The Exorcist (1973)
I’m lying in bed, somewhere between four and six years old, waiting for sleep when the witch appears at my window. I can see her shadow projected against my curtains from the lamp outside. She’s tall and shaped like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, complete with the pointy hat. She even sounds like her, too. She talks to me, and I talk to her, my voice quivering and my heart pounding. Her words are taunting, threatening. She says she’s going to get me and then cackles. She disappears, finally, when I yell for my dad.
I tell him about the witch, and he insists it was a dream.
“But I wasn’t asleep,” I say.
He brings me a drink of water, says goodnight, and eventually, I fall asleep.
In the morning, I tell my mom about the witch. She thinks it was a dream, too. But just in case, she says she prayed for me.
Let’s travel forward now.
I’m a high school senior, and I’m in a stranger’s home for a Bible study. I’ve spent my whole life in the conservative evangelical world, but somehow, this is a first. And the only reason I’m here now, aside from a friend inviting me, is because a girl I have a crush on is here too. Otherwise, I’d be at home.
When the Bible study starts, I’m instantly out of my element. There are songs, none of which I know, and then a husband and wife missionary team from Australia speaks. Their version of Christianity is unfamiliar to me. For them, God is active and involved in ways he isn’t in my version. He’s a hands-on God.
After they speak, everyone breaks into small groups for their own hands-on encounters. I’ve never seen this kind of thing before, and it’s weird. People are falling over, laughing, crying. It’s unbearably hot, and it’s hard to know if it’s just from all the bodies crammed into this living room or if there’s something more to it.
Finally, it’s my turn for one of these experiences. The husband from the missionary team puts his hands on my shoulders and prays over me. A few others do, too. Like the room, their hands are hot. But that’s not all I feel. After a moment, the cells of my body start to vibrate. It feels like I have electricity running through my veins, through every inch of me.
I don’t know if I can take this, I think.
And, as if God Himself sent the message to my brain, a response: Yes, you can.
As I write this, about six months away from turning forty, I can say — unequivocally — these are two of the strangest things to ever happen to me. I don’t know how to explain them. Maybe my dad was right, and the witch was just a dream. But it didn’t feel like one. And the Bible study? If that wasn’t a supernatural experience, I don’t know what it was.
But if I accept both of these moments as genuine, I’m boxed into a corner because then maybe — maybe — there really is some kind of cosmic war happening behind the scenes. And at this age, I’m less inclined than ever to believe that.
It’s not that I don’t believe in God or the supernatural, but my ideas of both have changed with time.
Looking back, religion was mostly a source of shame or anxiety for me. The world I grew up in taught me that I wasn’t enough. It taught me to be suspicious of my own feelings, to doubt myself, and to look to authority figures for approval. And it taught me that, at any moment, God could radically muck up your life just to build your character.
Faith, for me today, is much more love-thy-neighbor-oriented than anything else. It’s about appreciating the diversity within people and understanding that diversity as part of something unexplainably sacred. And it’s about the good that people can do when they come together for a common cause. There isn’t much room, however, for witches at windows and veins filled with lightning.
But the question never entirely goes away.
What was that all about?
That same question applies well to The Exorcist, that masterpiece of demonic possession by novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin.
When little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) becomes possessed by a demon, her mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), does everything possible to get a medical or scientific explanation for what’s wrong. But in the end, science and medicine fail her. The only explanation is one that neither Chris nor Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest who is struggling with his faith, wants to believe — Regan is actually possessed. How else to explain the strange voices, the projectile vomit, the objects moving on their own? Putting her through an exorcism seems like a step back into the Middle Ages, but it’s the only thing left to try.
Veteran exorcist Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) joins Father Karras for the climactic showdown between good and evil. Ultimately, the priests save Regan, but it comes at a cost. Father Merrin dies from an apparent heart attack, while Father Karras invites the demon into himself before jumping from Regan’s bedroom window and falling to his death.
According to news reports, audiences freaked when the movie came out. Some moviegoers fled from the theater. Others vomited or had heart attacks. In one case, it purportedly caused a miscarriage. And yet, for all that, neither Blatty nor Friedkin thought of The Exorcist as a horror movie. Blatty conceived of it as a “supernatural detective story,” while Friedkin called it a film about “the mystery of faith.”
Watching it for the first time now, it actually seems a little restrained for a movie in which a demon-possessed child masturbates with a crucifix.
I’d avoided it for a long time, in part because of those infamous audience horror stories. With the childhood I’d had, you just don’t mess around the devil. I can still remember one time when my mom warned me never to play with a Ouija board because who knows what might happen.
Of course, a movie is just a movie. I always knew that. But there’s knowing, and then there’s knowing. I’ve worked through enough issues by now to know it.
What I’ve found is that The Exorcist speaks effectively to that uncertainty I feel when I think about the witch at my window and the Bible study. The plot points in the movie don’t all add up cleanly. We don’t always understand the cause and effect of everything. We can intuit, for example, a connection between the opening, with Father Merrin discovering an ancient idol in Iran, and what happens to Regan in Georgetown. But it’s not a clean connection. There’s not a logical progression from one to the other. And it’s the same with memories like mine. Looking back, I can make inferences and guesses, but I can’t say with certainty what it all meant or what caused it. They’ll always be mysteries.
There’s a great Iris DeMent song that sums up how I try to think about faith, especially the parts that don’t make sense. It’s called “Let the Mystery Be.” It’s a song about accepting what you can’t know. One verse near the end stands out in particular:
Some say they're going to a place called glory
And I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
And I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be
Letting the mystery be might sound like taking the easy way out, but anyone who’s struggled with anxiety knows how hard it is sometimes to just let something be. Anxiety can be its own kind of demon, changing how a person thinks and acts, hijacking the mind, and reframing the world as a dangerous place, with you as the target.
To let something be is to show humility and recognize your own limits. In meditation, it’s about noticing what’s in your body and your mind and then letting those thoughts or sensations move along.
There’s a meditative quality to The Exorcist, too, believe it or not, if you can look past all the horror on the surface. It’s in the way Friedkin uses the camera to just observe. Whether we’re watching the doctors try to diagnose Regan or the priests perform the exorcism, Friedkin approaches it all with an unflinching curiosity, noting the details and letting them pass. Yes, the big-picture question about Regan’s condition is settled. But at least part of what we see — the minute connections, the whys and wherefores Blatty and Friedkin don’t explain — is up to us. We make sense of it the best we can and feel our way through the rest.