The Exorcist rocked the world 50 years ago and horror has never been the same since. It shocked audiences with its unflinching portrayals of disturbing medical examinations, levels of profanity that shot right past those considered “acceptable” for Hollywood studio films, and a scene in which a twelve-year-old girl masturbates with a crucifix. It was decried by some and lauded by others. Evangelist Billy Graham famously said, “the Devil is in every frame” and urged Christians not to see the film and thereby expose themselves to such evil. The Catholic Church was mixed, condemning the film’s profanity and violence, but individuals within the church also praised its depiction of the power of good over evil. Roger Ebert loved it. Pauline Kael hated it. What matters, though, is people saw it, and they saw it in droves, making it the biggest box-office smash of the year. In 1973 and 74 it famously induced fainting, screaming, and vomiting. There are several filmed interviews with visibly shaken patrons who had walked out on the film practically in hysterics. But beneath all this sensation is the reason why it was then and continues to be so effective. It is only nominally a film about demons and the devil—at its core, The Exorcist is a deeply human story.
The Exorcist is about many things, but for me, more than anything, it is about various experiences of religious belief and the tensions between faith and reason. At one end of the spectrum stands Father Lancaster Merrin, played by Max von Sydow. Merrin is the personification of stalwart faith, predestined from the film’s opening sequence to face off against the demon. He is unshakable in his belief in God and the Roman Catholic religion through which he expresses that faith. He will be a force for good in the world or die trying. At the other end of this spectrum is Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who before the events of the film simply doesn’t give any thought to the spiritual dimension and has no time for any kind of belief in a god or anything connected with religion. She seems fascinated by the priests and nuns that inhabit the neighborhood where she is living during her current film shoot, but it is more like she is an armchair anthropologist observing a foreign culture.
Caught between these two worlds is the struggling Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest who believes he has lost, or is in the process of losing, his faith. The writer of both the original novel and the screenplay for The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, gives full investment to all the characters he creates, but he seems to understand Karras in a deeper way than any of the others. As a practicing Roman Catholic, he often wrote about matters of faith and regularly delved deep into the questions, contradictions, and tensions of belief and doubt. His novels The Ninth Configuration and Legion and the films that were made from them (the latter released as The Exorcist III) are testaments to this. Through Karras, Blatty creates a surrogate for the portion of his audience that may not relate to Merrin or MacNeil; the person ensconced in a religious faith who struggles with doubts about their system of belief and whether or not there is anything to believe in at all. He is simultaneously a man of the cloth and a man of science, a psychologist by training but his training has come through the Jesuit system he has been consecrated into. He is a personification of the tension between faith and reason that is written into the Christian scriptures themselves. In another sense, Karras also personifies an entire nation in transition as America was beginning its shift to an increasingly post-religious state.
On a less esoteric and far more relatable human level, Damien Karras has lost hope, and the greatest symptom of this is his sense of helplessness. In a key moment early in the film, a homeless man holds out his hand and asks, “Fadda! Could you help an old altar boy?” before adding, “I’m a Cat’lic.” Damien can only stare at the man in silence. Perhaps he is repulsed, but maybe even more he is frozen by his inability to truly help this man, and his helplessness has left him empty, cold, and unable to feel the kind of empathy that likely burned like a fire within him in his younger days. Damien may well be asking the same question in his own heart to his Heavenly Father, pleading for some kind of awakening, calling out to his God, “can you help an old altar boy, Father?” but only getting the dreadful Silence in response. Soon after this incident, he confesses to a friend and fellow priest, “I think I’ve lost my faith, Tom,” and is clearly devastated to speak the words aloud. He also feels helpless in his inability to help his dying and needy mother, played by Vasiliki Maliaros, in her last days. He seems unable to summon the strength to comfort her in the ways he would like. When she dies, it reduces him to little more than a shell.
When Chris MacNeil comes to Father Karras in desperation, he uses the words of his science rather than faith to comfort her, but by this point, even the skeptic Chris has reached the end of her reliance upon human power. “She’s already seen every fucking psychiatrist in the world, she needs a priest!” Chris exclaims in exasperation, prompting Karras to evaluate her daughter Reagan (Linda Blair). At first, he puts the girl through the similar paces of the psychologists from outside the church that she had seen before, concluding that Reagan is experiencing some kind of extreme psychological episode. When Merrin comes to the house, Karras tries to fill him in on his psychological conclusions, saying there appear to be three distinct personalities, to which Merrin responds, “there is only one.” With these words, Merrin immediately reestablishes himself as the unshakable rock of faith in the film after a long absence from the narrative.
After the exorcism begins, Damien’s doubts begin to crumble; he simply cannot explain away what he is seeing and experiencing any longer. The demon uses the incident with the homeless man and experiences with his mother to break him mentally and physically. “You killed your mother! You left her alone to die!” it shouts. The demon uses the voices of both the derelict and his mother to needle under his psyche. Late in the film, it even appears to Damien as his mother, preying on his guilt, tightening the screws in his brain, mocking him, destroying him. These trials all culminate in his final act of compassion in which he sacrifices himself for Reagan, calling on the demon to leave her and come into him, laying down his life for her safety. In the end, he is given the opportunity for one last act of faith when he gives his silent confession to his closest friend Father Dyer, played by real life Jesuit priest William O’Malley, at the base of the stairs he has just tumbled down. According to John 15:13, Jesus said, “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In the end, Karras’s act is an act of the greatest love as he lays down his life for Reagan, her mother, and perhaps his friends Lt. Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) and Father Dyer. The film does not fully answer whether Karras reclaims his faith in the end, but there is a strong implication of it.
Director William Friedkin continually maintained that “you get out of The Exorcist what you bring into it.” This statement, which he made in several interviews over many years, has always rung true for me. Through the various stages of my life, what I bring to and take out of the film continues to evolve. I originally came to it as a sort of test of my mettle as a horror fan. When I first saw it, The Exorcist was regularly touted as “the scariest movie of all time,” topping dozens of lists of such rankings. I had heard about the rotating head, the vomit, and the audience reactions. The adults in my circle seemed to discuss it only occasionally and in hushed tones when they did. It had also been labeled as a kind of forbidden fruit by my religious upbringing.
I distinctly remember my childhood pastor describing the film as featuring scenes of “demons flying out of people,” proving that by the mid-1980s the film had developed something of a mythic reputation. Curiosity drove me to the library where I pored over books about monsters and horror movies, featuring stills that remain in my mind to this day, including several from The Exorcist, which sent my imagination racing. When I actually saw the film, there were certainly moments that shocked and disturbed me, but it was also clear that there had been a fair amount of misinformation spread about it. I can’t claim to have fully grasped it at the time, the first section felt slow to my young self and contained a distinct lack of the pea-soup-spewing, head-rotating horror I expected. When those moments did come, they certainly delivered, but it just felt like it took forever to get there. That said, I became fascinated with the movie and watched it over and over until I became familiar with practically every beat. It even became something of a comforting film to watch. I knew it so well that I could practically play it in my mind if I so desired, which remains largely the case to this day.
In my mid-teens I had a profound spiritual awakening. The faith of my youth, which always seemed so distant became incredibly real and close to me. During that time, I felt I should distance myself from horror. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and it was a conversation about The Exorcist that brought this brief period of fasting from horror to an end. I remember the bass player for the worship band that I played with at the time saying he had watched the film the night before and been blown away by it. He said that it was really getting at the heart of some profound truths about the nature of faith and its tension with science and reason. This made me drastically reappraise the film and come to realize that the heart of The Exorcist is not the shocks, scares, and supernatural fireworks, but the crisis of faith experienced by its tragic hero, Father Karras. I went on to a career in church ministry as a music director that lasted ten years. I have mixed feelings about those years. I am grateful for the many wonderful people I got to know, but also realize that I was not right for that role. I have now been away from church work for longer than I was in it, happily teaching third graders how to play recorders.
These days I find myself relating to Damien Karras more than ever before. Like him, I sometimes look at the world around me with a sense of helplessness. There is so much pain, grief, and tragedy and so little I can do about it. I see those who claim to be Christians consistently profaning the name of Jesus by placing on a pedestal the kinds of hypocrisy he decried. I see churches that clearly worship politics and politicians over the God they claim to serve. I see them turn away and even ridicule the most vulnerable, the “least of these brothers of mine” that Jesus commanded his followers feed and clothe and visit while sick and imprisoned. It angers me and it grieves me. It pushes me further away from belief, but still I hold on, even if it is only by a thread. Like Karras, there are too many things that I have seen, heard, and experienced that I cannot simply explain away. And so, also like him, I stand on the tightrope of doubt between faith and unbelief and wonder if I’ll ever fully get to either side.
Like Damien Karras I feel the unbearable Silence, the very same lamented by Hamlet in his last breath, Ingmar Bergman in his faith trilogy, and Shusaku Endo in his brilliant novel. And I question whether the Silence is real or if I have lost the ability to listen. Still, in the back of my mind these words echo, perhaps as they would in the mind of Damien Karras, “and we know that all things work together for good…” Challenges work to make us stronger, to love our neighbor more, to help us feel joy more deeply, to persevere through the dark places of life, to give us the strength to sacrifice for others. This will most likely not include calling a demon into yourself and taking a header down a flight of stairs, but there are many forms of sacrifice. They don’t even need to be monetary. It can be time, talent, attention, empathy, kindness. When we spend any of these things on someone else, there is sacrifice involved. No matter how small or insignificant it may seem, it is not wasted. When I see these acts of sacrifice and do my best to perform them myself, it goes a long way to restore my faith, not only in humanity, but also in the God I still cling to as best I can. I hope someday that I’ll end up on one side or the other of this chasm between belief and unbelief, but for now, I suppose this tightrope I and many like me balance on is as good a place to be as any.
