Dempsey, Michael. "The Exorcist." Film Quarterly. Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 1974): 61-62.

The Exorcist was extremely popular among the viewers, driving out millions to see the spectacle of the film. Though sensationalized in the media and among the viewing public, the critics had a much different view. The review in Film Quarterly expresses a critic’s opinion compared to the masses, showing that the film produced just as strong a negative effect.

Michael Dempsey opens his review with the line, “The Exorcist is the trash bombshell of 1973, the aesthetic equivalent of being run over by a truck” (61). He proceeds by criticizing first the public response of the film; he believes that people inappropriately associate shock value with film quality. As William Zuckerman noted that people went to the theater to be stimulated by fear, Dempsey blames William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty for manipulating “the most primitive fears and prejudices of the audience” (61).

Dempsey also criticizes the filmmakers, in particular the ideas that Blatty attempted to reveal in the film. In regards to theology, he calls Blatty’s portrayal “idiotic”. The use of an exorcism of a young girl does not prove the existence of God, as Dempsey writes “…faith, faith in what? In a God who allows an innocent girl to be tortured?” (62). He asserts that Blatty’s faith stems not from the love of God, but from the fear of hell. Dempsey also evaluates the originality of the film, citing a list of movies with similar elements, and the acting, calling Linda Blair’s performance a “film technician’s Frankenstein” (62).

Although Dempsey’s review is from a rather extreme point of view, it is important to understand the full range of response to the film. The explosive response to The Exorcist came from many diverse viewpoints, Dempsey representing the opinion of the film from a cinematic perspective.

The Exorcist, released on December 26, 1973, created an enormous response from viewers and critics, from loving the film to hating it, all for different reasons. People reacted to all aspects of the film . religion, violence, gore, and sex. A phenomenon had been created. The sensationalism surrounding the film was perpetuated by moviegoers and journalists, who had reported of fainting, heart attacks, vomiting, and miscarriages during the film. The Exorcist was even blamed for a murder in the UK. The extreme emotions evoked by the story is generally attributed to the more superficial elements of the film, but William Peter Blatty, writer of the original novel and of the screenplay, had intended it to be much deeper and thought-provoking. The annotated bibliography contains sources that reveal multiple layers of the film, attempting to capture a piece of the full range of responses.

Marriott, James. Horror films. London: Virgin, 2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.H6 M323 2004

 

The Exorcist succeeded in large part due to the hype surrounding the film. In fact, there was just as much controversy within the filmmaking process as there was about the film. In the section titled “The Exorcist”, James Marriot provides details behind the making of the film, from inception to the post-release reactions. In it, it is revealed that the film may well have been a product of the director, William Friedkin, rather than that of William Peter Blatty.

Blatty initially wanted to write a factual case history, based on an article he had read in the Washington Post in 1949, but the family had no interest. Producer Paul Monash offered Blatty $400,000 for a six-month option to film his novel, who then sold the option to Warner Brothers for a reported $641,000. After Monash was cut from the project, Blatty wanted an agnostic director but ended up with William Friedkin, a Jewish director who forced Blatty to create a second draft of the script in order to work with him.

Friedkin was a difficult director; having no connections to Iraq, he had to make additional promises to Iraqi filmmakers in order to shoot the opening scenes there. He opted to have all mechanical effects and little optical effects – for the exorcism sequence, the entire room was enclosed and refrigerated. Blatty criticized many of Friedkin’s techniques, such as the spinning head sequence which he deemed unnecessary, saying that “supernatural doesn’t mean impossible” (qtd. in 132). There were additional dangers on the set: a rig that was attached to a mold that had been made for Linda Blair came loose during shooting, requiring back treatment. Friedkin used these difficulties to show journalists and the public that the movie was cursed, increasing the buildup of attention around the film.

After the film’s release, which opened in only 30 cinemas, the term “cinematic neurosis” became popular, when psychiatric problems were exposed from disturbing films in people with no history of mental illness. The movie was blamed for criminal and suicidal acts, including one incident in the UK in October 1974, when a 14-year-old boy blamed for the movie for his murder of a 9-year-old girl. The MPAA changed the rating from R to 17 certificate from increasing public pressure, and the UK gave it an X rating. The public was so caught up in the hype that the movie became the highest grossing horror movie internationally. In this section, Marriott explains the creation and perpetuation of that hype that would dispel any oddities surrounding the movie.

Magistrale, Tony and Michael A. Morrison, ed. Dark Night's Dreaming : Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PS374.H67 D37 1996

The Exorcist is based on the book of the same name written by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay. Chapter 6, “Casting Out Demons: The Horror Fiction of William Peter Blatty” details Blatty’s inspirations for writing the novel and his thoughts on the reaction to his work. Even the book had an enormous impact, spending 55 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. From this, the more serious intentions of the story can be understood without the visual stimulations of the movie to distract.

Douglas E. Winter writes that Blatty brought a new legitimacy to the horror genre, that he “ushered the reign of Stephen King and the stylized horror genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s” (84). Blatty was raised as a Roman Catholic, having attended a Catholic grammar school, a Jesuit high school, and a Jesuit university – Georgetown. Before writing The Exorcist, he had already published 8 books and produced 11 film scripts, and was known as a comedy writer. It wasn’t until 1971 that he wrote the book based on a successful exorcism he had read about in the Washington Post in 1949. Blatty said, “It seemed a validation of what we were being taught as Catholics, and certainly a validation of our hopes for immortality. Because if there were evil spirits, why not good? Why not a soul? Why not life everlasting?” (qtd. in 87). It was this confirmation that Blatty tried to evoke through his novel, though he concedes that “the real point of the book is nowhere to be found in the film” (qtd. in 91).

Winter praises The Exorcist as a book that confronts religious issues in a thought-provoking manner. He also discusses the social undertones of the story, of women's liberation and the rebellion of youth. The popularity of the book can be attributed to its sensationalism and to the pronounced taboos, but Blatty's real intention, as shown by Winter, was to reveal his hopeful attitude of what the exorcism implies about the justification of religion and the afterlife.

Harrison, Stephanie.  Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005.

Harrison’s book neither deals directly with Roeg’s film, nor with du Maurier’s short story that inspired it, but it is essential to any analysis of Don’t Look Now.  The process by which a director adapts a short story into film is important, because a short story is just that, short.  A director must take something that rarely lasts over fifty pages and turn in into a film that usually lasts over two hours.  A director must take the story and ‘run with it;’ in some ways making the story his own.  Harrison analyzes 35 short stories and the films they spawned.  She separates the films and analyses into sections based mainly on genre (Horror, Western, etc.).  Don’t Look Now is a hybrid film, so it would not snugly fit in any of the genres that Harrison chooses, but it does have horror, drama, erotica, and auteur elements to it.  Harrison describes four different auteurs (Altman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Kazan) and their individual styles of adaptation.  She calls Altman, for instance, the “translator” (3), because he attempted to stay as true as possible to the original story.  There is little to no literature written about Nicholas Roeg, so it is impossible to know whether or not he would fit in with any of the different auteurs.
    One point I found very interesting in Harrison’s analysis is her idea that audiences are less hard on films based on short stories for being true to their source material, because “few short stories are embedded in the public’s consciousness in a way that popular novels are” (xvi).  In the case of Don’t Look Now, both the story and the film seem to have been lost from the public consciousness (due, in part, to the success of The Exorcist, which was released the same year as Roeg’s film).  Harrison’s book, as I said above, never mentions Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but by looking at the process by which other writers have adapted short stories, we can get a sense of the different approaches to it and how Roeg many have gone about doing it.  Roeg took a fifty-four page short story about a man’s blindness to his abilities and his fate and refashioned it into an unsettling drama/thriller about a married couple and ...

Hutchinson, Tom. Horror & Fantasy in the Movies.  New York: Crescent Books, 1974: 13-36.

Hutchinson goes beyond merely mapping out the history of horror cinema, and dedicates the first chapter of his book to revealing the deeper meanings beyond certain horror films.  Behind the blood and monsters, Hutchinson sees social commentary and much more, which the average viewer is completely unaware of.  He events of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and concludes that its underlying message is, “that we ought to co-operate or else” (23).  Hutchinson writes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), another 1950s sci-fi film, “carries a warning about loss of identity, an all-too-grim idea in a world where individuality is ironed out into uniform characteristics of thought and yes-saying” (23).
Hutchinson begins his analysis with the birth of cinema and the fantasy shorts of George Meliès.  He moves into German Expressionist films, such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) (19-21).  He also refers to Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) as further examples of horror films with social messages (23).  Hutchinson argues though, that one cannot simply voice these messages, or warnings, to the audience directly.  As he says, they must be “wrapped up in trappings of tinsel before they will be accepted” (28).
Don’t Look Now (1972) is one of those films whose meaning is “wrapped in trappings of tinsel” (28).  Hutchinson explains that, “[Donald] Sutherland here carries the seeds of his own destruction within himself, but will never know it” (29).  Reflexively, we are placed in the same position as Sutherland, because we are also unable to interpret the signs to recognize the future (e.g. our doom).  Hutchinson’s argument is that, “[Sutherland] is time-trapped in the way that we all are, unable to move beyond his three-dimensional context” (29).  Hutchinson ties into a theme explored in other sources I have encountered, that of time and space (in Don’t Look Now).  He, unfortunately, does not give the theme an adequate explication (quickly moving to the next film), but he does place the film in relation to other horror films that do more than just scare.  One is easier able to understand Don’t Look Now, when placed in the context of other horror films...

Based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Directed by Nicolas Roeg, Screenplay by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, Music by Pino Donnagio, Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie

In this article, Joanne Cantor discusses Jaws along with other famously frightening films that have scared audiences for years. Among the reasons cited by Cantor and her research, emotional impact is a recurring topic.

The responses that included Jaws all had similar analysis of the effects of the film on the viewer. As Cantor notes, many of the students wrote about how the film personally affected them as opposed to others. There were two main categories of emotional effects: those that occurred when the subject was awake and those that took place during “bedtime” hours.

Movies such as Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project, and Scream share such characteristics, which may be one reason why all of these films have had such documented success in the industry. In particular, Jaws had the most influence on people in the water, with 65% of viewers reporting interference with swimming. Additionally, 43% of the 83% of viewers who cited life-changing effects had ongoing problems from Jaws.       

In her conclusion, Cantor explains that in addition to the emotional effects from Jaws, there might be an evolutionary reason for why people are so affected of traumatic experiences (i.e. horror films). She cites LeDoux’s theory that we have accurate memories of these experiences so as to identify life-threatening situations in the future and act quicker and more rationally.

seems like a good introduction