AN ANALYSIS

On Christmas Day, 1973, Warner Bros released a horror film that did more than
make people scream and grip their arm-rests. Audiences across America and the
world fainted, vomited and ran out of cinemas shrieking; there were even reports
of miscarriages and ‘the-Devil-made-me-do-it’ murders for which the film was
squarely blamed. Ambulances were posted outside cinemas during screenings of
the film, and in many countries (including the U.K.) the film was denied a video
release for over 20 years. Clearly, this movie represented a radical break from the
typical horror flicks of its time, characterized by jerkily-moving monsters and
shadowy Gothic settings. Here was an intense psychological thriller, utterly
realistic and containing the most shocking yet convincing special effects ever seen
on screen to date. This film was THE EXORCIST.

The Exorcist has a complex, multi-layered plot but its primary story is that of
Regan, an ordinary twelve-year-old girl who falls victim to demonic possession.
Before her mother’s (and our) eyes, she transforms from being a cute, innocent
child into “a cursing, fetid horror who masturbates with a crucifix.” It is this
transition, and her shockingly malevolent, perverted behaviour – both towards her
own body and to those around her – that constitute the source of the film’s horror.
Aside from its more celebrated (and often parodied) elements, such as the
360-degree head rotation and green projectile vomit, much of the film’s horror is
of a blatant, base sexual nature, an aspect of The Exorcist which has spawned
considerable controversy. Undoubtedly the crux of this is the highly graphic
‘crucifix masturbation scene’, in which Regan repeatedly stabs a crucifix into her
vagina while yelling “Let Jesus fuck you!” This has led to a broadly supported
theory that The Exorcist is not about “the belief in evil – and that evil can be cast
out”, but that it is, in fact, about a girl – a “monstrous-feminine” – whose repressed
sexuality, only now coming to bloom as she enters puberty, causes her to go out of
her mind and commit acts of repulsive bodily defiance in the face of the enemy:
patriarchy, as personified by Father Karras and Father Merrin.

For Charles Derry, author of ‘More Dark Dreams: Some Notes on the Recent
Horror Film’, “Possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of
aberrant feminine behaviour which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject –
and perversely appealing.” Ignoring The Exorcist’s overt religious theme, he sees
Regan as “a body in revolt”, and goes on to assert that “Regan is possessed not by
the devil but by her own unsocialized body.” He depicts Regan’s relationship with
her mother as containing a strong but repressed desire for incest, which is finally
granted open expression when, during the crucifix masturbation scene, Regan
thrusts her mother’s head between her legs and cries, “Lick me! Lick me!” To
Derry and like-minded theorists, conflict in the film occurs not between good and
evil, God and Satan, but between man, the enforcer of patriarchy, and “the
castrating girl/woman, a figure designed to strike terror into the hearts of men.” He
concludes: “Horror emerges from the fact that woman has broken with her proper
feminine role – she has made a spectacle of herself – put her unsocialized body on
display. And to make matters worse, she has done all of this before the shocked
eyes of two male clerics.”
In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex, Drug And Rock ‘N’
Roll Generation Saved HollyWood, Peter Biskind expresses a similar point of
view, although his emphasis is more on Regan as victim:

“It is easy to see why people, especially women, detested the picture. It
presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is
equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture – almost all of
them celibate priests – unite to abuse and torture Regan in their efforts to
return her to a presexual innocence. Having Regan thrust a crucifix into her
vagina is intended to be a fiendishly inventive bit of sacrilege, but it is also a
powerful image of self-inflicted abortion, be it by crucifix or coat hanger.”
“The Exorcist is filled with disgust for female bodily functions; it is perhaps
not too much of a stretch to see the famously gross scene in which Blair
vomits pea soup as a Carrie-like metaphor for menstruation. Indeed, The
Exorcist is drenched in a kind of menstrual panic.”

William Peter Blatty, author of the novel and the movie’s adapted screenplay,
rejects this interpretation outright: “I heave a sigh of exasperation when I read
things like Biskind’s analysis, and mentally place them in the same drawer where I
keep interpretations of the intended ‘meaning’ of the film as a metaphor for the
problems of parents dealing with teenage rebellion.” Considered after a full and
prudent viewing of the film, Derry’s and Biskind’s analyses (together with others
like them) seem obviously unwarranted and over-simplified, the result of watching
the film through blinkers which focus only on certain raw strands in its deep and
detailed fabric. Kinder and Houston describe Pazuzu, the demon in The Exorcist,
as “vulgar, limited, and preoccupied with sex”, but it seems a similar description
could be levelled at these imaginative theorists, who insist that Regan “comes to
explicitly personify the evil of feminist liberation” and interpret the film’s meaning
in purely sexual, gender-based terms.
The film does, undeniably, contain an explicit and obscene sexual
undercurrent: when possessed, Regan’s actions and, later, (once she’s restrained)
verbal abuse is frequently of a vulgar sexual nature. But the inclusion of this
ingredient is designed to convey all the more powerfully the vile, anti-human
instincts of Evil; it is not intended to serve as a focal point for the film but is
merely one of several devices the demon employs to “make us believe that we’re
animal and ugly” (to quote Father Merrin). The crucifix masturbation scene, for
example – the scene most of the ‘repressed-sexuality’ theories anchor on – was
only devised by Blatty in the later stages of writing The Exorcist: as he explains in
The Fear of God (a documentary about the making of the movie), he had to come
up with something shocking enough to drive Regan’s staunchly atheist mother to
consult “witch doctors” (i.e. priests) for help. The very fact that the possessed is a
girl was largely to blur the book’s (and hence film’s) basis in a real-life event: the
1949 exorcism of a boy in Georgetown, Washington, which fascinated Blatty and
eventually inspired him to write the novel. The film certainly uses sexual
debasement to maximize its stark confrontational horror, but to suggest that it is
“drenched in menstrual panic” is exaggerating and missing the point.
For one thing, the ‘repressed-sexual’ theorists seem to place too great an
emphasis on coincidental details. One could imagine them making similar
assertions about Samara in The Ring; they are foiled there only by the fact that
Samara kills a young female like herself at the beginning of the film. If it had been
a boy, everything else would have fitted their theory quite snugly: a hatred of the
father, a feeling of affection for the mother, and the fact that, at the film’s climax,
she kills Noah but spares Rachel. Interestingly, Samara and Regan are physically
very much alike: both are pretty, prepubescent girls with long, dark hair and dark
eyes, which turn green when they are in ‘evil’ mode.
At the same time, there is undoubtedly something peculiarly frightening
about the “monstrous-feminine”, which is evident in both The Ring and The
Exorcist. It is no coincidence that three of the creepiest horror films I've seen are
The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project and The Ring – all of which feature a female
‘monster’. There are two explanations that I can put forward for this. First, women
and children are generally regarded as gentle and benevolent, so when it is they
who are the perpetrators rather than the victims of evil, it plays havoc with our
intrinsic understanding of the world. We accept from common knowledge and
experience that males, as the more aggressive gender, are inclined to commit acts
of violence; it is not that great a leap from the husband who instigates domestic
violence to the Jack the Ripper-style psychopath who habitually stalks and hacks
up women. It is much more disturbing when the perpetrator is a female (especially
a young female) because it contrasts with the world we know so much more
sharply. We struggle to come to terms with how, in The Exorcist, Regan, a sweet-
natured child who loves horse-riding and making sculptures for her mother,
mutates to become “That horror. That thing on the bed.”
On a deeper, cultural level – and perhaps in contradiction to the above – is
the fact that for centuries women have been associated with black magic and the
unknown (and therefore the frightening). In the West, Judaeo-Christian religion
teaches us that the woman is weak, treacherous and susceptible to the Devil’s
influence, a belief exemplified by the medieval fear and persecution of witches. In
the East, the feminine is associated with darkness and death as part of the yin
element (as opposed to the light, lively male yang ). Regan, as well as Samara and
the Blair Witch, all contain elements of the monstrous-feminine who, through
some sort of black magic (a Ouija board in The Exorcist, a video tape in The
Ring), assumes grotesque powers and breaks out of her conventionally innocuous
feminine character to become – perversely, chaotically – a harbinger of horror.