Long enough for us to see them, but short enough that they are hard to identify without the aid of a freeze-frame. These images are on screen for two or three frames at a time.
At one point, a huge close-up of Pazuzu – the demonic tiki idol found by Father Merrin in Iraq – is superimposed on Regan's bedroom door, and an image of Father Karras' dead mother appears in the fluttering curtains just before he dives out the window to his death. This image, for example, looms over Regan during her first medical exam and later flashes beside her mother's head in the flickering lights of the kitchen. Mostly, it is a scowling face – white skin, red eyes, yellow teeth – that presumably represents the presence of "Captain Howdy," Regan's conception of the spirit that has apparently leapt from her Ouija board into her body. They're not subliminal we see them, and we are meant to. Friedkin took an already terrifying subject and then added layers of visual and aural cues to heighten what we were already experiencing.Īt various points in the film, Friedkin flashes ghostly images on the screen, just for an instant. That is not simply a reference to the pea soup and profanities that spew from Linda Blair's mouth, or the spectacle of young Regan gouging her genitals with a crucifix. Roger Ebert (in a four-star review) and Pauline Kael (in a relative pan) both expressed shock that the film avoided an X-rating, and even by today's standards they are correct – it's astonishing that "The Exorcist" was an "R" just four years after "Midnight Cowboy" got hung with the "X."įriedkin went to great lengths to instill fear and discomfort in his audience. Some saw it as a brilliant but disturbing thriller with a deep theological subtext, while others saw it as an exploitative potboiler that resorted to perverse stunts to generate fear through shock value – a high-end Herschell Gordon Lewis flick cloaked in religious imagery. What's inarguable is that Friedkin made an emotionally charged horror film that hit with the force of a sledgehammer. "They understood that the demon in Regan McNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock.") ("Every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying," King wrote.
Stephen King, in his book "Danse Macabre," states definitively that "The Exorcist" is a parable about parents of the World War II generation and their complete inability to relate to the behavior they were seeing out of the children of the sex-and-drugs revolution of the 1960s. I have a close friend who says without hesitation that it is ultimately the story of a mother who would do absolutely anything for her daughter, and therefore a reminder of the infinite well of maternal love.
I have always thought "The Exorcist," at its most basic roots, is the story of Father Damian Karras losing his faith (due to guilt over his dying mother) and reclaiming his soul (by sacrificing his own life to save the young girl).
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