31 Days of Fright, Day 27: The Exorcist

Welcome to day 27 of 31 Days of Fright here at Road To The Movies! In today's episode, Jonathan takes a trip down memory lane with...

THE EXORCIST
1973
Rated R

The first time I saw this movie, it scared the hell out of me. It was partly because of the movie itself (and the fact that I was about 12) but mostly it was the way in which I saw it. The scenario is this: I was staying at a friend’s house whose mother was notorious in our group for sleepwalking. My friend was asleep and so was his mother, and I was busy trying to navigate a Nintendo 64 game. Suddenly, the door to my friend’s mom’s room opened. She came out groggily, and I could almost immediately tell she was asleep (this sort of thing happened quite a bit). She wandered around for a few minutes, then came stumbling over to my game and suddenly shut it off. Then she promptly went back to bed. Guess what was on TV when she turned it off? That’s right, The Exorcist. I was far too scared to get up and turn it off, so I sat through the whole thing. I’ve never been the same again.

I’ve watched this film about thirty times since that first viewing, and I can see why I was so deathly afraid. I know it will never hold that same intense feeling of fright it did when I first saw it, but there are certain parts that still chill me to the bone. And now that we have the new uncut edition (which is the version I watched for this review) we have a chance to experience parts of it for the first time. That was really exciting for me. This film is sort of the genesis of my horror movie experience, and it remains a classic in the genre as well as my own life, for many reasons.

The direction is spectacular. Every scene has obviously had quite a bit of care put into it, because they all cut extremely deep. And, in my opinion, any director who can get a child to act that insane and scary deserves a ton of recognition. I also highly enjoyed the writing. While some of it seems very overly expository, it gets the story across well and conveys the horror that everyone involved is feeling. The problems with the dialogue don’t seem like problems in writing. It all feels very natural. I think the problems are with the way people spoke during that time period: a little clunkily, and with too much explanation.

Despite all its good points, there were a couple of things that didn’t really impress me, the biggest of which is how slowly the story moves. Especially in the extended cut. It crawls at a snail’s pace for quite a while, and I can see why I remember almost nothing at all about certain parts of it from when I was young. They’re easy to simply ignore. But when it picks up, it really picks up. It almost goes nowhere at all for an hour, then it goes everywhere all at once, in the best way possible. There’s really not a whole lot that takes you out of this movie that can’t be blamed on the time period rather than the filmmakers themselves.

In short, this is a near perfect horror movie, not because it is a classic and not because everybody’s heard of it, but because it’s genuinely scary and the story is truly involving. The characters are acted almost perfectly, and it’s directed with such vision that one can’t help but appreciate the care put into it. The filmmakers obviously approached this film with one goal in mind: to scare the pants off anyone who watches it. They’ve accomplished that, and still do almost forty years later.

9.5/10

-JONATHAN


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