“What an excellent day for an exorcism.”
When you first watch The Exorcist, you might most notice its shock value,
its iconic scares, and the artistry of its subtle,
realistic horror aesthetic.
Yet what might not be as obvious
on initial viewing is what the film is really saying.
The 1973 film about the demonic possession
of 12 year-old girl Regan is really an exploration
of deep theological questions:
Why does evil exist? Why are the innocent punished?
And why would a loving God allow such unfair suffering?
“His mother passed away.
She was living by herself, and l guess she was dead
a couple of days before they found her.”
The Exorcist also doesn’t shy away
from wading into controversial political debates,
like the clashes between progressive and family values,
between science and religion, and between atheism and faith.
And the ending of The Exorcist comes down with a noticeably
conservative pro-faith and pro-patriarchy stance—
suggesting that science is no substitute for God,
families suffer without strong father figures,
and Christianity is the only thing that can heal us.
“Our father, who art in heaven...”
William Peter Blatty,
who wrote the novel The Exorcist is based on,
described his story as “an argument for God”
and “an apostolic work, to help people in their faith.”
"Save your servant.
Who places her trust in thee, my God."
Here’s our Take
on the deeper messages and themes of The Exorcist’s ending,
and how to still appreciate this movie if you don’t happen to agree
with its values.
“The power of Christ compels you!”
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“Jesus Christ, can you believe this?
He doesn't even call his daughter on her birthday,
for Christ’s sake.”
One key aspect of The Exorcist’s story is the absent father,
on both the literal and spiritual levels.
We’re repeatedly reminded
that Regan’s dad is out of the picture.
“Where's her father?”
“In Europe.”
“Have you told him what's happening?”
“No.”
So on one level,
Regan’s demonic possession represents a larger fear
about what happens when the nuclear family is disrupted
and lacks a father figure.
“Your daughter's symptoms could be an overreaction to depression.”
“My daughter isn’t depressed.”
“Well, you mentioned her father... the separation.”
You could even read the film as a dire warning about the dangers
of raising children without a stable male influence.
To be fair, it doesn’t feel that the movie is trying to blame Chris
for being a single mother.
This successful, well-off actress loves being a mother
and her home life with Regan is actually shown to be very happy.
“I love you!”
“I love you, Rags. We'll have a good day.”
But Regan’s fatherlessness is really about a bigger symbolism—
the family’s lack of religious belief. “Do you have any religious beliefs?”
“No.”
“What about your daughter?”
“No, why?”
God the Father is absent in this little girl’s life,
and the film implies this may be what made her vulnerable
to demonic possession in the first place.
In the end, the victor in the movie is fatherly love, both human and divine.
Father Merrin and Father Karras perform an exorcism on Regan,
and these priests come to fill the patriarchal role for Regan,
refusing to desert her like her dad did,
and even sacrificing themselves totally to save her.
“Come into me! God damn you! Take me! Take me!”
In the last scenes of the film,
Regan kisses the cheek of another priest,
and it’s as if she’s declaring her faith,
marking God as the true father in her life and all priests
as a proxy for Him.
Chris gives Father Dyer Karras’ medal,
“I thought you’d like to keep this.”
implicitly acknowledging that he and Karras are basically
two interchangeable manifestations of the same spirit.
In the director’s cut, Father Dyer’s final insistence
that she take it instead acts as an encouragement for Chris
to embrace religion and accept a token of protection
from the holy father who’s now present in Regan’s life.
As Yale film professor Marc Lapadula told us,
“And so two lives for one life to be saved, and it’s worth it
as far as the church is concerned…
Two men die trying to save one young girl,
and in the end they do.”
Regan’s possession can be read as expressing our culture’s fear
of young girls being spoiled by the onset of sexuality.
We’ve seen the horror convention of an innocent child overtaken
by an evil force before,
but Regan’s behavior here is especially shocking and explicit.
She goes from being a sweet child to someone profane, violent,
and inappropriately sexual.
“Let Jesus fuck you.”
The battle between innocence and sin takes place
on the battleground of a young girl’s body—
a physical form that most people are inclined to feel protective towards.
We see how hard Regan resists the demon’s influence,
“Mother, make it stop!”
and her intense symptoms emphasize that she’s being physically hurt
from the inside and robbed of her normal personality.
So, it’s like the demon is molesting her.
“It's burning! It's burning!”
“Do something, Doctor. Please, help her!”
“Make him stop! He's trying to kill me!”
All this could symbolize that puberty and sexual urges
are like violations of a child’s inherent purity.
“Have you ever known your daughter to swear and use obscenities?”
“Never.”
This sexual demon perverts everything— from the love between mother and child
“Lick me.”
to the help that authority figures try to provide.
“She advised me
to keep my fingers away from her goddam c---.”
At the end of the film,
everyone’s relieved that Regan has no memory
of her demonic possession,
“She doesn’t remember any of it.”
“That’s good.”
so it’s as if she’s been restored to the innocent little girl
she’s meant to be.
But this regression sends the troubling message
that Regan maturing into a young woman is unnatural and horrific,
and must somehow be prevented.
“I'm telling you that that thing upstairs
isn't my daughter.”
As Sadie Doyle writes for Rookie Magazine,
“Once you realize that The Exorcist is, essentially, the story of
a 12-year-old who starts… going through puberty—
it becomes apparent to the feminist-minded viewer
why two adult men are called in to slap her around
for much of the third act.
People are convinced that something spooky is going on with girls;
that, once they reach a certain age, they lose their adorable innocence
and start tapping into something powerful and forbidden...
And the moment a girl becomes a woman
is the moment you fear her most.”
“I'm the devil.”
The happy ending of Regan’s regression
to a childlike state of girlhood suggests that—
to be godly and virtuous—
females must reject sexuality and mature womanhood at all costs.
Another key message The Exorcist leaves us with
is that science is no substitute
for the centuries-old function of religion.
The film frames the medical community as arrogant and inept.
“So what’s wrong with her?”
“We still think the temporal lobe—”
“Oh what are you talking about, for Christ’s sakes?”
Doctors misdiagnose Regan, speculatively prescribe pills,
subject Regan to harrowing tests, and for all their sophistication,
have no idea what’s going on.
“I'm sorry.”
“You're sorry.
Jesus Christ, eighty-eight doctors
and all you can tell me with all of your bulls--t—”
“The medical community has totally given up on her.
I mean the greatest institutions in the world,
the Johns Hopkins of the world,
whether it’s the physiological or the psychological side of medicine,
none of them can help her.”
Ironically, the doctors are the ones who first raise the idea
that Regan’s problem may be spiritual, needing a spiritual solution.
“It starts with a conflict or a guilt that eventually leads to
the patient's delusion
that his body's been invaded by an alien intelligence;
a spirit if you will.”
They’re the ones who first suggest an exorcism.
“You ever heard of exorcism?”
“You’re telling me that I should take my daughter
to a witch doctor.”
Even Father Karras, who’s trained as a psychiatrist,
tells Chris that exorcism is outdated and inferior to modern medicine.
“Well it just doesn't happen anymore, Ms. MacNeil.”
“Oh yeah, since when?”
“Since we learned about mental illness, paranoia,
schizophrenia.”
But the story comes to the conclusion that,
however far we think science has progressed,
there are still certain things beyond our rational understanding,
that need an old-fashioned approach.
“I could see her as a psychiatrist—”
“Oh, not a psychiatrist! She needs a priest.
She’s already seen every f---ing psychiatrist in the world.”
The most modern, up-to-date medicine is no match for the demon’s
ancient form of evil,
while Catholicism works precisely because it is archaic and timeless.
The Exorcist’s opening scenes
of Father Merrin’s archaeological dig in Iraq show him unearthing
a statue of Pazuzu,
a demonic god from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian mythology.
And we later see Pazuzu in Regan’s bedroom during the exorcism,
confirming that this is the demon that’s possessed the girl.
“Grant me… your unworthy servant... pardon for all my sins—”
“Bastards!”
“—and the power to confront this cruel demon.”
The message in this opening
is that evil perseveres across cultures and time periods—
it’s a universal thing that’s always existed,
and the way that we fight it doesn’t change over time, either.
When Father Karras jumps out the window in the exorcism scene,
this recalls Mark 5:1-20 in the Bible,
in which Jesus casts the demons possessing a man into a herd of pigs,
and the pigs run off a cliff to their deaths.
The man shouts,
“My name is Legion, for we are many,”
just as Father Merrin says that the specific name and form
of a demon doesn’t matter, as they’re all versions of the same evil.
“I think it would be helpful if I gave you some background
on the different personalities Regan has manifested.
So far, there seems to be three. She's convinced—”
“There's only one.”
Ultimately, the film argues that this primordial evil
can only be defeated by the priests' “medicines”
of belief, sacrifice and selfless love.
“Now, my doctors care about me, but I don’t have any doctors
that are willing to die for me…
What those priests are called to do in this story
is to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
Still, in promoting the power of faith,
The Exorcist also ends up sending some strikingly
anti-science messages that— in a modern context—
appear dangerous.
The Exorcist suggests that the purpose of demons is to help us face and purge
our doubt and our distance from God.
“I think the point is to make us despair.
To see ourselves as animal and ugly.
To reject the possibility that God could love us.”
And the exorcism isn’t just a battle for Regan’s soul,
but for Father Karras’—
it brings his crisis of faith to a head.
“I need out, I’m unfit. I think I’ve lost my faith, Tom.”
At the start of the film,
he feels guilty over his inability to adequately care for his mother
in the lead-up to her death,
and unqualified to counsel his parishioners
when he’s so lost himself.
“There's not a day in my life when I don't feel like a fraud.”
The film humanizes priests,
showing that they struggle with the same questions and doubts we do.
When the exorcism starts, Karras is visibly unsettled,
unlike the confident older priest Merrin—
but it takes someone who’s struggling with doubt to finish the job,
to be more vulnerable to the demon and therefore more triumphant
in rejecting it.
Merrin warns Karras not to be sucked into the demon’s mind games,
“The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us.”
and sure enough,
the demon preys on Karras’ worst thoughts.
“You killed your mother. You left her alone to die.”
But when it takes on the voice of Karras’ mother,
“Dimmy, why you do this to me?”
this forces Karras to confront his regret and guilt head on,
and he can finally mourn.
“You’re not my mother!”
Karras eventually commands the demon to leave Regan and enter him instead,
before finally killing the demon by killing himself.
And though he loses his life,
Father Karras finds peace in his self-sacrifice
because his faith is restored.
“In that moment he’s redeemed.
He’s gonna take on the cross of what this girl’s gone through,
even though the demon inside her just murdered this fellow priest,
and in order to stop it he’s gonna sacrifice himself.”
Through Karras’ struggle, the film spoke to the doubt and confusion
many people were feeling at the time of its release.
Blatty’s novel came out in 1971,
in the wake of JFK's assassination and during the Vietnam War.
And the 1973 film implicitly taps into the pervasive sense of "evil"
and disillusionment people may have felt as the idealistic Camelot passed away
and Watergate unfolded.
Some have even interpreted the demon—
who speaks in strange languages, including backwards English,
and threatens a wholesome American way of life—
as representing U.S. fears of foreign communists.
Meanwhile, like the film’s characters,
fewer people were turning to the church to cope with their modern problems.
Within the film, the old-fashioned Father Merrin
and modern, independent woman Chris represent the extremes
Karras is torn between.
But Karras — a priest who’s also a Harvard-educated psychiatrist—
finds a medium way between those two poles of the old and the new.
“How did a shrink ever get to be a priest?”
“It's the other way around.
The Society sent me through medical school.”
Thus, though Karras, the story is trying to show
that faith can (and must) still play a role in modern life.
"This is the cup of my blood.
The blood of the new and everlasting Covenant,
the mystery of faith."
One of the reasons The Exorcist works as a movie—
and can affect you regardless of your beliefs—
is that it’s not lecturing at us about faith.
It’s not judging its characters who aren’t religious.
Yet it is sending a number of overtly conversative messages,
and even putting forward what some might consider
reactionary views of female sexuality, single parents, science and atheists.
This opens up a larger conversation about why exorcism movies
(and arguably much of the horror genre in general)
do tend to lean to the right.
As Alex Mar wrote for Salon,
“the exorcism film is profoundly conservative,
and terrific propaganda for the church.”
Mar also writes,
“...in the exorcism film:
Perversely enough, to believe in the devil
is the key to salvation.”
"I believe in the devil, and so I believe in God!"
"People say that God is dead.
But how can they think that if I show them the devil?"
And this is exactly what we see in The Exorcist.
In presenting an example of true evil,
the film argues for the existence of the opposite:
true good, total self-sacrifice and the urgent need for faith
in a benevolent higher power.
“It is the Lord who expels you.”
Stephen King wrote that
“the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary,”
in the sense that we look to it to “re-establish our feelings
of essential normality.”
He writes that “good liberals often shy away from horror films,”
but that “the best horror films, like the best fairy tales,
manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.”
Viewers who might enjoy The Exorcist as a piece of cinema but don’t relate
to its Christian message may find the movie’s religious agenda
a little disturbing.
Yet even if you’re turned off by its politics
and it’s not about to convert you,
there are also some more universal truths
to take away from The Exorcist—
like the idea that there are always going to be deeper, mysterious things
that our savvy, modern establishments can’t understand;
that many of the same fundamental trials of human life
continue to plague us across the ages;
and that there will always be evil and suffering in the world,
but the most powerful way to overcome difficult times is through the kindness
of human beings who do great things for one another.
“Human beings can also rise to certain occasions
and they can actually surprise everyone.”