After spending a few years on a trilogy of Halloween legacy-quels, writer/director David Gordon Green has moved on to reviving another iconic 1970s-vintage horror franchise with The Exorcist: Believer (opening Oct. 6). It's a particularly fitting time to dig into the long shadow cast by the original The Exorcist, both because of the recent passing of its director, William Friedkin, and since this year marks the 50th anniversary of the satanic-possession classic. The Exorcist was 1973's single biggest theatrical hit, a pop-culture sensation that became as famous for extreme audience reactions to its unsettling subject matter as for the movie itself. The Exorcist was the 1973 release that the most people bought tickets for, but there's a question that intrigues me: Was it the movie the most people bought tickets for because it was released in 1973?
At first glance, there's not a lot that ties The Exorcist specifically to the era in which it was released—except, that is, for the movie that actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is in Washington, D.C. to shoot when her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) goes all demonic on her. In the one snippet of on-set filming that we see, Chris is playing what appears to be an administrator at a university, responding to student protests about military presence on campus. As she tries to settle them down—suggesting, for example, that they need to work "within the system"—the response just gets angrier. The character she's playing is, basically, The Establishment. She's someone who doesn't understand what's gotten into the kids these days.
Eventually, of course, something gets into her kid, and the fact that the object of the demonic possession in The Exorcist is a child has always been interpreted as one of the things that made it so unsettling to viewers. Blair's performance—no matter how much of it consists of lip-synching to animalistic growls and the purring evil of Mercedes McCambridge—is a marvel of manifesting an evil presence through physicality. From a contemporary perspective, whatever Friedkin put her through to elicit that performance likely seems unconscionable. But did it strike a nerve? Hell, yes.
What tends to get less attention than the more extreme instances of spewing profanities and/or pea soup, however, is the material that precedes it, as Chris is trying to find a medical answer for Regan's strange behavior. Friedkin's direction emphasizes both what Regan endures—the film's most difficult-to-watch sequence might actually be her MRI exam—and Chris's terrified reactions as she watches, and waits, helplessly. The Exorcist builds its terror on a mother's sense that her child is in danger, and that she has no idea what can be done to make that child better.
Even more specifically, it becomes a narrative about our children becoming people we don't even recognize—an unease that was certainly swirling throughout the country in the early 1970s in the relationships between parents and their adolescent or teenage children. The Exorcist teases for a significant amount of its running time an uncertainty regarding whether Regan's malady is physical, psychological or supernatural, including a somewhat prescient scene (apparently only in the "director's cut") where a doctor prescribes Ritalin to Regan with a primitive description of what we'd now call ADHD. For a large portion of American population circa 1973, it felt like all of the kids were simply going crazy, and no one could figure out whether the problem was that they needed medication, needed therapy or needed God.
None of this is to understate the visceral effectiveness of The Exorcist as a piece of horror filmmaking—from jump-scares and flashes of demonic faces, to Dick Smith's legendary makeup effects and the magnificent use of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." It just seemed to be hitting a particular cultural soft spot of its moment, combining a more general parental fear about endangered children with something particularly connected to a Greatest Generation sense of youth gone mad.
Ultimately, maybe it's hard to deny from the climactic confrontation with Father Karras (Jason Miller) that an actual demon had been inhabiting Regan MacNeil, making her say and do things that violated all of society's standards of acceptable behavior. Plenty of parents in 1973 probably walked away from The Exorcist thinking, "Well, at least that would be an explanation I could understand."