Category: Monster

    Many people know how this movie was overshadowed by the incredibly popular E.T. when it first came out.  It was a box-office bomb for Universal Pictures.  But gradually its reputation spread by word of mouth, until, about twenty-five years later, many people rate it among the best horror movies ever.  I definitely
would not go that far, but The Thing definitely packs a punch to the gut.

     I remember how disappointed I was with
this movie the first time I saw it. I can recall what I
thought was missing in The Thing.  What I
wanted to know about was the terrible change from being human to becoming  the ultimate alien monster; do you feel
horrified, ecstatic, or perhaps a rush roughly like
adrenaline but more intense, as you sense your new powers.

    Watching this movie now, I still would love
some answers to my questions.  But I don’t think
the filmmakers had this in mind.  It definitely did
not come up during the Commentary included in
the deluxe DVD with John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. They
focused squarely on other issues.

    First, how does a group of people
not trained for war react when suddenly face to face with
an enemy different from anything that people have ever
fought?  Second, how do they cope with the
sudden paranoia when they’re surrounded by people in a closed
space, and some of them could be already infected by the
Thing?

   Questions about exactly how  and
when the infected people got infected go
unanswered.  Many plot threads are left dangling at the
end.   But then again, that’s not what this movie
focuses on.

    What you get instead are the desperate
strategies these new recruits try to use, when
suddenly threatened with a life-form capable of taking over
the whole planet.  (In just over three years,
according to Blair’s computer.)  And the added
desperation of knowing that any of the people around them could
already have been taken over by this life-force.  This is the
focus of The Thing, not any deep philosophical questions.

    The Thing begins in the
brightest of daylight with one unanswered question.  Why are
these Norwegian researchers risking their own lives, and
those of the Americans, to kill a dog?  The Norwegians
seem hysterical with panic, but why?  When one of them
injures a member of the Americans to get to the dog, he is
immediately shot dead.  Zero chance for explanations.

    One of the M.D.’s, Copper, and the helicopter
pilot MacCready fly to the Norwegian base
to investigate.  The clues they find suggest something
horrible but impossible to pin down.  Every
building burned.  A bloody axe buried in a wooden
door.  A man sitting, now frozen, his wrists and
throat slashed with a straight razor.  Strangest of all,
the body of a distorted man, combined with some
other lifeform, frozen in the snow just outside the
buildings.  The face contorted, seemingly stretched into
two distinct halves, facing slightly different directions.

MacCready finds a Norwegian dead, an apparent suicide…no
explanation

      MacCready and Copper fly the frozen body back
to base.  It is dissected but its internal organs appear
normal.

   Each man on the base does his best to resume life as
usual.  Bennings, the man shot in the leg, hopes that a
card game will relax his nerves.  A dog, the same one the
Norwegians tried to kill, brushes against him, making him
jump.  This dog has been wandering the rooms and passageways
of the base all day, with everyone’s mind on other
things.  Bennings asks Clark, the man responsible for the
dogs, to put this one in the pen with the others.

    The dog hesitates at first, then enters the pen
and lies down, not sure what the others will do.

You can’t tell how the pack will figure out who’s now the dominant
dog.  Whether dominance can be established without a
fight.  The other dogs make threatening signs.  Can this
battle be settled without bloodshed?

    Suddenly this question is shoved aside for all
time, as the conflict changes into something worse than most
nightmares.  Personally I cannot recall ever having a
nightmare as bad as this.

    The dog’s fur and skin rip apart.  From
this mass of naked muscle, legs tear themselves free, spider-like
legs, but from a spider as big as the dog.  Unearthly shrieks
come from the mass of flesh and contorting legs.
Venomous-looking liquid shoots out of somewhere in this formless creature, covering one of the dogs while structures looking like tentacles strangle it.

The dog–starting to change

Congratulations.  You’ve just witnessed the best special
effects in movie history, the first of several in The Thing.  Someday someone will accomplish more, using CGI, but this
is still the champion for right now, over 25 years and
counting.

    The camp’s other M.D. Dr. Blair, and MacCready,
the chopper pilot, are starting to get the big picture now
and it is plenty ugly.  What they are dealing with is an
extra-terrestrial form of life with the ability to change
itself into a perfect replica of another form of life.  It
can copy one of the humans as easily as it can one of the
dogs.  Blair becomes obsessed with cutting off all the
Thing’s possible escape routes, shooting the rest of the
dogs, and destroying the helicopter, tractor, and the computer
system.

    MacCready appears less educated than the
others, but he is the most intelligent, resourceful,
and courageous.  In addition, he is an excellent
detective, taking clues and quickly using them to
gain insight.  Along with Blair, he is the first to feel
the coming wave of paranoia that will soon sweep
the others:  Given its capabilities to mold itself, any
one of them could be harboring the Thing.

    You can sense the paranoia after Dr. Copper
thinks of a way to identify the Thing using
refrigerated blood kept for emergencies.  But the crew
finds the entire blood supply is gone.  Accusations
and counter-accusations fly. The intense fear is masked with
an anger, genuine fury, probably the crew’s best defense
against panic.

MacCready: “Trust’s a hard thing to come by these
days.”

     A new blood test is devised, but order is on
the verge of crumbling.  Garry, the only man with a key
to the blood supply has become a prime suspect.  Other
major suspects: Dr. Copper, who often gets access to  blood,
and Clark, due to the long stretches of time he spends with the
dogs.  Blair, the man with the deepest insights into the
Thing’s biology, is kept prisoner after his spree of
destruction.  Garry is deeply offended about being
accused, and refuses to be leader any more.  MacCready, with
his courage and decisive nature takes charge; he is all that
stands between the crew and chaos.

    The new blood test is given.  Without giving too much away, leave it at this:  All the guesses as to the Thing’s identity (to be fair, all were backed up with some logic) turn out to be dead wrong.  In a few scenes,which match the dog-transformation scene in their power, the Thingis brought out of hiding, in ways that are as imaginative as they are horrific.  To repeat one of the most quoted lines in The Thing, one astonished crew member
stares at a new lifeform the Thing created, saying “You
gotta be fucking kidding.”

    The death toll mounts, but no one can say which
of the survivors has become the Thing’s latest replicated
form of life.  Scariest of all is MacCready’s idea, probably
sound thinking: The Thing will be happy to go to sleep
in the intense cold and wait until spring to revive itself.
He sees only one answer, and it means sacrificing all who
have survived this far, “We’re going to have to warm things
up around here.”

    Plenty of plot threads are left hanging:
What was the deal with the torn-up uniforms?  Who turned
on the light in MacCready’s shack?  Whatever happened to
Nauls?  Just forget these details for now.
This movie finally puts to rest, the man in the monster suit
with the zipper down the back.

    Listen to the Commentary, and appreciate how
much the technical advances meant to the filmmakers’ sense of
creativity.  As much as we all loved E.T. we
can now appreciate how alien a form of life from
another solar system might be.  Especially a form of life
with the intention of re-populating our planet.

    I can’t say enough good things about Rob
Bottin’s special effects.  We are all less fortunate for
the limited amount of work he has done since, after
reportedly burning out to keep up with finishing this
movie.  The music by Ennio Morricone (The Good the Bad and the Ugly) is chilling, with two notes, like sinister heartbeats
repeating again and again, building the tension.  Kurt
Russell (MacCready) has never been better.  The rest of
the cast, mostly familiar as character actors, are excellent
as well.

The Thing begins with some rather conventional
flying-saucer effects.  What comes next is anything but
conventional.  Forget the loose ends in the plot.  This
is one movie that will grab you and not let go.

     Many of us have heard about “cycles of family
violence. “  How this violence is likely to pass down from
the abused child to their children when that child becomes a
parent.  Maybe you are talking to someone about a painful
childhood, and suddenly they stop and say, “I’ve become my
father.”

Or my mother… take your pick, whatever
applies.   If you know enough family history, you may even be
able to trace the inheritance of abuse from generation to
generation, until someone is able to put a stop to it.
Psychologists call this “the break generation,” the one who
ends the cycle.  One example was John Lennon, an abandoned
son himself.  (To be fair to Lennon’s father, he
did offer John the chance to live with him and was turned
down, when John was a young child.)

Years later, Lennon chose the life of stay-at
-home father while his second son, Sean was growing up.  He
also worked hard to make up for the time he had missed with his
first son, Julian, after he and Julian’s mother were divorced.

Most of us have heard stories about physical
manifestations—people so ill for example that they fantasize about
being crucified, and then develop marks on their hands as though
nails had been driven through them.

The Brood plunges you
straight down into a bad dream combining these themes:  The
cycle of family violence, and the stories of physical
manifestations.  I don’t want to give away too much as to
who—or what, the Brood are, except to say that they are child-like
beings.  And that certain abused people can use them to
strike out at those who hurt them.

Frank, a divorced father with a young
daughter, Candy, believes his ex-wife Nola is abusing Candy, and
that he needs to keep Nola away from her.  Frank has plenty
of good reasons for his suspicions.  He can see bruises on
Candy’s back.  Second, Nola has committed herself into a
psychiatric institute, known as Somafree.

Somafree is run by Dr. Hal Raglan, whose
therapy methods are controversial.  Some call him a genius.
They rave about his book
The Shape of Rage concerning childhood abuse.
Others, some of Raglan’s former patients, say he has made
them worse, and are preparing lawsuits against him.

Frank has seen moments of Raglan at work with patients when he
visited Somafree to pick up Candy.  He can see the man’s
charisma, and his sharp insights.   But Frank can also see a
man with an ego out of control, taking people to places where they
may well be dangerous to others and themselves.  And there is
no mistaking the bruising that he sees on Candy.

Raglan’s approach is for Nola, like his other
patients, to confront her rage toward her parents.  Nola’s
mother is an alcoholic who abused her and continues to deny it
happened.  She still drinks heavily, even when Candy is with
her.  Nola’s father Barton was a weak man who stood by and
let the abuse go on.

The director David Cronenberg has talked about how
personal feelings concerning his painful divorce went into writing
and directing The Brood.  The stories are
most insightful. But the movie itself is the ultimate proof of
those intense emotions, and of his directing skill.

Years ago, one critic described
The Brood as Cronenberg’s one good film.
At that time, this was arguably a fair criticism.  But since
then, several other Cronenberg movies have shown this picture was
no fluke.  Many people have their own personal favorites he
directed, mine being perhaps his warmest and most hopeful,
The Dead Zone.

Cronenberg has been successful recently with two
mainstream movies, A History of
Violence, and Eastern Promises.
But years ago, he was known as a cult director with a
reputation for the bizarre and the grotesque.  Martin
Scorsese actually said he had been frightened about meeting
Cronenberg for the first time.  (Cronenberg described
Scorsese as someone “who should have known better.”)  In the
media, Cronenberg was known as “the king of venereal horror” and
worse.

In these movies, ordinary people’s bodies went
through incredible changes, disturbing, at times disgusting.
They Came from Within: Human bodies were
invaded by strange parasites described then as a cross between a
penis and a large turd.  One character lies on his back,
watching the outlines of the parasites as they move through his
body.  Rabid:  a woman develops a
hypodermic growth in her armpit that kills the men who embrace
her.

In The Brood, Dr. Raglan has
been able to get some of his patients to express their anger into
physical manifestations: marks on their bodies, or worse, tumors,
“lymphosarcoma.”

But with Nola he has gone much further.
She has actually given birth to living creatures—other
people at the Institute have mistaken them for children.
These creatures, her brood, have a clear sense of who it is that
Nola feels angriest with.

Possibly a child advocate could argue that
this movie exploits violence against children for the sake of
horror.  They are definitely entitled to their point of view.

My opinion:  this movie is much more than
that.  It’s much more than the bad guys getting what they
deserve, or a bunch of evil children who kill teenagers after
the teenagers have sex

.

A glimpse of the brood–in the house where Nola grew
up

The bad parents do get a kind of justice.  But
innocent people get hurt too.  Cronenberg’s screenplay is not
perfect but it’s good enough to make you care a lot about the main
characters.    For example, you feel Candy’s pain over
and over again.  A sweet little girl who has never hurt
anyone.  She is torn between two parents who both love her.
She nearly sees her grandmother killed, then is terrorized
by the same creature who did the killing.  You don’t realize
until much later that she knows who these creatures are. Later
they enter her classroom and quietly walk away with her into a
snowstorm;  a scene that is poetic in the grimmest kind of
way…one of the best moments in any Cronenberg movie.

Nola’s venomous wishes–made real

You can criticize the ending as kind of clichéd,
possibly as a cheap shot.  But the image you are left with is
something else—Candy’s sad, hurt expression as she sits in
silence.

    Dust Devil comes
from a long tradition of stories with basic plot elements in
common.

   They share these things:  Modern,
well-educated people find themselves up against something
straight out of an ancient legend/ folk-tale/
mythology.   These people must  overcome their
disbelief,  then turn to traditional or ancient
weapons.  Not contemporary science, which proves to be
powerless.     

    They must look to someone who
knows the old legends…or perhaps, to some native shaman, wise
man or magician who is familiar with the magic tradition in the
myth.   Only they know what to do next.

    Dracula, The Exorcist, Curse of
the Demon, Poltergeist, and The Last Wave all have subplots
similar to this.   Remember the
intimidating medical tests Regan must suffer through, in
The Exorcist… none of them
doing her any good.  Modern science has great
powers… but not over everything.

    But this formula is no guarantee
of success—think of The Sentinel (1977) and
Blacula, and lots, lots more.

    You get the broad outline of the
Dust Devil mythology in voice-over as the movie begins.

    “The desert wind was a man like
us; then grew wings and flew like a bird.  He
became a hunter, like a hawk, and took refuge in those far
corners of the world where magic still lingers.  Having once
been a man, he still suffers the passions of a man…”

     How real will this legend
feel to you?  That depends on another question.  It
depends on how well you can accept the Dust Devil in human
form; a man sounding and looking something like a young Clint
Eastwood (High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider for
example), wearing a long coat decorated with human bones.

  He is photographed in a way that reminds you
of Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s films and later, in Eastwood’s
own.

    

Listening for signs of life in the desert    

You see him first alongside a highway in a desert resembling the
inferno–inside the nation of Namibia.  He is
pressing his ear against the highway, which seems so
empty that he is in no danger.   Soon a car
driven by a lonely woman stops; she offers him a
ride.  Then… not much later, the chance to stay at her
house.  The gardens and house feel like a speck
of color in an endless wasteland.  Soon they are in
her bed.  The Dust Devil breaks her neck, killing her
it seems, in mid-orgasm.

Lovemaking abruptly cut off by killing

     He stops long enough to light several candles
in her bedroom.  Then he uses her blood to
sketch ritualistic drawings on the walls.  He cuts off
several of her fingers then carefully saves them. 

One of the drawings the stranger leaves

     Next, he finds a can of gasoline and sets fire
to the house.  Much of it burns but definitely
not all.

   The phone rings for Detective Ben
Mukurob.  First he ignores it, thinking it is one of
his sad,  frightening dreams.  He has had a lot of
those dreams recently.  Except for a large dog sleeping
close-by he appears painfully alone. 

   Soon after, Ben gets another call,
describing the burned house.  Your first impression may be
(as mine was) that he is too cynical to care.   But
that impression is very wrong.  He takes his job most
seriously.

    Meanwhile, in the neighboring
country of South Africa, Wendie, a home-maker in her twenties
is arguing with her husband, Mark.  She makes up her
mind to leave him and drives away.

    At the dead woman’s house, Ben
speaks to his supervisor.  The boss is sure that
this is the work of terrorists. 

   Ben–determined to bring in the killer

     Ben is equally sure it is not.  The political situation in Namibia and South Africa had changed
recently, stabilizing in some ways.  Terrorists are less
common now.

    Dust Devil does
something uncommon:  voice-over is used to
continue telling the unfolding plot.  As Wendie
keeps her word about leaving, the narration continues:  “Out of the flatlands she came.  Into
the drylands…He had been calling her…drawing her to Bethany…”

    Bethany, the Namibian town is
indeed dying: no rain for seven years, its one major industry
already shut down.  Wendie, in her car, and the Dust
Devil in a train, have both picked Bethany as their
next stop. 

    More narration: “He sifts the
human storm for souls.  He can smell a town
waiting to die.”  You feel that Wendie and
Dust Devil inevitably will meet;  it is only a matter of
time.

     At the same time Ben talks to the coroner
about the victim’s remains.  Neck broken, the
drawings on the walls sketched  in her blood, probably
mixed with body fat, iron ore, and kaolin (clay).   The
coroner, a white woman, tells Ben who is African, that the
killing is tied in with witchcraft.  She recommends he
speak to a sangoma, an expert on witchcraft rituals.

   Ben has an old friend Joe who is a
sangoma.   But the detective has turned his back on
magic and rituals.  He aims to be more like Sherlock
Holmes, or one of the CSI team, staying with rational,
purely scientific explanations.

    As if it was fated, Wendie and the
Dust Devil cross paths.  Wendie gives the stranger
a lift, and immediately you feel the mutual attraction. 
They talk on and off; suddenly Wendie sees him on the road
and realizes he is no longer in the car.  Hours later, alone
in a motel room she takes a bath.  She makes a sudden
decision to slit her wrists with a razor then abruptly changes
her mind. 

Ready and waiting for Wendie

     The Dust Devil can sense her wish to die.  He waits in the motel bedroom.  Wendie knows he is
out there.  Next morning, as she prepares to drive away,
he is already sitting in the car. 

    Their attraction continues to
grow.  They stop at another motel, dine in an outdoor café
and dance to country and Western music played on
loudspeakers.   In the motel room, they
have sex. 

    But afterward, the Dust Devil
talks–more than he ever has before.  “You don’t
understand…This wind keeps blowing me on and on…You don’t
know who I am…” 

    He showers and Wendie looks
through his collection of snapshots.  They seem harmless
enough. Then she finds severed fingers and knows she is in
grave danger.  The Dust Devil tries to comfort her with
the truth—“all these people wanted to die…I was only the midwife…”

    But Wendie no longer wishes to
die.

     “You picked the wrong one
this time, you bastard!” She drives off.

     Ben changes his mind; he
talks to his old friend Joe despite his own doubts about
magic.  Joe tells Ben that this is the work of a
shape-shifter.  He adds, “You’ve got to stop
thinking like a White man and start thinking like a
man instead.”  He pleads with Ben to
take a carved stick  with him, and keep it close. The
stick has the power to bind the Dust Devil, to root him to the
ground. 

    Ben, with his strong faith in
science and logic, has trouble believing this.   “You’ve
been watching too many drive-in movies,”  he says, but does let Joe give him the stick, before leaving for
Bethany.

      Wendie wanders out
into a seemingly endless desert, followed by the Dust Devil, Ben,
and Mark. All but Mark catch up to each other in a ghost
town, every building with floors covered ankle-high in sand. 

     Dust Devil
deserves praise for originality in several  elements.   The music by Simon Boswell takes on
many forms.  At times it feels reminiscent of
Ennio Morricone’s work in Sergio Leone movies like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and
Once Upon a Time in the West.  Other times it is like a vocal chorus without words, as if
the Earth itself is humming.  The photography is
outstanding, showing the desert  barren, endless, devoid
of color, a place where death is never far away and life is
precious.  Check out the shot in the desert with the Dust
Devil sitting absolutely still on a rock outcropping, and
thirty feet higher up, vultures waiting calmly. 

    Zakes Mokae, so good in movies
like A Dry White Season and
The Serpent and the Rainbow, is excellent as
the haunted Ben, and John Matshikiza equally good in the tricky
role of Joe.  (He is also effective as the
narrator.)  Robert Burke (Rescue Me, Munich)
strikes most of the right notes as the Dust Devil.  To
avoid leaving out anyone, the entire cast does the job.

    You may find still more influences
that I missed out on, that have been borrowed by
Dust Devil.

 Having said that, I still find this movie
highly original and unusual.  I can’t recommend this one
enough.

 

     The Exorcist was a courageous
movie for its time and place— the United States in the early
1970’s.  Even though William Peter Blatty’s novel had been a
best-seller, producing this movie and getting it distributed
were far from easy.

The Exorcist was not a
typical 70’s film; it was not afraid to paint its picture in bold
colors, showing good and evil as two distinct forces… forces
fated to battle face to face.

Ironically, this was a major reason for its box
office success.  America was in need
of hopefulness.  The Exorcist left you
feeling that courage and faith might be rewarded, not
tossed into the garbage.  Along with
Jaws and Alien, The Exorcist was
a major force in pushing horror movies into the mainstream.

The early 70’s was still a time of much angry
social/political finger-pointing.  But this movie was
not afraid to make its statement; that  some issues were
simpler than conservative vs. liberal, pro-choice
vs. pro-life.  In doing this, it raised your hopes of
finding heroes willing to go to war with evil, not to
watch passively.

The evil in The Exorcist is
not suggested; it is shown, more graphically than
anything up till that time.   The movie broke new ground in
its violence and sexuality.  No movie before it had dared to
combine religious and sexual imagery like this one did, not even
Ken Russell’s The Devils, which had received an X
rating two years before.

The Exorcist’s plot is not
complicated—it deals with Pazuzu, an Asian demon, thousands of
years old.  It asks you to imagine:  What if this
ancient evil somehow possessed a young girl in present-day
America?  And what if the girl’s mother (not Catholic, or
even religious herself) was to choose Roman Catholic priests to
drive out this demon?

One major challenge facing the novel and the movie:
how do you portray absolute good and absolute evil?  How
would they speak?  What actions would they take?  The
novel (and the screenplay, which followed the novel closely)
had to make the dialogue and the action specific.
In other words, this is how absolute evil and good would
function in a real situation.  You would expect that each
individual’s image of good and evil’s actions is highly personal.

Let me give one crude, but memorable example.
During the exorcism, the demon (through Regan’s voice) makes some
vulgar sexual references to Merrin’s (the title character)
mother.  To a sheltered, provincial person, these remarks
might seem unspeakably vile, almost unbearable to hear.  To a
tough, big-city kid, the same remarks sound no worse than
something heard in their neighborhood playground.  Thoroughly
not shocking.  But this is an exception, a rare
example of bad judgment in the writing.

Why is it this little girl, Regan McNeil,
whom the demon chooses to possess?   Regan seems to be a
random choice.  She is a special girl but not
that special; most of us have been fortunate enough to
know one child like her.

Regan is not a saint.  But she is a sweet girl,
clearly finding joy and hope in everyday life, even though her
parents are separating, and her father seems unwilling to stay
part of her life.

The daughter Chris can not forget; no saint but radiating an
unmistakable sweetness

Chris, Regan’s mom, is no saint either.
But her importance in this movie cannot be overstated. Watch it
again, concentrate on Chris, and you’ll see what I’m talking
about.

She is the good mother we all wanted, someone able
to give unconditional love, and hang in for her child under the
ugliest of circumstances.  That in itself is plenty.

Chris; not a larger-than-life figure, but the good mother we
all wanted

Most people are quite familiar with
The Exorcist’s plot, from reading the
best-selling novel, seeing the movie, or word of mouth.
Everyone seemed to be talking about it, from legal
secretaries to ministers in your neighborhood church.   The
climactic exorcism scenes have passed into American folklore,
lampooned on Saturday Night Live and the
Scary Movie series by such well-known actors as
Richard Pryor, James Woods, and God knows who else.

A little more of the plot.  An American girl,
about 11, experiences severe psychological problems with no
explanation.  Along with out-of-control behavior come
mysterious noises, then her bed shaking violently.  Her
mother, Chris is like many of us.   She respects religion in
general but rarely finds it meaningful in day-to-day life.
Science, medical science, is where she looks for her
answers to Regan’s condition.

The tests Regan undergoes are painful
and invasive.  But they do not help her in any way.

Many felt the pain Regan undergoes (and the limitations of
modern Western medicine it underlines) scared them more than
anything later

And you watch a subtle change in this gentle
girl’s response to the medical people, first defensive, then
out-and-out hostile.  To a sensitive mother, Regan
seems to be getting swallowed up– and silenced, by another force.
You can easily overlook this insight, in the tidal wave of
special effects to come.

But Chris never misses this crucial
thread.  She has a devastating sense of the real Regan being
pulled into a pit.  Yet she knows that Regan’s
gentle, sweet spirit can never be destroyed.

Regan–Her essence buried by outside forces

A lot has been written about the special effects in
The Exorcist, the hideous changes in Regan’s face
and voice.  Most found them brutally terrifying.  A few
found them laughable.

Many intellectuals stuck to the old argument that
showing something scary is never as frightening as
suggesting it… leaving it to each individual to conjure up what is
most frightening to them.

But for many people (including myself), seeing the
transformation onscreen was another story.   I think my
reaction ( absolute terror) at watching Regan change was
a typical one.  The make-up job on Linda Blair (Regan) and
her dubbed voice, by veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge won
well-deserved praise.

Watching The Exorcist again for the
first time in many years, what struck me was this: I could
remember what Regan did in her possessed state, but not
the timing.  Who else was there.  That some of the worst
brutality and viciousness are experienced first, experienced
alone by Chris.  The slap that leaves her face
bruised for weeks.   Regan’s masturbation with the
cross.  Regan pushing Chris’ face against her crotch.
Her head turning to reveal an expression of hatred, of contempt
for her mother.

The masturbation is riveting partly because, as many
critics said, it takes two totally separate entities, the sacred
and the beastly, and smashes them together.  They are
absolutely right.

But there is a second part to it.   Taking two
such extremes and forcing them together this way, is to say to you
in plain terms that every value judgment you make is
meaningless.

That it’s all a hopeless, pathetic joke.

Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson…they’re
just like Gandhi, Lincoln, or Nelson Mandela.

Chris survives the test.  Listen to the way she
tells Father Damien, “You tell me that thing
upstairs is my daughter.”

Chris has looked deep into the heart of pure
despair.  Yet she still holds onto her love and faith.

As Regan and Chris’s story unfolds, another struggle
is going on.  This is Father Damien Karras’s story.
Father Damien is a priest and psychiatrist with the massive
responsibility of counseling other priests at Georgetown
University.   The endless demands and his growing guilt about
his mother’s poverty and illness are taking a heavy toll.

His last visit to his mother is an eye-opener.
She lives alone in an alien, threatening city landscape.  She
has never made the leap from a Greek way of life to an American
lifestyle and that isolates her even more.  The less she asks
of her son, the more he feels her unspoken demands.  Money
would not cure her problems but it could ease some of her
sorrows.  And Father Damien has none to spare from his
priest’s salary.

And the vocation he has sacrificed for, no longer
seems worth the sacrifice.  On the subway, Father Damien
walks away from a beggar and his lack of compassion saddens
him.  Soon afterwards Damien’s mother dies in a pitiful City
hospital; he cannot justify the hardships she was forced to live
through.

Ironically it is a medical doctor who gives Chris the
idea of getting an exorcism for Regan.  Without showing you
each intermediate stage, the story gives you an understanding of
how a skeptic like Chris could take this path.

Chris finally meets Father Damien to ask for
help.  It is a quiet but monumental scene; you feel that both
people have found what they needed.

You learn much less about the man selected to conduct
the exorcism, Father Merrin.  He had performed an exorcism
years before and nearly died in the process.  He is also an
archaeologist in the Middle East.  During his last visit, he
has a premonition when he finds a small likeness of Pazuzu, then
later finds himself standing face to face with a statue of the
demon.

The moment the two priests enter the house, you can
feel the tension flooding, wave upon wave.   Father Merrin
(Max von Sydow) is a combat-tested soldier with an unwavering
attitude.  Father Damien has more direct connections to
Regan.   From talking to Chris, he has gained a vision of the
child and her goodness.

Drawing the demon out is a more personal struggle for
Damien than it is for Merrin.  Damien has more weaknesses and
doubts; the demon means to attack these vulnerable spots.
Regan and Father Merrin have already been pushed to their physical
limits and are close to death from the strain.  All could
easily pay a heavy price for driving away the demon.

A brutal mind-fuck aimed at Father Damien; the demon manifests
as Damien’s’ mother

Father Merrin–ready to risk his life for Regan’s soul

The screenplay gets rid of some of the novel’s
hokey, borderline-macho lines from Father Damien when he
challenges the demon.  A definite improvement.  The
exorcism’s aftermath leaves you with a cautious optimism.

No light beaming down from Heaven or angels
appearing.   But a subtle peace on a human level.
Watch the expression on Regan’s face as she kisses Father
Dyer’s collar (Father Karras’ close friend).  It is a moment
you will remember.

This movie is a lot more than blood and the
split-pea soup that so many joked about at the time.   Faith
is a highly individual part of each of us; not easy to
change.  But this movie may restore our faith in finding
heroes who keep their word, who risk everything to fight for
something they believe in.