Author’s note: After decades of attempting to read “The Exorcist” but then chickening out after getting a couple chapters in, I can now successfully say that I’ve read William Peter Blatty’s epic masterpiece on demon possession. Over those same decades, I’ve also attempted to write about “The Exorcist” in all of its split pea soup spewing glory but every time I sat down to write something about it, I’d hit a wall, or be thrown down a flight of Georgetown stairs, as it were. Most of the time, that wall was just because I’d have scraps and pieces of something but not something that was a coherent review of the movie or analysis of the book. You can’t really do much with scraps. But I think I’ve cracked the code and would like to try something different here. I thought it could be fun to write about “The Exorcist” as if I’d summoned a demon or as if I was in a séance with one. So, this is that. Anytime you see something in regular TYPE, that’s me. Anytime you see something in BOLD that’s the demon. Cool? Cool. Let’s do this. Has anyone seen my Ouija Board?
Oh, Spirits of the Netherworld. I call to you… I have Spooky Season things to talk about.
*silence*
Okay let’s try this again… Oh spirits of the Netherworld. I call to you!
*silence still*
*holds Ouija board up to ear* Helloooo? Spirits? Is this thing on?!?
Say “thee.”
Thee?
Thee. Trust me.
You cannot be serious. Whatever. Oh, great spirits of the Netherworld, I summon thee!
*A demon break through the 4th wall like the Kool-Aid Man* OH YEAH!!!
So “thee” was the magic word?
Totally. We here in the Spirit World like that kind of late nineteenth century stuff like Victorian clothing and candles on walls.
And “thee” fits into that?
The whole nine. Anyhow, what can I help you with?
It’s Spooky Season!
It is! Are you feeling festive? Got your bowl full of candy corn and your Jack-O-Lantern carved up? Got a costume yet?
It’s been over 90 degrees every day this October, so it’s been hard to get into the Halloween mood.
Oh, you think it’s hot, do you? Do you know the pit from whence I came? It’s literally 5,000 degrees on our cool days. My clothes are still smoking for crying out loud… which we also do a lot of.
Smoking or crying out loud?
Yes.
It does smell like burnt…
Sulfur?
Yeah, I was going to say eggs, but sulfur is more accurate.
Yeah, the big man downstairs has that thermostat snap, crackle, and poppin’ to make us all extra crispy. Anyways, what can we do for you?
I have a book and movie adaptation I want to write about, but I don’t really know how to do it best. Writing traditional movie and book reviews can be a little tedious and I don’t want to do that. Can you assist me with this one?
Sounds intriguing. I guess you could be using ChatGPT but sure, why not summon a demon instead?
That should tell you something about how I view AI that I’d rather speak to an actual demon than to put my creative work into an AI meat grinder.
I do have a fee, though. We don’t work for free anymore. Late-stage capitalism is one of our best inventions and we all have side hustles at this point.
A fee? Is it steep?
I don’t know. Only you can answer that. We need the soul of your first born.
No deal.
Your second born?
*thinks for a second* No deal.
Okay fine! How about $666 dollars?
Sure! Do you have Chase or Bank of America down there? I can wire you the money.
Mister, we have all of the banks and bankers down here. But most of us just use Hells Fargo.
I’ll Venmo you some cash.
We mostly use Zelle down in Hell but go for it. You ready?
I am.
*cracks knuckles, puts on goggles, jumps in*
What are the goggles for?
You people are disgusting and gross. It’s so crowded in here, too. All these fleshy organs and soft tissue. Also, why are you sweating so much?
I just ate a bag of Sour Skittles.
You truly are unbelievable, Matthew. What are we going to talk about that you couldn’t just do it on your own and had to summon a Demon for?
The Exorcist!
Wait, you want me to help you write about The Exorcist? A little on the nose, isn’t it?
Yeah, well, who better to talk about The Exorcist than an actual demon?
Just as a point of clarity, I’m somewhere between a garden variety spirit and a demon. I’m a bit like Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life, only down… there.
I’d be down for a dark reboot of that movie.
It’d be from Mr. Potter’s perspective and George would have jumped into the river and…
Okay okay maybe not. That sounds horrible and I don’t need to know more.
But the point still stands that I’m not like a demon-demon. I’m working to get my wings.
Gotcha. But like I said, how does one do a review of either the movie or the book without saying something that hasn’t already been said many times over the past 50 years?
Where should we even begin? Tell me about your history with The Exorcist?
The first time I saw The Exorcist, my brother and I were staying with one of my dad’s coworkers while my dad and stepmom were on their honeymoon. I was 11 years old.
JESUS H CHRIST YOU WERE 11 WHEN YOU SAW THE EXORCIST?
Yep. And my brother was 9. The woman who babysat us wasn’t paying as close attention to us as she should have been and let her shit head son show us that movie late one night. Sometimes I laugh at the inattentiveness of 1980s and early 1990s parents but letting your son show The Exorcist to young children under your care while their parents were out of the country seems like borderline child abuse.
Dude, totally. We’re pretty evil beings where we’re from and The Exorcist is like an Anchorman level comedy for us, but even that’s a little dark for us. This isn’t Poltergeist or The Thing. This is the freaking The Exorcist we’re talking about here.
In my 11-year-old mind, I legitimately thought I was watching something genuinely evil. This wasn’t just chills down your spine or hairs on your arms standing on end, this was a movie that felt very disturbingly real and very dangerous. I’m sometimes a little leery of using the word trauma for things that aren’t textbook “trauma.” Sometimes a bad experience is just that; a bad experience. But watching that movie at that age with the life experience I had at that point; it felt like legit trauma.
I don’t want to say it emotionally and spiritually scarred me, but it definitely left a mark. I was simply too young to have seen the stuff that happens in that movie. Plus, I was away from anything I normally would have used as safeguards or homebase (family, home, friends, etc.) and had nothing to really fall back on. For years, anytime I’d think about that movie, usually at night when I was trying to sleep, one of the images would pop in my head and it’d keep me up for a while.
*puts down pitchfork and gently pats me on the back* There, there.
Dude, what the heck? I thought you were supposed to be scary? This is weird.
*picks pitchfork back up* YOUR MOTHER KNITS SOCKS IN HELL! Wait, can we cuss here?
You can cuss here.
YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL!
That’s more like it.
Regardless of whether me seeing that movie way too young in my life is definitionally “trauma” or not, it certainly felt as such. And I treated it as if it were real. I internalized it. I thought about the stuff in that movie way too frequently. And then when I got older, I decided everyone should share my trauma. That’s what people with trauma do, right? We pass it on! And I became the guy who’d show that movie to anyone who hadn’t seen it yet.
“You’ve never seen The Exorcist? We should watch it!” And then we’d be in my room watching it and I’d be staring at people’s faces when certain scenes would come up.
Yikes.
Yikes indeed. I’m being a little overly dramatic here, but I did show that movie to so many people. For a long time, that movie had a pretty good hold of me. Luckily, both time and age have softened its edges. Now I’m more likely to laugh at that movie than to watch it from behind my hands. But if you catch me thinking about that movie on some random night, there’s a good chance I’m going to fall asleep with the lights on that night. But over time I’ve come to appreciate the other things that movie has going on.
Other things?
Yeah, other things. Its themes. Let’s put a pin in that, though.
Oooh! A pin? Like in a voodoo doll?
Sure. But that movie really is a singular achievement. Stephen Colbert has a segment he does on his show called “The Colbert Questionert” in which he asks guests on his show somewhat idiosyncratic questions on a wide array of topics as a way to better get to know the people he’s interviewing. It’s one of my favorite bits that a late-night host does.
Yes, we’ve seen it. We use it in our demon training seminars. Because where you see sincerity, we often see pretentiousness and falsehood. So many guests do that thing where it looks like they’re thinking long and hard about a question like “what do you think happens when you die” when in fact they’ve come to the interview with pre-planned things they want to say and have workshopped the answer for maximum impact.
Wow. That’s a pretty ungenerous read on those questions and answers, don’t you think?
Look at who you’re talking to. I was skiing on a lake of fire when you summoned me. Grace is what they do upstairs, not where we’re from.
Continuing on… one of the questions on the “Colbert Questionert” is “what’s your favorite action movie?” For me, the answer to that question always comes down to Terminator 2 or Die Hard. My friends and I used to get in long, drawn out, and overly heated debates on which of those was the better action movie. Regardless of where you’d rank them against one another, I dare you to find a better action movie.
That’s an impossible choice.
Agree. But one of my favorite things to do is to really jump into a story or a movie and squeeze every ounce of analysis from it that I can. If left to my own devices, I’d do nothing but shoot the shit about movies, television shows, books, music, etc. all effing day.
Every boss you’ve ever had would agree with that, much to their chagrin.
I’ve also always been fascinated with the idea that some genres have (generally speaking) a consensus “greatest” movie at the top of their “greatest xyz genre” lists. That sometimes there are movies that are so uniformly great and enjoyable or thought provoking that both critics and fans alike anoint it as the best of its genre.
Take Die Hard and Terminator 2 again. I’d say that there’s a good case that either would be the consensus “best” action movie.
But to play devil’s advocate (HEYOOOO!), I bet there’s a lot more fluidity in that designation for action movies than you’re giving it credit for. Just off the top of my horned head, I can list The Matrix, Speed, Predator, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, the first Rambo movie, and everything John Woo did in Hong Kong, as movies that might be the consensus “best” for the action genre.
True. Kill Bill and the John Wick movies come to mind, too.
What about comedies or superhero movies? We like those down there. Are there any comedies or superhero movies that you think are deemed the best?
Trying to find “the best” comedy or the best superhero movie would be a real shitshow. On the superhero front, I’d say either Donner’s first Superman: the Motion Picture or Nolan’s The Dark Knight would be my choices as the consensus “best” movies (especially The Dark Knight) of the superhero genre, but one could easily make the case for Logan, Avengers: Infinity War or even Pixar’s The Incredibles, among a few others.
Oh shoot! I just forgot about Into the Spider-verse, which is one of my favorite movies (superhero or otherwise) of all time.
Maybe for comedies, you could say Airplane! or the 21 Jump Street movie or Anchorman or…
Requiem for a Dream! Or what about Manchester by the Sea? Those really crack me up.
But there are genres where the “best” debate is a lot more settled. As much as I love Goodfellas personally, the best gangster movie of all time is The Godfather. The only gangster movie that could possibly supplant the first The Godfather would be its sequel The Godfather Part 2. (Aside: I miss the days when sequel titles literally were just “Part 2” or “Part 3.” Bring that back, Hollywood). It’d be disingenuous to say Goodfellas couldn’t make a case for “best gangster movie,” but still, that’s kind of the point. Whether it’s either The Godfather or whether it’s Goodfellas, that’s the debate. The drop off after that is severe.
And science fiction?
The debate for “best Science Fiction” movie is even more black and white. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is no case for any other movie as “best,” in my opinion. What would it even be? Blade Runner? The first Alien movie? As great as those movies are… no… as perfect as those movies are, 2001: A Space Odyssey is still way, way, way superior.
I think I see what you’re saying. Just a reminder, though, you summoned me to help you write something quick and easy and the word count is creeping upwards and upwards.
Similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey being the consensus “greatest” science fiction movie, I think The Exorcist fits that mold with the horror genre. You’d be hard pressed to find a “greatest horror movie” list that didn’t have that movie at or near the top of it, nor would it be hard to find someone who has seen that movie who doesn’t hold it in high regard.
Similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Exorcist is another instance where “my favorite” and “consensus best” align. The Exorcist is a towering cinematic achievement. Both Jaws and The Godfather get a lot of love for being huge hits but The Exorcist was equally as impactful.
And I’d argue that even though some of the shock value edge has worn off a bit, the head spinning and split-pea soup spewing shock stuff was never what made that movie great in the first place. And I think the reason why so many of the “devil possesses a person” movies that followed suck ass is that they think that’s what people want to see. …that people just want the grotesque.
That’s false. Or maybe it’s just a misread of the situation. I couldn’t care less about eyes rolling back white or a possessed person’s voice sounding like they’d been smoking cigarettes every day for 35 years. What made The Exorcist great were the quiet moments. And I didn’t fully realize that until I read the book.
Go on!
If you just rely on the movie alone, you’d largely think that the story is about Regan MacNeil and how the demon Pazuzu has possessed her spirit and body.
Pazuzu! Good demon! Great at parties. He does this version of “The Girl from Ipanema” on an organ made out human organs… it’s literally to die for!
But the brilliance of that story… The things that happened to Regan and her family were so shocking and so unlike anything that had come before, it was probably easy to get distracted by it. But what makes that story so brilliant is pretty evident in the book; this isn’t Regan’s story at all. This is Father Damien Karras’s story. Regan is barely even a character at all. And just as she’s about to become one, she becomes a vomit spewing hell hound tied to a bed (in other words: not her).
EEEEASY THERE! Hell Hounds are great pets. Very loyal and loving when you get to know them.
The divine battle between good and evil has raged on for as long as there’s been good and evil. The book really does a great job of fitting what’s happening to Regan and Chris MacNeil into the broader struggle between those two forces. And in that context, it makes sense that the main character would be a priest experiencing doubt, instead of just a young girl going through some pretty awful things.
If I may jump in here a second. And maybe these are trade secrets I shouldn’t be giving away, but yes, the battle between good and evil has raged for countless millennia, this is true. But you humans have really given both sides so many focal points. Y’all have made it fun! So many options and avenues to go down.
Like a game?
Yes, a bit. So yes, I agree with you on your read of The Exorcist. Regan and her soul are relatively small potatoes to us. There are billions of you. Let’s say hypothetically Pazuzu managed to kill Regan. That’s sad. And that’s devastating to her and her family. But on the grander scale, where’s the fun in that? Y’all die all the time! We wanted Father Karras! If we could make a priest lose faith, if we could make a priest truly despair, then that’s the whole ballgame.
I think that’s what I really enjoyed about the book. Okay first off, the movie had a decent dose of this, but one thing is painfully obvious in the book is that The Exorcist is a brilliant procedural drama. It’s obsessed with process. Regan starts exhibiting these troubling behaviors and her mom takes her to every doctor in the phone book. And every doctor and every psychiatrist she takes her to conducts every single test imaginable in order to rule out whatever diagnosis they had assumed she had. It isn’t until they’re out of options that Regan’s mom Chris MacNeil goes to Father Karras to see if what’s ailing Regan has a metaphysical or spiritual solution.
If the book has a fault, there’s maybe a little too much of that. It’s like “okay! We get it already. None of the doctors, psychiatrists, police officers, and then priests can crack the code. No one can figure this out! Can we get to the head spinning already?”
But here we get to the most subtly brilliant thing about that book. No one has more doubt than the priest himself! The doctors and psychiatrists are all like shrugging their shoulders, unable to figure anything out. Damien Karras is constantly seeing things that literally defy any kind of rational explanation… items moving, Regan speaking in languages she shouldn’t be able to speak (or even speaking backwards) … knowing stuff she shouldn’t know like that Karras’s mom had just died or…
Or details of the beef between Jesus and King Herod.
I loved those lines in the book. But that’s just it. There’s no way Regan should know the Herod lineage and that the Tetrarch of Galilee was the one Jesus took on.
Oh man those were the days. Not a big fan of Jesus, but the dude could spit those bars, son! We won so many battles over the years and have those championship banners hanging from our rafters, but those battles with Jesus… they were legendary. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore, do they?
Father Karras kept seeing these unexplainable things and kept disbelieving his own eyes. In fact, everything he’s seeing seems like it could have come from the Bible itself. He’s seeing all this stuff but he’s practically gaslighting himself into not believing it. It can’t be this obvious. It can’t be the devil or Satan. It must be either physical or psychological.
He’s doubt personified. And it was a stroke of genius to make a priest the one with the most doubt.
Okay, I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, either and I might get fired from the eternal fire for telling you yet another trade secret, but doubt is what makes clergy folks so difficult to battle. Your holy books are the swords, but doubt is the whetstone that makes faith strong. We demons do certainty, and it doesn’t tend to work out well for us.
Speaking of doubt, I also have a bit of family mythology wrapped up in this book.
Yeah?
I remember a couple of conversations I had with my dad about the movie, and he mentioned that the book was a very impactful book for him. According to things he said, he had been considering joining the priesthood until he read that book. I don’t completely know if he changed his mind due to the horrific events of that book or if it was because of how well they portrayed Father Karras’s moments of doubt. Regardless, according to him, he changed his mind pretty soundly after reading the book. It’s one of the things I wish I could talk to him about now.
Would you like to leave your father a message? I’ll be sure he gets it.
Are you quoting the movie or are you being serious right now?
Oh, come on. Your dad was a good dude.
But perhaps there’s an alternate theory I hadn’t considered until I finished the book.
Yeah?
The Exorcist was released in May 1971. My sister MaryAnn was born in January 1972. Do the math! In essence, there was never a world where my dad could have read that book where my sister didn’t already exist. It’s probably unlikely that my dad was considering becoming a priest when he knew he had a kid on the way. His saying he was contemplating joining the priesthood was probably a mythology he constructed after the fact because it made for a better story.
It’s possible… no, I’d say probable that my dad, a man wracked with shame after being raised in an abusive household, read The Exorcist, a book about a priest wracked with shame and full of doubt, and came to the same conclusion Father Karras did; that this young child needed this man. That was the spiritual crisis he confronted. His energy was needed with his family. And maybe you could even add that my dad was struggling with alcoholism at the time and perhaps realized that he’d need to change on that front, too. At least that’s the mythology I’ve constructed for him.
Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Most demons aren’t really good at listening these days. We’ve become just as attention deficit oriented as y’all have.
Is that why y’all don’t do possessions much anymore?
That and we’ve moved on to other strategies and have had much better success. Just … look around.
That’s dark.
We’re off to a good start in 2025. You haven’t seen dark yet.
This was fun, though. Thanks for helping me.
No worries. Should I see myself out?
No, I can let you out.
The usual way?
The usual way.
*long wet fart sound*
I’m freeeeee! And I just got my wings!
Attaboy, Clarence.
An open and shut book 
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