The Exorcist

The subtractive test finds a compelled spine and many permitted limbs, and that is what holds the axis below the cap. The prologue is required: it makes the antagonist older than the house it enters and Merrin’s return a meeting already fixed. The medical sequence is required, since every secular remedy must be exhausted before the priest is called. Karras’s mother is required; his guilt is the door the demon uses. What gives is a great deal. Kinderman’s inquiry is half a detective film the cut never finishes: it supplies one hinge and then idles. The film-set comedy and the party run long for what they carry, and the prologue takes its time.

Score: 7.1 / 10

There are disclosures, and they hold: the helplessness of the modern institution before suffering, doctors in a row, each certain and each wrong, diagnosis rendered as an assault on a child; a mother’s terror at a daughter changing past recognition, with no father present and money no defence; a priest who has lost his faith through guilt and recovers it only as an act. But the axis ranks a mood below a meaning, and here the mood carries more of the weight. The obscenity and the violation are shown with force, while the film declines to say what the possession is, illness, adolescence or evil, and leans on the shock.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Elevation here is dread, frequent in the second half and scarce in the first. The summits: Merrin’s arrival at night, a figure in a hat under the street lamp in fog with the bedroom window lit above; the arteriogram, terror by clinical procedure; Karras’s dream of his mother on the subway stairs, a white face cut in for frames; the crucifix scene; the exorcism, breath showing in the cold room, the bed rising, two priests reciting while the voice mocks. What holds the axis down: the first hour builds by noise in the attic and a cold room and rises little, and some of the effects, the head turned on a dummy and the green vomit, now read as effects.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The myth bears the climax. The old priest and the ancient enemy meet again, as the dogs and the statue of the prologue promise, and the duel is a liturgy against a voice. The doubting priest is the hinge: the demon reaches him through his mother, and his end is substitution, the oldest Christian figure made the climax of a studio picture. The violated innocent is a girl of twelve with a Ouija board in a rented house. It meets the bar of the Universal Minimum and no more, and stands a long way below the gate: Pazuzu stays a figure evoked rather than worked through, Merrin is drawn in strokes, and the pattern is taken whole from Church tradition and the novel, used with force rather than remade.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is close and named: the Satanic cycle that Rosemary’s Baby (1968) had already brought into a modern city, a prestige studio and a realist manner; Blatty’s bestselling novel, which supplied the story and much of the argument; and Friedkin’s own documentary method from The French Connection (1971). The turns are real: horror played with the realism of a medical and police film, violation from a child’s mouth and body at a length no studio film had shown, sound that treats the voice as the monster, a theology taken seriously. The stake was a long, troubled production over budget and schedule. The debt holds it well short of the gate: the first wager had been placed five years before.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The form is the sequence: the long naturalist approach, the camera and the cutting kept plain and observational, so that when the supernatural enters it enters a documentary world; the slow medical procession is the form of a mother’s hope running out. Sound is the second instrument: the attic, the voice, the cut-off silences, the hard jumps from quiet to noise. What holds the axis low: most of the form is the realist grammar of its decade, well used rather than remade, so that much of it could be exchanged without loss; the strands of Chris, Karras and Kinderman are cut together by alternation rather than joined by necessity; and the prologue sits beside the film as its own short piece.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The film has been re-read for fifty-three years: as a fable of female adolescence and the terror it provokes in adults; as a film of the absent father and the working mother; as Catholic apologetics, and as its opposite, a film whose only proof of God is a demon; as a document of the medical gaze. The quarrel between Friedkin and Blatty over its ending, which a re-edit of 2000 was in part made to answer, keeps one question open from inside the work. What holds it: the questions are fewer than the readings, and much of the return is to the shocks and to the legend of the production rather than to depths found on a further viewing.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made horror a form of the prestige mainstream, treating the genre’s premise as fact and giving it realism, sound and makeup at a level the genre had not commanded; a reorganisation of where horror could stand, much less of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the largest box-office successes of its time; the first horror film nominated for Best Picture; the possession film as a genre, from The Omen (1976) through the sequels and imitations of the decade to the cycles of the 2000s and 2010s and The Conjuring films; with Jaws it showed the studios what a genre premise could earn. Reach outruns force, and stays within one genre.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-three years, the span in which this figure is usual. The theatrical cut survives whole and has been restored and reissued. The re-edit of 2000 replaced it in theatres and for a time in circulation, but the two have since been issued side by side, and the alteration takes little. Presence is wide and continuous: re-releases, television, every home format, Halloween programming, teaching, and a sequel line that has kept the title in view into the 2020s, though fame and box office are presence, not proof. The surface is partly fixed to its making: the dummy head and the vomit read as 1973, and the shock depended on a first audience’s innocence.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several departments. Owen Roizman’s photography keeps the house warm and ordinary and lets cold enter it, and composes Merrin’s arrival as an icon. The sound builds the demon from Mercedes McCambridge’s voice and treated noise, and makes silence a threat. Dick Smith’s makeup ages von Sydow by decades and degrades Blair by stages. Burstyn’s mother is raw and furious, Miller’s Karras tired and exact. The costs are many and they count: effects that show their mechanism, uneven pacing across the first hour, the Kinderman strand acted as a character turn rather than built in, and dubbing that sometimes shows.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the dig in northern Iraq, with its heat, its hammers and the statue against the sun, and a bedroom in Georgetown filled with frost. They obey one law, the same plain observation and the same signs, dogs fighting, a clock stopping, the face of the statue, so that the supernatural is never a different physics from the street. The range runs from a film-set comedy to the crucifix scene. The law strains in three places: Kinderman’s comic manner, with his film talk and his cold, sits outside it as relief; the prologue’s link to Georgetown is asserted by cuts more than joined; and the film’s question, illness or possession, is answered in a way the realist first half does not prepare.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 122 minutes holds. The family: a single mother and a daughter, an absent father on a call that does not come through; a son and his mother, poor, ill and committed. The sacred, in two priests, a Jesuit university, the Mass, profanation and ritual. Medicine and psychiatry as an institution. Class, in a rented house against a tenement and a ward. The city, in Georgetown’s streets and steps. Work, in film-making and the Jesuit life. These are integrated through one house and two mothers. What holds the axis lowest: Regan’s consciousness is withheld by design, the state and the wider society appear only as police and doctors, and the ancient order is a prologue, not a held stratum.

Score: 6.8 / 10