The Spiritual Horror of The Exorcist
The Exorcist occupies an odd place in the pantheon of horror cinema. Undeniably a classic, inspiring uncountable imitations, homages, rip-offs and parodies, The Exorcist nonetheless stands apart from other horror classics and has stubbornly resisted a proper franchise treatment for over forty years. Unlike contemporary horror classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th, which did yield sprawling successful franchises, Exorcist isn’t considered a schlocky horror flick but rather serious cinema. To view The Exorcist is not to engage in a guilty pleasure like firing up an installment of Nightmare on Elm Street but to consume a proper, legitimate film.
This is all the more surprising given the fact that Exorcist has no shortage of schlock. Beyond the familiar head-spinning and projectile vomiting, we have, for example, scenes of the afflicted little girl raping herself with a crucifix and shoving her mother’s face into her crotch while screaming “Lick me.” There’s the spooky spider walk and a less-acknowledged but nonetheless haunting scene where Regan, early in the process of her possession, ominously predicts a party guest’s death before the camera provides a lingering close-up of her urine pooling on the floor between her feet.
All of these gross-out scares would fit well in any John Carpenter or Wes Craven gore-fest, but within the world of The Exorcist they seem to carry additional weight, as though they are in service of a more ponderous and, yes, serious tale of horror. And I think what makes The Exorcist stand out is its Catholicism.
It may sound tautological to make the case that The Exorcist is a “Catholic movie,” but plenty of horror movies invoke Catholic aesthetics and even surface-level Catholic theology without really telling a Catholic story. But The Exorcist is different.
A Crisis of Faith, Where Faith is the Crisis
The beats of the original Exorcist story have been copied so often that they’ve become cliche, but they were at least somewhat innovative at the time. Briefly, the story goes:
- A little girl (Regan) is acting strangely.
- Her mother (Chris) tries to help, but science can neither explain nor fix what is happening to her.
- It couldn’t possibly be demonic possession though because that’s fairy tale stuff.
- Actually maybe demons are real. Let’s consult a priest.
- SET PIECE TIME!
The story of Chris, the beleaguered mother of the possessed girl, exists largely between 3 and 4 and it’s devastating. Chris is an avowedly irreligious person who, putting all of her faith in science to cure her daughter, is shattered when she has no choice but to resort to asking a Catholic priest for an exorcism. In a crucial and beautifully acted scene, Chris meets with Father Karras, a local priest/psychiatrist to seek his help. She wears a headscarf and large sunglasses as if disguising herself for an illicit tryst, and struggles to get the words out asking for spiritual help, breaking down shortly after she does. In short, she’s humiliated and has no idea who she’s become, and she’s dealing with this while trying to save her daughter.
In these few moments we see Chris’s entire worldview collapse around her as she desperately seeks help for her daughter. Flipping the script, she blasphemes against science by begging for the church’s help.
Just as critically, we see in this scene that Father Karras’s faith has its own problems. He immediately rebuffs her, treating exorcism as a “sixteenth century” practice that has been obviated by modern understandings of mental illness.
From this point the story centers on Father Karras’s own faith journey. Disillusioned with the church, he nonetheless agrees to assist Father Merrin, the older, wiser, faithier veteran exorcist, and performing those very same sixteenth century rituals to rid Regan of the pesky demon.
As the exorcism progresses we learn more about Father Karras’s crisis of faith, and it’s important to understand. It isn’t that Father Karras is losing his belief in God. Rather, he struggles with faith in the goodness of God. And the demon latches onto this. In a great example of how The Exorcist uses the grotesque in service of weighty themes, one of the most vulgar lines in cinematic history — “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell” — has the horrifying effect of forcing Father Karras to wonder if his mother is suffering eternal torment.
Now, it would be very tidy if Father Merrin, with the help of Father Karras, successfully defeated the demon using the Catholic playbook and the efficacy of the process restored Father Karras’s faith. Fortunately the movie takes its subject matter too seriously to allow for that, and the ritual fails.
The incantations, the holy water, the vestments, the bells and smells all succeed in (apparently) annoying the demon but ultimately can’t drive it away. Instead, Father Merrin drops dead of a heart attack, throwing Father Karras into a blind rage during which he beats the possessed girl and demands (or commands?) that the demon enter him instead. The demon obliges and Father Karras hurls himself out a window before the demon can take full control, killing himself and defeating the demon.
What’s so Catholic about that? Everything! When salvific rituals fail to produce their desired effect, Father Karras reenacts the crucifixion by taking the evil upon himself and destroying it through his own willing death. In this we know that Father Karras’s faith has been restored — not his faith in the outward trappings of Catholicism but in the divine sacrifice at its center. He embraces his full vocation by standing in persona Christi in the most literal possible sense.
Cinematic heroes acting like Jesus is, of course, nothing new, but there’s something crucial missing here: the Resurrection. In the immediate aftermath of his fall, Father Karras’s dying body is attended to by another priest — Father Dyer — who tearfully asks him to make a confession. Father Karras is able to move his fingers but doesn’t say anything, leaving Father Dyer to (still tearfully) recite the rite of absolution in the hopes that Father Karras will receive his reward.
We like to think that Father Karras is in Heaven by the time the credits roll, but the movie doesn’t let us see that, or even fully articulate it. We can intellectualize that Father Karras will be rewarded for his selflessness, but in the context of the film it feels remote, abstract and contingent. Indeed, the brief scene involving the failed confession may serve to simply drive home the point that Father Karras’s ultimate sacrifice transcended the rituals of the church, but it could also signal that even after this sacrifice his eternal salvation isn’t guaranteed.
Chris, meanwhile, has regained her daughter but lost the world. She has to go on living knowing that demons roam around her, that the Devil is real, and that (comparably disturbingly, perhaps, for someone of her erstwhile beliefs) God is real.
This is grim, medieval Catholicism. The world is fallen, evil is real, and sometimes people have to fight it. God will stand with you in your struggles and in your suffering but he will not defeat the evil for you. He will not take the cup from your lips.
And this is where the “seriousness” of The Exorcist comes from. Yes, it’s scary when spooky things are happening, when a little girl talks in a demonic voice and turns her head around, and (somehow) when an old woman mysteriously appears in a bed.
But the true terror of The Exorcist is spiritual. It’s a world in which good and evil are real and at constant war, in which God and Satan are real and Satan can torment you while God does nothing, in which you may need enough faith to jump off a building to save a little girl. And spiritual horror is with you always. It can’t be killed.
Several Movies Which Are Not The Exorcist
Viewed in this framework, it’s easy to see why the various Exorcist sequels and prequels were such airballs. To the credit of the produces of Exorcist II: The Heretic and Exorcist III, they resisted the franchise formula of simply making the original over and over again with the same villain, new victims, and familiar guest stars. But what they didn’t do was make Exorcist movies.
John Boorman’s Exorcist II is a bizarre fantasy about collective consciousness and African locust gods. It has more in common with Boorman’s bonkers-but-glorious Zardoz than with The Exorcist, though it did at least bring back a teenage Linda Blair.
Exorcist III is a supernatural crime thriller that, despite being directed by the author of the original Exorcist novel, is so divorced from the original source material that the director’s cut was delivered to the studio without an exorcism in it. The theatrical cut added not only an exorcism but decided that Father Karras survived and has been hanging around possessed for seventeen years, completely vitiating the ending of the first movie.
These aren’t bad movies as such. Each is a serviceable spooky flick. But neither is an Exorcist movie in any coherent sense. They barely tee off the original storyline, let alone touch on any of the heavy themes of the original.
By the time the double-mulligan prequels Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist came around in 2004–2005, the exorcism movie trope had been so thoroughly trodden that they only way these films could possibly harken back (or forward, or whatever) to the original would be to actually embrace the spiritual horror that the first film confronted so well. Unfortunately they did the opposite, both presenting off-the-shelf exorcism stories while slapping the “Exorcist” brand on them and calling their main character Father Merrin.
Worse, Father Merrin’s crisis of faith in these films carries none of the heft of Father Karras’s in the first movie, instead having the priest haunted by his decision to help a Nazi kill X people to save Y people, where Y is greater than X. Rather than questioning the goodness of God and the possibility of salvation in a cruel universe, the prequels center on a trolley problem.
Now, with The Exorcist: Believer, the non-franchise as strayed so far from its spiritual moorings that the Catholics are entirely absent, leaving the set piece exorcism in the hands of a group of miscellaneously spiritual demon fighters with nary a priest to be found. Gone also is the moral clarity of the original movie, with the central quandary once again offering a no-right-answer choice of which possessed little girl to kill. The spiritual stakes aren’t low, they are nonexistent.
Repent and Submit to the Pope
Believer is the first installment of a planned trilogy, though it’ll take a great deal of faith to keep this train on the tracks after the abysmal reception the first chapter has drawn. Perhaps the producers will see the error of their ways and make the next films more overtly religious, though Hollywood seems eternally doomed to scratch its head at the success of both explicitly and implicitly religious media properties.
But it may just be that The Exorcist was a one-and-done meditation on the challenges of faith, and that its countless imitators are enough of a franchise without more movies with “Exorcist” in the title. The future Believer films may have more things to say about spiritual horror, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
