesting than a scare machine, and the parts that once seemed like its whole point — the shocks — are now the parts that show their seams a little. What holds is the architecture: the long grey first hour, the medical procedural, the two priests failing quietly. It remains the only wholly convincing possession film because it is the only one that treats belief as a genuine crisis rather than a plot mechanic, and it earned its Best Picture nomination, the first ever for a horror film, on exactly that seriousness.

Watch it for the realism, which is where the fear actually lives. Then, if you want the lineage, go back to Rosemary’s Baby to see the city where Satan first went respectable, and forward to Hereditary to see the wound this film opened up dressed in new clothes. Below the line, the ending — the one genuinely transcendent choice Friedkin makes.

Spoilers below

The climax turns on a piece of theology the film has been quietly building toward, and it is the reason the picture is finally a story about faith rather than filth.

Father Merrin dies mid-ritual, felled by a heart attack while the demon jeers, and the exorcism appears lost. It falls to Karras — the doubter, the psychiatrist, the man who has spent the film unable to believe — to end it. He does so with an act that is not sanctioned by any rite: he invites the demon into himself, screaming at it to leave the girl and take him instead. The film has spent two hours establishing Karras as a man drowning in guilt over his mother, a man for whom self-sacrifice is the one form of grace still available. When the demon accepts and takes hold of him, he uses his last seconds of will to throw himself through the bedroom window and down the long stone staircase in Georgetown, killing the host before the thing can act.

It is a suicide that functions as a sacrament, and it is the moment Friedkin’s cold documentary style pays off completely. Because the whole film has refused easy uplift, refused to let God visibly intervene, this final act of belief lands as an actual leap — a man choosing faith with his body at the instant of losing it, on the evidence of nothing. The 2000 re-release, restoring the notorious backward “spider-walk” descent of the stairs, added spectacle to the middle of the film, but the ending never needed it. The genuinely frightening thing The Exorcist leaves you with is not that the Devil is real. It is that stopping him might cost you everything, and that the film cannot promise it was worth it.