An Exorcist for Our Times

Forty years ago, America was horrified by a little girl. Played by Linda Blair, little Regan coughed up gouts of green slime, floated from her bed, spouted obscenities at priests, and swiveled her head like a demented owl. "The Exorcist" was a huge hit.

"The Exorcist" fit in with the times. Americans felt unmoored in the early 1970s. Vietnam, political assassinations, civil unrest, protests, riots, and a stagnating economy unsettled the public. As the detective says in the source novel by William Peter Blatty, “the world—the entire world—is having a nervous breakdown.” The power of "The Exorcist" lay in how it spoke to the times and offered up a simple lesson: There is a war between good and evil in the world, and the good guys can win. "The Exorcist" told us that the devil is real, but he can be defeated through the conscientious efforts of a team of good guys.

Other historical forces contributed to the success of "The Exorcist" as well. The possessed kid is from a family of divorce, with a struggling single mom trying to raise her precocious child and have a career. In the 1970s, concerns about single moms and broken families were beginning to shape the culture wars to come. In "The Exorcist," the devil slips in where the nuclear family seems to be breaking.

Perhaps most interesting, defeating the devil in "The Exorcist" requires a radical kind of talk therapy. As the film (and the novel) make clear, mental-health experts tried, and failed, to treat little Regan. She even spends some time in a mental hospital, only for the doctors to watch helplessly and do nothing. Ultimately, it is Father Karras (who, by the way, is well-versed in psychology) who brings about the healing catharsis. Unfortunately, it costs him his life.

As noted by Stephen A. Diamond in a 2012 Psychology Today post, exorcism is a bit like talk therapy: "Psychotherapy, like exorcism, commonly consists of a prolonged, pitched, demanding, soul-wrenching, sometimes tedious bitter battle royale with the patient's diabolically obdurate emotional ‘demons,’ at times waged over the course of years or even decades rather than weeks or months, and not necessarily always with consummate success."

Exorcism in movies can be seen as akin to last-resort talk therapy, in which the conversation is not between patient and therapist but more like one between the devil and a priest.

Since Father Karras defeated Satan, there have been many other exorcism-themed horror films. One of the most recent is "The Pope’s Exorcist." Starring Russell Crowe as real-life papal exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, the movie borrows heavily from the 1973 film.

As with the "The Exorcist," this new film speaks to our current moment. The hero, Amorth, must battle the stifling bureaucrats who would stop him from waging war on evil. A panel of higher-ups tells him he is obsolete, and that the church should not be in the business of fighting the devil. But Amorth tells them that evil is real, and he is right.

Amorth’s epic battle originates from a combination of trauma and conspiracy. Taking advantage of a family grieving over the loss of a father whose death is witnessed by his young boy, the devil enters the boy, who goes through the usual voice changes, obscenities, levitation, and gory face transformations. As with "The Exorcist," a broken family is the conduit. And once again, this is not a case for practitioners of mental science.

In a twist, we also learn that the location of this possession is important. Hundreds of years ago, the devil entered a priest here. This priest then convinced the Pope that an Inquisition would be great for Spain, thus triggering the dark era of the Spanish Inquisition. This fact is later covered up by the church. Amorth must not only battle the devil, but also deal with the church’s dirty secret. For the modern viewing public, the idea of devilish conspiracies and church cover-ups is disturbingly relevant.

Battling against bureaucracy, mental-health treatment norms, a church conspiracy, and family trauma, Amorth prevails (with the aid of a sidekick, yet another nod to the original "Exorcist"). Like Father Karras before him, he voluntarily takes the devil into his body in an act of self-sacrifice. Fortunately for Amorth, the results are better than they are for the Karras in the 1973 movie.

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That this film has proved profitable shows that the old "Exorcist" story is still relevant, if tied to more modern concerns.