"There is only one": William Friedkin's The Exorcist - Page 4

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.

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Postscript: It should come as no surprise to you that in a war waged in and by a horror film, the monumental horror image is what I view to be the most lethal weapon in the arsenal. In my senior essay I did a close reading of The Exorcist, detailing the use of the monumental horror images throughout the film and the profound, "cosmic" fear they engender. Below you can find reprinted the relevant portion; to read the whole essay, click here and find out how.

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The inspiration of cosmic fear - specifically the type stemming from Catholic dogma—was an explicit thematic concern of William Peter Blatty, who adapted The Exorcist’s screenplay from his own novel of the same name. He carefully constructed his story so that the demon Pazuzu, who possess young Regan MacNeil, would be more terrifying for its mental effects on those around Regan than its physical effects on Regan itself. In the novel, Father Lancaster Merrin, the missionary and archaeologist who is summoned to exorcise Regan, insists that "the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us...the observers...every person in this house." Merrin discusses this further in a conversation with the conflicted Father Damien Karras, found in another scene that was cut from the film’s final cut but was present in both novel and screenplay:

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Article Author: Sean T. Collins

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