The assault is aural, too. The demon's voice emanates incongrously from the little girl's body, as does at one point or another the voice of a homeless man and a dead English film director and a dead mother of a priest. The demon's language is obviously an assault on the ears. The otherworldy growls, screams, buzzing and screeching crescendo repeatedly. And we musn't forget the extradiegetic music, any more than we'd forget the terrific splendor of Father Merrin's spotlit arrival at the McNeil household while Regan's demon eyes stare expectantly outward. Harsh, dissonant strings, tinkling bells, ambient tones--evil has a power of beauty just as does good.

And good's power is cruel just as is evil's. Good relies on strength, and on the projection of that strength. The priests shout and yell. They wrestle and restrain. They strike. They dress in uniforms, like soldiers. They wield weapons of God. They chant like the repeat of artillery: "The power of Christ compels you," over and over again, sending chills up and down the spine, over and over again until that power's compulsion is at last affected. It's a magesterial moment: At last, good is bringing out weapons big enough and hard enough to fight those that evil has used throughout.

War is death, and there is death here, brutal, human death--heart attacks and defenestration are sufficient to feed the fires of this battle. And it's the sacrifice of soldiers, make no mistake about it. They submit themselves for sacrifice not because they don't fear death--clearly they do, evidenced by the fervor with which Father Karras tells Regan's mother Chris that Regan will not die--but because they do fear it, and because that fear gives them basis for comparison against the superior fear of the evil such sacrifices are meant to combat. Good (at first I accidentally typed God, but I suppose it wasn't much of an accident) demands such sacrifices without compunction. After all, this is war.

My point is that, in a sense, this movie lacks that awful certainty I tend to look for in horror. There is evil, which his a horrifying notion, but there is also good, which is... leavening, if not comforting. But still I say only "in a sense," because even though evil has an opponent, we are still caught in the crossfire. At any moment we may be asked to believe the unbelievable in order to fight the unspeakable. It may cost us our faith. It may cost us our sanity. It may cost us our lives. How we rank those losses is the film's central question. And the realiztion that there are forces whose intrusion could cause that ranking to change, forever, is the horror at the movie's heart.