Good Lord (!), what a film. Jason Miller’s face etched in granite, Linda Blair putting on the theatrics courtesy of Mercedes McCambridge, and the real MVP of the piece for me, Ellen Burstyn at the end of her parental tether.
I can’t separate this and THE FRENCH CONNECTION. They’re both such monumental films, and their impact unfortunately overshadows everything else Friedkin did, whether good or bad. The first time I saw this on the big screen, a Film Society screening at University in the late ‘90s, wasn’t the best introduction to it. I invited some friends and we laughed through most of it. Watching it now, even thought there are obvious sequences that it’s easy to laugh at – for example, the innocent Regan and the first couple of expletives that fly out of her mouth – I don’t think much else is amusing, aside from a couple of effects that don’t look particularly realistic (the swivelled head always looks super-fake to me).
Still when you’re with a bunch of friends in your late teens, and you go to watch a film together, and – most importantly – you’ve been told all your life that this is the scariest film ever made, so you’re a little on-edge anyway, it’s easy to crack up. In fact, the thing that cracked us up and started to send us over the edge was our friend J.P. licking his lips in one of the scenes where Kinderman talks to Father Karras, and they walk past a young lady playing tennis. Even seeing this shot some 25 years later puts a smile on my face. I still recoil in horror when I think about the older couple, sat near us in that Lawrence Batley Theatre screening, who turned around to shush us.
The British public have had a strange relationship with this film. It was banned on home video for so long, but never banned at cinemas, and so it was something you could still go and see projected fairly regularly. The home video ban was lifted in 1998, just in time for its 25th anniversary, with the BBFC conceding that ‘while still a powerful and compelling work, it no longer had the same impact as it did 25 years ago.’
I probably next saw the film again a couple of years later when Friedkin’s Director’s Cut was released on DVD, and this led to another amusing moment that’s locked together with the film for me. My friend Vini and I were in Ireland, visiting friends, and following a night at the pub, had gone back to somebody’s house to watch THE EXORCIST. In those early days of DVDs, many people watched them through the PS2, Playstation’s latest gaming console. We popped the disc in, and prior to the film starting, Friedkin appeared in a video introduction, speaking about how the Director’s Cut came about. Vini grabbed the PS2 controller, and pretended to be controlling his gestures and hand movements, while saying things like “Okay, now point to the camera…”. To this day, I still notice every time Friedkin gesticulates in interviews – something he does fairly often – always going back to that thing he does where he holds one hand limply in the other.
My second big screen Friedkin in recent weeks, after THE FRENCH CONNECTION, with more to come thankfully, and a perfect Thursday night screening at the glorious Hollywood Avondale (who I supported by buying some beautiful limited-run Friedkin posters).
Hit: Tubular Bells – Mike Oldfield
Hidden Gem: Iraq – Jack Nitzsche & Krzysztof Penderecki
Vinyl Stylus 