So The Exorcist did devilishly good enterprise in its heyday, which started smack in the midst of the vacation expanse between Christmas and New Yr’s. The one vast December launch to do higher is James Cameron’s Titanic, and that opened almost 25 years later. However not like the movie concerning the sinking boat, The Exorcist truly is a Christmas film. We’re critical.
Whereas there isn’t a touch of the holly or the ivy on display screen, Friedkin and maybe extra crucially screenwriter William Peter Blatty, who tailored his personal bestselling novel of the identical identify, went out of their technique to make one of the heartfelt and non secular footage ever conceived for a wider viewers of skeptics, agnostics, and apostates. The movie is even set adjacently to Christmastime, though the image by no means attracts consideration to this truth. Early on within the movie, we Ellen Burstyn’s character stroll house on what is meant to be the start of Halloween eve. The solar continues to be shining and leaves are falling from the timber, however youngsters dressed as ghosts and witches run previous her on their technique to trick ‘r treating.
The scene in query happens on the very begin of the movie, earlier than Linda Blair’s poor little Regan MacNeil has proven any signs of coming down with a case of the Pazuzus. Nonetheless, we’re clued in {that a} truthful period of time passes between Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil wrapping manufacturing on her unnamed film-within-a-film and their Georgetown house turning right into a battleground betwixt good and evil. Alongside the best way, we are able to spot that the wind has picked up, the nights have turned wintry, and in some vast photographs of Georgetown, a Christmas ornament or two will be gleaned.
Friedkin by no means brings consideration to the time of yr, however sufficient weeks and months cross within the story for poor Father Karras (Jason Miller) to bury his mom, and Chris to take Regan to each medical knowledgeable in D.C. who come to the identical conclusion: name a priest. Friedkin, in fact, was himself a secularist like Chris—an agnostic man who was raised within the Jewish religion and who in 1973 didn’t consider in demons and ghouls. The movie’s screenwriter did, nevertheless.
Pulling from an alleged case of precise exorcism that he studied whereas attending Georgetown, creator Blatty believed deeply within the biblical definition of evil and he created a narrative supposed to remind his readers and viewers of its existence too. This was completed to scare you, sure, but in addition to encourage you to consider within the goodness of males’s souls. It even turned one in every of Blatty’s greatest contentions with Friedkin after the director eliminated a line within the theatrical reduce (which was later reinserted within the prolonged model) the place the movie’s vessel for many absolute goodness, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), says: “I believe the purpose is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly, to reject the chance that God might love us.”
That is clearly Blatty’s idea on the alleged phenomena of demonic possession, however the movie doesn’t enjoy simply the abject horror of the idea, but in addition within the goodness of individuals doing what is true. Ultimately, the monks Merrin and Karras are near saints (not less than for those who ignore the character assassination of a disparaging Chris MacNeil within the current The Exorcist: Believer). They offer their lives in order that poor little Regan shall be spared. They don’t lose sight of God’s love and acknowledge the little woman trapped beneath the hideous monster we bear witness to within the third act.
