The Exorcist is not a horror film.
William Friedkin famously said that he didn’t consider The Exorcist a horror film. It seems obvious to me, at least, that whether or not he considered it such, that’s just nonsense. The Exorcist is unquestionably a horror flick. It is horrific, it’s supernatural, it looks spooky as hell, and it has some of the most iconic moments of horror ever committed to screen. Anyone who looks at The Exorcist and proclaims that it’s not a horror movie isn’t being honest with themselves, and that included Friedkin; sometimes geniuses are wrong. But there is something to say, I think, about just what it is that makes The Exorcist so effective as a horror film, and bizarrely enough, that’s all wrapped up in Friedkin’s nonsensical claims.
The Exorcist is scary not because it features demonic possession, a little girl doing and saying monstrous, nightmarish things, head-spinning, green vomit, or an unsettling Mike Oldfield score. No, all of these things certainly work together to craft an atmosphere and a sense of dread, these are things that arguably tip the flick over into the realms of pure horror, but they are not why it gets under your skin, nor are they what makes the film itself inherently scary. What makes The Exorcist so frightening, in my humble opinion at least, stems from that fact that Friedkin appears to geniuinely believe that he’s not making a horror film. Considering how memorable these moments are, and despite the fact that they are often the moments that people point to as the scariest parts, it’s worth noting that for most of the runtime, The Exorcist is less interested in that kind of out-there, grotesque nightmarishness than it is in the more real-world, drama-esque elements of its narrative. It is, for big chunks of its runtime, not really a horror in the purest sense. In fact, for the majority of the film, Friedkin appears to be making a drama.
It’s the story of a man who has lost his faith and a woman who is terrified of what is happening to her daughter. The supernatural and demonic elements of the movie are just the catalyst and the means through which the film explores these ideas. The scariest bits of The Exorcist, for me at least, are the bits where young Regan (Linda Blair) is subjected to invasive medical procedures, something that is far more horrific than watching her crabwalking down the stairs, because, well… it’s all too real. And herein we find a truth to Friedkin’s claims; The Exorcist is a horror film, there’s no question about that, but that doesn’t mean Friedkin himself is making one. His approach is in capturing the reality of this situation, in capturing the trauma and the truth in the nightmare. Of watching reasonable people deal with an unreasonable challenge. Of watching the real world fail to tackle an issue that exists well beyond the realms of it. The Exorcist is about faith in religion as much as it is about faith in science and reason. And it is about what happens when your faith in these things is brought into question; what happens when you simply cannot explain away what is happening with logic.
This is why, I think, so many of the sequels fall flat. Exorcist II: The Heretic, dispells all the real-world elements. That film’s director, John Boorman, does away with any of the ambiguity that Friedkin is careful to maintain across the first two thirds of his film, opting instead to delve straight into the supernatural elements. The results are… lacklustre, and that’s putting it nicely. To be fair to Boorman, there was nothing he could have done. Friedkin’s film ends without ambiguity, there’s nowhere else to go. The Exorcist is a film with a definitive ending, and the only way to continue that story would be to do what Boorman chose to do. The problem with that, of course, is who cares? We’ve seen that movie plenty of times before, it’s the set-up of countless horror flicks across all of history. The Exorcist worked because it brought the nightmarish realms of supernatural horror crashing into the real world, and once you’ve done that there’s just not an awful lot of places left to go.
William Peter Blatty seemingly solved the problem of how to follow The Exorcist by essentially shifting gears and telling a new story. Crucially, though, The Exorcist III is more or less its own story, with the events of the original only serving as backstory, and in this sense the film basically repeats the trick; the supernatural encroaches upon the real world, but this time from a new perspective (no longer are we in a family drama, now we’re in a police procedural), allowing the knowledge of the original to imbue the flick with a sense of hopelessness. We know how this ends, we know the monsters are real, now we’re just waiting for our protagonist to catch up, and the horror comes from watching him have his own faith and his own world view brought into question. And you can see just how important this approach is to the film’s success in the fact that when it comes to The Exorcist III, it is the director’s cut, Legion, which keeps Blatty’s original concept intact, that is the far superior film. The movie works best when it stands alone, connected to by seperate from Friedkin’s movie.
By all accounts the television series achieved a similar success, but I’ve not seen it, so I can’t comment. What I can comment on is the remainder of the franchise (bar Joseph Gorden Green’s new entry, The Exorcist: Believer, again because I haven’t seen it), all of which seems to try their hand and tackling the story with variations of the approach Exorcist II: The Heretic took. None of them work, and their inability to work lay within their fundamental misunderstanding of just what kind of story The Exorcist actually is. Remember, Friedkin was not making a horror film, and in that approach he tapped into the true horror of the premise. If The Exorcist as a franchise is to survive, if it’s to connect with modern audiences on a level anywhere close to the way the original did in its day, it’s integral that filmmakers understand this very basic point; the true horror lay not in the demonic possession at the centre of the story, but rather in the human drama that said possession impacts. The Exorcist is not the story of a demon, it’s story of the people the demon affects, and of how its very presense affects them, shatters their understanding of the world, and how they come to terms with a world that now looks drastically different, in which their prior belief and certainty in the tools of science and logic and reality no longer hold much weight.
William Friedkin famously said that he didn’t consider The Exorcist a horror film. He was wrong, but in approaching the material with the eye of someone who refused to accept that he was making a horror film, he found something all the more horrifying. That’s what we need to see from the franchise moving forward. The Exorcist is unquestionably, unmistakably a horror film. And yet… And yet, it is not like other horror films. Its power lay outside the horror, beyond the demons and the gross-out effects sequences and the terrifying make-up, and can be found in the reality of it, in the truth behind the supernatural terrors that lurk within. Let’s try to remember that.
