"The Exorcist" Stunned Audiences

When this movie came out in late 1973, it created a sensation in the public the likes of which I've rarely seen. Everywhere you went people were talking about this film and the theaters were packed. I went to see it twice, but perhaps three times. Many of us like to be scared, at least a little, but this film absolutely terrified some people. Based on the book of the same name by William Peter Blatty, which was published a few years before, the book sales soared along with the box office receipts. Blatty, who was raised Catholic, based his novel on a real case of exorcism performed some twenty plus years before.

The story is the classic struggle between good and evil. We can't kill evil in the true sense, for like in the Halloween movies, you think evil (Jason) is dead, but it isn't, it lives to come back at another time, and it lives within us, like a cold sore virus, waiting for an opportunity to manifest itself again. Conquering our own worst characteristics can be very difficult, especially for some, and those characteristics are then available for exploitation (the Nazis almost made a science out of exploiting the awful side of human nature, and then whipping it into pure hate). But we have choices to make, and likely you all have seen the cartoon of a person with an angel on one shoulder and the devil or a demon on other, both talking into the person's ears to convince them to choose their desired course. John Steinbeck used the same sort of theme in his great book, "East of Eden," which was another good versus evil saga, but with the idea that humans "may" choose their own course. This idea of "choice" also shows that we can't have good without evil (see Word History, below).

The story of "The Exorcist" revolves around a little girl, played by Linda Blair, living with her actress mother (played by Ellen Burstyn) in Washington, DC, while a movie is being filmed. They have a German couple (Swiss German?)* to take care of the house. The director of the movie being filmed in Washington, who is usually drunk, taunts the man for having been a Nazi, but the obviously perturbed man always uneasily says, "I'm Swiss." The girl's parents are separated, and as her birthday arrives, she overhears her mother using abusive and profanity laden words in a telephone call to the seemingly uncaring father, who is in Europe. The contrast is, the mother deeply loves and cares about her daughter, while the father, "... doesn't give a shit," per dialog from the movie. Does this lack of a father's love leave the girl vulnerable to evil? Does a possible former Nazi make the house and the girl a target?

After a series of odd noises are heard coming from the attic, the little girl begins to display behavior out of character for her, including bad language, a situation that grows increasingly worse. After all sorts of doctors and tests, and scans, the situation deteriorates further, as the child's bed shakes and quakes, even when the mother jumps onto the bed to help her daughter. The doctors insist there is a problem in the girl's brain, even when they too witness an episode of the bed shaking and even lifting off the floor. This all demonstrates their desire to apply logic to the illogical. Eventually the doctors tell the mother to seek religious help for girl, whom they say believes she is possessed by a demon.

Meanwhile, the film had opened at an archeological dig site in Iraq, where one of the artifacts recovered is a small demon-like figurine. The head of the expedition is a Catholic priest (played by Max von Sydow) who recognizes the figurine as a demon he has encountered before. He goes to an area with a large statue of the same demon. He stands opposite of the demon, thus depicting the coming battle of  "good versus evil."

Then we meet another priest (played by Jason Miller), who is in Washington, D.C., and who is a psychiatric counselor for troubled priests. The job has taken a toll on the relatively young priest, who sees clergymen who are questioning their very faith, a situation he also begins to face. The man had left home and his Greek immigrant mother, to join the priesthood, but as his mother's health declines, his conscience continues to trouble him, bringing him to a severe crisis of faith when his mother dies without him being there. When the little girl's mother seeks religious help for her daughter (they had no particular religious beliefs), she meets with this priest, who tells her the doctors are likely correct in their diagnosis of a brain problem. When he goes to the house, where the girl is now confined to bed, we see a now largely disfigured girl, whose voice too has dramatically changed.**

More and the conclusion coming next ....       

* How many Germans/Austrians claimed to be Swiss Germans after World War Two, I can't say, but the idea was not uncommon in the public mind and, thus, in the world of movies and television. The idea was, Germans/Austrians were trying to distance themselves from the Nazis and their crimes, crimes they themselves may have committed, so they presented themselves as Swiss Germans to avoid the suspicion of having been a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. Switzerland was neutral during the war, although more than 2/3 of the population is of German background. The claims to be "Swiss" didn't always help, however, as suspicions of anyone with a German accent lingered long thereafter. The 1960's NBC comedy "Get Smart" had an episode that demonstrated in a comedic way this whole "Swiss German" situation. Secret agent Maxwell Smart was on a remote island with some other people, including a man with a heavy German accent, who always said he was Swiss. The man also claimed to be a clock maker, but when the cuckoo clock he had struck the hour, a little Hitler figure with outstretched arm came out and shouted, "Sieg heil! Sieg heil!" When Max told the man it wasn't two o'clock, the guy answered, "If he says it's 2 o'clock, you'd better believe him."       

** The voice for the demon was done being actress Mercedes McCambridge, who much earlier had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in the movie, "All The King's Men."

The photo is of the Warner Home Video 2012 DVD.

WORD HISTORY:
Evil-This word, used primarily as a noun and adjective, and of somewhat shaky distant ancestry, "seems" to go back to Indo European "upelo," which had the notion of "passing a limit/boundary." This gave Old Germanic "ubilaz," with the meaning of "bad." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "yfel," with the broad meaning, "bad, injury or illness causing, evil." This then evoled into modern "evil," but the meaning became more specific to "moral baseness, wickedness," as "bad" took over the more general meaning. The other Germanic languages have: German has "Übel" (evil, illness, nasty, wicked), Low German Saxon "övel" (ill, unwell), Dutch "euvel" (evil, flaw), West Frisian "evel" (now archaic), the North Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic) do not use forms of the word.