It was the movie phenomenon of the year. When The Exorcist was released to an unsuspecting American public on St Stephen's Day, 1973, cinema-owners reported faintings and convulsions among their audiences. One announced that: "My janitors are going crazy wiping up the vomit." As a marketing hype, it worked brilliantly: movie-goers queued around the block to share in this dubious experience.
Twenty-five years later, the re-release of The Exorcist offers a chance to see what all the fuss was about, and perhaps to measure our own standards of shock-ability against those of an earlier, but not necessarily simpler generation.
For Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, the semi-hysterical reaction was a surprise. Blatty had found his inspiration in the 1949 case of a 14-year-old boy from Maryland who had supposedly been possessed by devils and exorcised by a priest, Father William Bowdern. Initially, Blatty wanted to write a book about the case, but Father Bowdern had been ordered by his superiors not to publicise the events, so the author decided to draw on them for his own fictional story. His novel is about a divorced actress, Chris MacNeil, shooting a film on location in Georgetown, near Washington DC. When MacNeil's 12-year-old daughter, Regan, starts behaving increasingly strangely, she turns unsuccessfully for help to a range of doctors and psychiatrists, before reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the child is possessed.
She contacts Father Damien Karras, a priest tormented by his loss of faith and racked with guilt over the death of his mother, who agrees to perform an exorcism, with the assistance of the ageing Father Merrin, who has dealt with cases of possession before.
It's a rudimentary plot, no more than adequately told, but The Exorcist chimed well with an increasing fascination with Satanism and the occult at the fag-end of the 1960s and was a best-seller when published in 1970.
When Warner Brothers bought the film rights to the book for $641,000, with Blatty writing the screenplay, the project was turned down by Stanley Kubrick and John Boorman among others - Kubrick because he wasn't offered enough control, Boorman because he objected to its exploitative nature (four years later, he would direct the sequel, Exorcist 2: The Heretic, a sometimes intriguing but only partially successful attempt to put his own interpretation on the subject. It flopped at the box office). Finally, William Friedkin agreed to take on the job.
In the years since, Friedkin's reputation has dimmed considerably compared with those of his peers and near-contemporaries Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but in 1972 he was hot, fresh from an Oscar-winning success with The French Connection. As soon as he came on board, he junked the working screenplay, ordering Blatty to return much more closely to the structure of the novel. Blatty had wanted Friedkin to direct because of the gritty, semi-documentary style he had brought to The French Connection - the fear of everyone involved in the film was that it would become camp or risible.
For someone who was too young even to attempt sneaking into the cinema on its initial release, watching The Exorcist now is a fascinating experience, and still rather unsettling, though perhaps not for the reasons that transfixed audiences 25 years ago. The prologue, set on an archaeological site in northern Iraq, is a tour de force of sound and fury, forming a brilliantly disturbing introduction to what follows. The bleak, autumnal vistas of Georgetown add to the film's sense of a mundane world drained of meaning and suffused with dread (one wonders whether Ang Lee was influenced by this style when filming The Ice Storm, his recent, equally chilly look at suburban mores in the winter of 1973, the exact moment when The Exorcist was sweeping America).
You can see why Friedkin fought to cast Ellen Burstyn as the mother, rather than the studio's suggestions of Jane Fonda or Audrey Hepburn. Either of the last two would have taken over the role with movie-star inflections, whereas Burstyn is a helpless Everywoman (despite playing a movie star). Jason Miller is very much the tortured 1970s anti-hero as Father Karras, and Lee J. Cobb is predictable in the Colombo-like role of the inquisitive detective, but Max Von Sydow brings an implacable grandeur to the role of the veteran Father Merrin.
Of course, none of these is the star of The Exorcist. Twelve-year-old Linda Blair, her angelic face scarred and pustulate, spitting out obscenities (dubbed by 55-year-old Mercedes McCambridge), was the reason the audiences poured in. But the vomiting, head-spinning and foul language which caused such controversy in 1973 have been drained of most of their shock value by decades of parody and imitation (although the masturbation scene with the bloodied crucifix is still fairly strong stuff). Far more disturbing for this viewer was a scene when Blair is strapped down and probed by surgeons trying to discover the nature of her illness. Interestingly, when I mentioned it to people who hadn't seen the movie since the early 1970s, they didn't remember this scene at all.
The response of the Catholic Church to The Exorcist was equivocal. After all, how many hit Hollywood movies feature a priest's crisis of faith as one of the main plot threads? The priests in the film are rough-hewn, tortured intellectuals, Ernest Hemingways in dog collars. Blatty was a devout Catholic, and saw the reality of demonic possession as a good thing.
"For if there were demons, then there was a God, and probably a life everlasting . . . I've heard many accounts of people going back to the Church after seeing or reading The Exorcist."
Whether this is the conclusion most people took from the film is questionable. The Exorcist is one of a clutch of movies from this period, including Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (withdrawn by the director himself), which have never been broadcast on British television or granted a certificate for video release in the UK (decisions which, because of Ireland's position as an outpost of the British market, mean they aren't available here, either).
While the reasons given for this censorship have centred on depictions of violence, and their potential to be deeply disturbing to young people, it's notable how all three films share a bleak view of human frailty and a deep pessimism about the inability of "civilisation" to keep chaos and evil at bay.
In this sense, they echo the disillusionment of their times, and foreshadow the conservative backlash which was soon to follow. It's hard to imagine the modern Hollywood machine ever allowing such a vision to its writers and directors (or modern audiences tolerating it). The most obvious inheritors of The Exorcist's legacy today are left-field mavericks such as David Cronenberg or David Lynch, but Friedkin was insistent at the time that he was making an entertainment, not an art movie.
It's the very unavailability of The Exorcist on video or television, however, which makes it commercially possible for Warner Brothers to re-release it 25 years on, and contributes to the mystique that still surrounds the film - along with such trivia as the many "suspicious" deaths which surrounded its making (including that of Irish actor Jack McGowan, who plays the drunken film director).
Watching it now, although it's clear The Exorcist is no masterpiece, it still retains a powerful charge which most contemporary horror movies have lost in a flurry of post-modern irony and nudgewink jokiness. There may be no vomiting in the aisles this time around, but expect a few bad dreams.
