Day 127: The Exorcist

"The Power of Christ compels you!"

I didn’t find the sound in The Exorcist to be that dynamic or interesting. In fact, had I not known that I was going to write a review for it I wouldn’t have remembered anything about it. Well, actually, I still don’t, really, and I paid special attention to it. The diegetic sound wasn’t all that good. The writing wasn’t magnificent. The delivery of the dialogue was nothing to go crazy about. The only thing that really peaked my interest was the backwards speak of the possessed girl. Then they went and explained it as backwards English, demystifying and therefore ruining that effect, too. There was lots of banging upstairs. It wasn’t mixed too well from what I recall.



The nondiegetic sound is a little more interesting. The chants in the beginning, which apparently were prayers (that whole sequence was kind of jumbled to me), are one aspect. Another is Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. I know of the album because many consider it a classic but had not actually heard it. It has now gone on to be sampled by Janet Jackson. There were shrieks and things that probably didn’t come from the characters themselves. That’s just standard horror procedure. That is, honestly, all I have to say about the sound.

I am obviously not a fan of this film, and never have been. I saw it many years ago and laughed my way through. I never thought I’d see it again simply because I disliked it so much. Owen Roizman did the cinematography. He’s done some great stuff, for example he did Network. I immediately think of the long desk with its many lights and that magnificent monologue on greed. His images are one and the same with my thoughts of the film. That means that Friedkin wanted it this way. He wanted the shoddy looking home movie feel, probably to achieve a level of reality or something, to ground this in fact so as to keep the audience with the story and not the style. I respect the idea, but I feel that the execution was poor.

As for on an ideological level, I also didn’t appreciate the film. All of the ethnic tensions and weird little juxtapositions didn’t hit home for me. The only one that struck me was the Nazi butler, which seemed like it had nothing to do with the rest of the film. I also can’t believe Max von Sydow was in this and I never noticed.

Everything about this movie strikes me the wrong way. Even the good things, like Burstyn’s performance, are squandered away within the beast. Way too much time is spent on what turns out to be pretty ambiguous relationships, anyways. All of the terror of the girl possessed is only shown in 30-second clips, not nearly long enough for us to get a sense of what we’re dealing with. That is, until the end, at which point I stopped caring.

I’ve never liked Friedkin. I don’t like The French Connection. I thought Cruising was not only awful but also homophobic and prejudice. Three of his films have been nominated for Razzies. Two of his other films have been nominated for Stuntman awards. After The Exorcist he seems to be living on its tailcoats floating along making B-movie horror and action movies no one remembers or cares about. Maybe The Exorcist just caught a certain zeitgeist and he’s been looking to find the next one since.

And what should have been the most profound, all of the religious aspects and the warnings of a faithless world are, alas, lost on me, someone who is not religious. Had I had a faith, though, this would not be the film to reaffirm it. This is a low-grade horror film in my opinion, with none of the beauty of the great Italian horror films, like Suspira, none of the philosophical weight (to me) of films like Videodrome, and none of the sheer terror of a film like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.