Exorcist resources

Four books provide essential reading: the novel that started it all, William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ and its sequel ‘Legion’. Mark Kermode’s critical study is one of the most readable titles in the BFI Classics series, free of the academic tone that typifies many of the BFI’s publications and packed with background information and intelligent analysis. Bob McCabe’s ‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes material.

‘The Exorcist’ fansite is your one-stop internet resource on the film. The word “fansite” normally sets alarm bells ringing with me, but this really is one of the best examples you’ll find.

Wikipedia articles on all five of the films provide easily digestible distillations of information available elsewhere and were indispensable in refreshing my memory while writing these pieces.

Finally, for some light relief after a week spent wrestling with the forces of darkness – be they Pazuzu or studio executives – click here to see the Starz Bunnies re-enact ‘The Exorcist’ in 30 seconds.

The Exorcist III

In refusing any involvement in ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’, William Peter Blatty’s opinion was “Karras fell down the steps; he’s dead – the story is over”. However, despite Boorman’s sequel doing the equivalent of a particularly eager kamizake pilot at the box office, Warner Bros were still keen on a third film. Blatty prepared a treatment intended, despite their differences over the final cut of ‘The Exorcist’, for Friedkin to direct. Friedkin’s ideas for a sequel diverged from Blatty’s and the project came to nought.

Blatty reworked the treatment into a novel, ‘Legion’. Arguably a more accomplished literary work than ‘The Exorcist’, it’s a measured, challenging and cerebral work that channels Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ in its enquiry into the nature and reality of evil offset by mankind’s facility for redemption. ‘Legion’ was published in 1983. Lieutenant Kinderman and Father Dyer are the principal characters. The novel does not contain any scene of exorcism.

In 1980, Blatty made his debut as director with an adaptation of his earlier novel ‘The Ninth Configuration’, an offbeat but curiously mesmerising story set in a military psychiatric unit. Part parable, part satire, entirely unexpected, ‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a true one-off. Little shown and largely overlooked, it’s a film ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal.

A decade later, with production companies Morgan Creek and Carolco vying for the rights to ‘Legion’, Blatty went with the former (Carolco had suggested script changes Blatty wasn’t happy with) and ‘The Exorcist III’ went before the cameras with Blatty directing for the second (and thus far last) time in his career. It wasn’t to be plain sailing.

With Lee J. Cobb dead and Father O’Malley too busy to reprise his role as Father Dyer, Blatty cast George C. Scott and Ed Flanders respectively. Scott suggests Kinderman rather than impersonating Cobb’s characterisation, but Blatty seems unable to rein him in at times and he hams it up a bit too much in some key scenes where underplaying would have proved more effective. Ed Flanders fares much better, making Dyer his own, but …

SPOILER ALERT

… shuffles off his mortal coil about a third of the way in. Early, slow-moving, dialogue-heavy scenes between Kinderman and Dyer, which seem to have no narrative function, pay off with Dyer’s demise: Blatty gives over enough screen time to the two men’s relationship to make the audience care. Kinderman, already investigating a series of murders which Dyer’s killing seems inextricably linked to, takes things personally …

SPOILERS END

… but when his investigations lead him to a mental hospital, the case takes on a supernatural element. An unidentified amnesiac, known only as Patient X, eerily resembles Father Karras (Jason Miller). When Kinderman quizzes him, his appearance changes to that of a notorious mass murderer, the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif). He knows things that only Karras could know; things that only Kinderman could know; and things, most chillingly, that only the Gemini Killer could know. Also, he knows all about the string of murders that have ravaged Georgetown. And he knows exactly how the murder was done that’s most upset Kinderman.

Brad Dourif is the ace up Blatty’s sleeve. Next to two scenes of exquisite, squirmy, Hitchcockian tension – one involving the hospital corridors by night (a scene as brilliantly constructed and shocking in its payoff as anything Hitch put his name to), the other taking the old saw of ‘the race against time’ and injecting a palpitating urgency into it – ‘The Exorcist III’ really delivers when Dourif is onscreen. His is a portrait of eloquent, mocking, sardonic, seductive evil that’s worthy of comparison to Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. Dourif is simply frickin’ magnificent and makes the film buzz with devilish energy.

Shortly after Blatty delivered his final cut, the working title of the film flitting between ‘The Exorcist 1990’, ‘Exorcist: Legion’ and ‘The Exorcist III’, the producers started fretting that here was a film with “exorcist” in the title (Blatty felt that, like the novel, it should simply be titled ‘Legion’*) that didn’t actually feature an exorcism. Against his better judgement, but working on the assumption that if he said no, they’d only bring in some hack to film it anyway, Blatty consented to reshoots including an all-out, effects-driven exorcism scene.

‘The Exorcist III’ would be close on a masterpiece if it weren’t for the exorcism. If only Morgan Creek had taken the long view that they didn’t even need the fucking word in the title. Imagine the poster, iconic enough with a shadowy picture of the steps down which Karras plunged, a tie to the original film already established in the tagline “dare you walk these steps again?” – all they needed was a banner saying “The story of ‘The Exorcist’ continues in … ‘LEGION’.” Job done. Simple as that. But, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s post, this wasn’t to be the last time Morgan Creek made a fundamentally bad decision vis-à-vis the ‘Exorcist’ franchise.

In order to shoehorn the exorcism into the narrative Blatty wrote in a new character, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson). Never mind that Williamson has the kind of gravitas, seriousness and granite-like presence von Sydow evinced in the original, he gets just one scene prior to the exorcism, seemingly turns up out of nowhere to conduct it, and the taunts Patient X subjects him to – visions of snakes slithering over him; the crucified and suffering Karras surrounded by the Gemini Killer’s victims – have no real impact since we learn nothing about Morning. Is he afraid of snakes? Was he a friend of Karras’s? In ‘The Exorcist’ the demon attacks Karras by using his guilt over his mother’s death; he does so to drive Karras out of the room so that an old score can be settled with Merrin. This gives the original film its power. ‘The Exorcist’ is only superficially a film about a young girl who’s possessed. It’s actually about a demon who possesses a young girl in order to destroy two priests.

If the exorcism weakens the film – and with footage excised from Blatty’s original version now lost, there seems little hope of a director’s cut – there are a couple of inconsistencies that niggle. Kinderman describes Karras as “my best friend – I loved the man”, when in fact the two men barely knew each other in the first film and it’s Dyer with whom Kinderman strikes up a friendship. Also, a young black boy murdered early on is described as the son of the woman who figured out that the tape recordings made by Karras of Regan MacNeil speaking in tongues were English being spoken backwards. But in ‘The Exorcist’ the sound engineer who determines this is a caucasian male, not an African-American woman.

However, there are enough moments in ‘The Exorcist III’ that are genuinely shocking, creepy, powerful and thought-provoking to outnumber thoroughly its flaws. In a photo-finish with ‘Dominion’, it’s joint second best entry in the series and so confidently and consummately crafted it’s a shame that Blatty didn’t dabble in directing more often.



*From The Gospel According to Mark: “And Jesus asked him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”



SOURCES
‘Legion’ by William Peter Blatty (Simon & Schuster, 1983)

‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ by Bob McCade (Omnibus Press, 1999)

The Exorcist

In 1949, The Washington Post reported that a Catholic priest in Mount Rainier, Maryland, had exorcised a young boy apparently possessed by a malignant force or spirit. William Peter Blatty, studying at Georgetown University, read of the case a year later and became passionate about developing it into a book-length study. He managed to contact a priest involved in the exorcism, but church authorities denied him permission to discuss the events, citing the potentially traumatic effects on the boy should the case become widely publicised.

Blatty embarked on a career as a screenwriter and sometime novelist, mainly penning lightweight comedies. But the exorcism case stayed with him. In 1971, he published ‘The Exorcist’. Although ostensibly based on the actual case, Blatty made numerous diversions, both in terms of the circumstances surrounding the possession and the nature of the manifestations, as well as changing the possessed child from a 13-year old boy to a 12-year old girl.

Blatty’s first compromise came when his publishers stipulated a more ambiguous ending (Blatty has always been concerned that the ending of the piece, book or film, should emphasis that evil has been defeated, normalcy has returned and all is well). When Warner Bros acquired the film rights, Blatty himself wrote the first draft screenplay, bringing it in an unrealistic 220 pages (using the industry standard rule of thumb that a page of script equates to a minute of screen time, Blatty’s preferred script would have resulted in a four hour movie).

Various directors were offered the project: Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols all turned it down. Kubrick simply wasn’t interested in the material, while Penn had teaching commitments at Yale. Both Nichols and Boorman were hesitant over casting a child actor in such a demanding role. Blatty lobbied for William Friedkin, even though the director had been openly critical of one of his earlier scripts.

Friedkin began whittling down Blatty’s screenplay, truncating (or even excising) entire screeds of theological discourse, and reducing the centrality of Lieutenant Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb). Still, his original 140-minute cut of ‘The Exorcist’ earned Blatty’s approbation. It was the changes he made as the release date approached and the commercial considerations of a 2-hour running time became paramount that caused ruptions between writer and director.

Amongst the scenes Friedkin cut wholesale are the now-legendary ‘spider-walk’ (although both agreed on its deletion, given that it would have freighted an already emotional scene with a double climax); a scene where Regan (Linda Blair) is checked out by her doctor (leading to discontinuity given an allusion in a subsequent scene to Regan being prescribed pills); a conversation between Fathers Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Karras (Jason Miller) during a lull in the exorcism; and, perhaps most significantly to Blatty, the original ending focusing on the developing friendship between Kinderman and Father Dyer (Father William O’Malley). This he replaced with a more dour scene in which Dyer, having bade farewell to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and Regan, glances down the vertiginous flight of steps where Karras plunged to his death, then turns and walks away, alone.

If Blatty found Friedkin’s aesthetic decisions controversial, they pale in comparison to his directorial techniques. The undisputed highlight is Friedkin’s treatment of Father O’Malley. A Jesuit priest, author and teacher, O’Malley had been hired as technical advisor; Friedkin then decided to cast him as Karras’s friend and mentor. Dyer’s big scene is his horrified and shaky administering of the last rites to Karras following his fatal plunge. A non-actor, O’Malley was unable to emote in front of the camera. Between takes Friedkin asked O’Malley, “Do you trust me?” O’Malley replied that he did. Friedkin hauled off and slapped the priest across the face, then shoved him onto the set to do the take.

Elsewhere, Burstyn and Blair sustain back injuries during physically gruelling stunt work; Friedkin discharged a blank round from a pistol to startle Miller for a key scene; and the sound effects for the exorcism sequence were blasted out at extreme volume on set without warning to create a tense, nervous, jumpy atmosphere.

The film opened to packed cinemas and round-the-block queues. Controversy was immediate. There were reports of vomiting, fainting* and miscarriages. Much was made of Friedkin’s use of subliminal imagery (the ghost face in Karras’s dream), however this is a very brief edit rather than something truly subliminal. As Friedkin inarguably put it, “if you can see it, it’s not subliminal”. True to the tendency of urban legend to attached itself to the film, this has been taken as a suggestion that there are subliminal shots in the film.

Evangelist Billy Graham went further, declaring that there was evil in the very celluloid. Why the devil would want to possess a few cans of raw film stock is something Graham failed to elaborate on, though it does explain a few things about the work of Michael Bay.

Mark Kermode’s definitive book (published as part of the BFI Modern Classics series) is essential reading. He discusses the “complex and contradictory” nature of the film, stating that in depicting the invasion of the abnormal into the normalcy of a white middle-class American home, the setting firmly rooted in a recognisably suburban environment, Friedkin pushed back the boundaries of what audiences of the time were comfortable with (particularly in terms of the horror genre, which had hitherto channelled its aesthetic from the gothic); and yet the good vs. evil narrative that ‘The Exorcist’ finally boils down to represents a highly conservative worldview “in which priests, policemen, good mothers and devoted sons” are the arbiters of what is right and sanctified.

Kermode nails it perfectly when he says, “It is in this tension between the progressive and the regressive, the divine and the depraved, the hidden and the apparent, that the power of ‘The Exorcist’ lies.”

The 2nd edition includes a transcript of a conversation between Friedkin and Blatty conducted by Kermode in 1998. Friedkin considers the film finished. Blatty – who has written alternative endings suggesting Karras’s resurrection/ascension – feels otherwise. Beyond the divergent visions of writer and director, beyond the very tensions that make the film what it is, ‘The Exorcist’ continues to haunt the imagination, permeate popular culture/consciousness and agitate the mind.



*The first time I saw ‘The Exorcist’, back when it was still banned on video in the UK, was at a midnight screening at a local fleapit. During the arteriogram sequence – a set-piece that is arguably more disturbing than any of the supernatural shenanigans – I bolted from my seat, weaved shakily to the gents and communed with the cold water tap for a minute or two.



SOURCES

‘The Exorcist’ by William Peter Blatty (Harper & Row, 1971)
‘The Exorcist’ (2nd edn) by Mark Kermode (BFI Publishing, 1998)
‘The Fear of God’ (1998 BBC documentary produced by Nick Freand-Jones)

And let my cry come unto thee / Exorcist week on The Agitation of the Mind

A couple of years ago I picked up the ‘Exorcist Anthology’ box set, dirt cheap: all five films, indifferently packaged. A raft of special features bulking out the original, directors’ commentaries on ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ and ‘Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist’ and sod all apart from trailers on ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and ‘The Exorcist III’.

Beyond watching the original for my write-up last Halloween, the box set sat on the shelf gathering dust. A week ago, I blew the dust off it and sat down for an ‘Exorcist’-fest. The power of Christ knows what compelled me.

William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ is visceral, cerebral and still controversial, one of the key American studio films of the ’70s – a stand-out in a decade littered with great American movies. It would be all-too-easy (and lazy) to describe the other titles as a mixed bag, beset by script and production problems. Not to mention unfair, since Friedkin’s film wasn’t exactly plain sailing in its production. Just like William Peter Blatty’s novel was essentially a compromise from his original concept of the material.

In fact, the entire ‘Exorcist’ saga is shadowed by controversy, compromise, meddling and ill-fortune.

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at each film in turn, tracing the story from the genesis of William Peter Blatty’s groundbreaking novel (it has its roots in an actual case in 1949) to production company Morgan Creek’s rejection of Paul Schrader’s prequel and astonishing decision to remake it entirely under the less-than-guiding hand of Renny Harlin in 2004.