It might be fair to say that Stockholm syndrome has something to do with this pick. The Exorcist is usually the first place I go in my mind when thinking about best/favorite horror pictures. It wasn't the first in which I had the experience of surviving something and feeling notably alive after a very bad scare. In terms of the movies, that would probably be The Wizard of Oz, and later on Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Suspiria, the various Cronenbergs, The Evil Dead, even A Nightmare on Elm Street. But The Exorcist is the most scared that any movie ever made me. Maybe that's something about my age when I saw it, in my late teens.
I'm not sure I made it all the way around to the catharsis part with The Exorcist either, certainly not after the first time I saw it. That was the week of its release, which means I might have seen the original with the subliminals. It was in a big old barn of a theater in downtown Minneapolis on a weeknight, packed full, with people sitting up front laughing at it like hyenas, and the rest of us behind them reduced to gelatin—at least my friend and I were. I made it out of that theater half traumatized. People were talking in comments here the other day about stunners. The Exorcist ranks among mine. I'm not any more afraid of crashing to my death in an airplane than I am of evil and Satanic forces stealing my soul (or body)—which is to say, maybe a little, I love Fearless and Rosemary's Baby too. But not so much that it keeps me up at night. Except this movie kept me up nights.
Over 20 years later, when I gave it another try in a living room on a VHS tape, I found it wasn't that scary any more. Now it's mostly just loud and unpleasant, but that's its business. It's riveting too. I see what they're doing—a lot of it is on display even in the trailer at the link. From black screens to sterile gleaming-white hospital interiors, from people whispering incoherently and a soundtrack so quiet you want to lean forward to shrieking and carrying on and sheets of sound and strange noise, the dynamics are jagged as a saw. Zero to 60, there's a lot of, and in simple, unexpected ways (e.g., "Your mother sucks cocks in hell"). Once started the shocks don't stop. It doesn't even get to its most supernatural business until the second half, but the first half, with its tedious sequences and the hospital tests and deepening mystery, is there for one reason only: to put its audience increasingly on edge. And it works. All that banality and all that evil all at once.
I also love how the special effects rely more on physical stunts and the cunning direction of William Friedkin and less on cinematic trickery. Even the famous head-twisting shots (which about did me in, I must say) were far more naturalistic than most of the slick plastic CGI we've become so accustomed to now. I have no problem with CGI as such, but I think what's going on here is more effective—my brainstem, such as it is, more engaged (not to say twisted) than my cerebrum.
Trailer
Head-twistin' [video deleted]
More head-twistin'
Phil #7: Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002) (scroll down)
Steven #7: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
For this countdown, The Exorcist is basically the last of my last-minute swap-ins, which of course get trickier the higher you go, and obviously this is now the top 10. On some levels it makes no sense at all. For example, I find The Exorcist presently at #99 in the latest incarnation of my list (and frankly I'm a little surprised to find it that high), behind, among others, Freaks, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, and Videodrome, as well as some others, such as Alien and Shadow of a Doubt, that arguably have a foot in the horror genre. I liked Don't Look Now so much when I saw it a few weeks ago that I'm not even willing to say The Exorcist is the best horror movie of 1973. And yet. It's true no movie has ever scared me more, and by itself that should be plenty to put it at the top of a list of horror pictures—good enough for me! The movie that was supposed to go here, Nashville, was one I was pretty sure Phil or Steven or both were going to write about, and for one reason or another I was getting hinky about stepping on any more toes, preempting picks as it felt like I had been doing a lot. Plus it was fun to recall that first time I'd seen The Exorcist when it was new (almost certainly one of the cuts with the subliminals), cowering in the far back left-hand section of a packed house in the old State Theater in Minneapolis. What drama. Were there people screaming and crying? Yes, there were people screaming and crying.
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