The Exorcist Legacy by Nat Segaloff EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Nat Segaloff
- Language: English
- Genre:Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-In Fiction
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The Two Bills
The Exorcist may be the most misunderstood classic of all time. It heads
the list of the world’s scariest horror movies, yet its creators staunchly
regard it as a whodunnit with spiritual overtones. It’s been called the
scariest film ever made, but it has only one traditional screen shock (a
candle flaring up) and nobody jumping out of the shadows. Scholars have
said it reflects the social and political upheavals of its era, yet it draws its
power from religious attitudes so old that they survived the Enlightenment.
It contains images that have been called subliminal, yet the man who
directed it says he had nothing in mind beyond trying to tell a good story.
There is ongoing dispute about the ending. Even its victim is misplaced;
many people think it’s about a twelve-year-old girl, yet the secretary who
retyped William Peter Blatty’s manuscript, before anybody else had read it,
correctly asked the author, “They’re after him aren’t they?”—meaning
Damien Karras, the priest.1 Like all great art, people take from it what they
bring to it, and people brought a lot to The Exorcist.
On its surface, it’s about the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old
girl. Beneath its surface, however, it’s about something more personal, more
familiar, more threatening, and therein resides its power. Beyond the
shaking beds, crucifix mutilations, streaming pea soup, and spinning heads,
what makes The Exorcist so affecting is that its emotional core is a mother’s
desire to protect her child and, on a more metaphysical level, whether we,
as humans, are worthy of walking on God’s earth.
“That’s a very good description,” agrees Ellen Burstyn, who played the
mother, Chris MacNeil, adding, “I see it in terms of the confrontation with
the unknown. Certainly the aspect of the mother protecting her daughter is
the thread of the story. As a genre I see it as a psychological drama. I never
have thought of it as a horror film. As a matter of fact—I’m sure you know
this—it’s the only film that’s called a horror film that’s been nominated for
Best Picture.”
But Stephen King, no slouch in the horror genre, believes that the
mother-daughter story is secondary to the real subtext of The Exorcist,
namely the generation gap. “The movie (and the novel) is nominally about
the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a
pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair,” he writes in Danse Macabre.
“Substantively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a
finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place
in the late sixties and early seventies.
It was a movie for all those parents
who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children
and could not understand why or how it was happening. It’s the face of the
werewolf again, a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale in which sweet, lovely, and loving
Regan turns into a foul-talking monster strapped into her bed and croaking
(in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge) such charming homilies as
‘You’re going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’
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