Who’s afraid of ‘The Exorcist’?

OPINION:

Is God dead? Is the devil real? Does the battle between good and evil end in heaven or hell?

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In an age in which churches are going out of business, young people are falling away from Christianity, and the importance of religion in the lives of Americans is reportedly on the decline, these questions, which resonate throughout William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece “The Exorcist” and its many follow-ups, including the recently released sequel “The Exorcist: Believer,” reflect an existential crisis that is playing out in every forum imaginable, from politics and art to science and religion.

Little wonder, then, that 50 years after “The Exorcist” shocked movie-going audiences into varying degrees of disbelief, disgust and horror, its harrowing tale of one man’s struggle to reconcile faith and salvation set against a backdrop of a nation struggling with its own crisis of faith remains unnervingly relevant.

Written by a Catholic (William Peter Blatty), directed by an agnostic Jew (William Friedkin), and produced by the multinational Warner Bros., “The Exorcist” is more than just a horror movie, albeit widely acknowledged as one of the greatest — and scariest — horror films ever made. Rather, it is a thinly veiled theological debate about what to believe in and the role that religion and faith play in our modern lives.

The film is an allegorical wrestling match between old-school religion with its faith in the unseen (the existence of God and supernatural evil) versus faith as a function of good works, intellect and social justice. As Matthew Walther writes in The New York Times, “Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s?”

Loosely based upon real events, “The Exorcist” tells the story of two priests of vastly divergent faiths (Damien Karras, a young priest whose faith is a construct of sociology and psychiatry, and Father Lankester Merrin, an aging priest who believes that we “live in a moral universe in which the stakes are not life and death…but heaven and hell“) and their efforts to save Regan, a demon-possessed girl.

For Blatty, the intense demonic possession of Regan, for all its visually distressing projectile vomiting, spinning heads and spiderwalking, was a vehicle by which to explore ideas about God, the human condition, and the relationship between the two.

In his behind-the-scenes book on “The Exorcist,” Blatty recounts how, as a junior at the Jesuitical Georgetown University in 1949, he came across a Washington Post account of a supposed demonic infestation and subsequent exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

The Post account made an indelible impression on the young Blatty. “If there were demons,” he noted, “there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.” Thus, in Blatty’s mind the devil’s incarnation in the Maryland boy became an apologetic for the existence of God, an accounting he believed could “do more for the church and for Christianity than 80 novels could.”

While it was a box-office success, “The Exorcist” left audiences reeling and hysterical. Within weeks of the first public screenings, stories began to circulate of audience members fainting, vomiting, suffering heart attacks and miscarriages. In Berkeley, California, a man threw himself at the screen in a misguided attempt to “get the demon.” Others were committed to psychiatric care after seeing the film. There were even reports of young men in Boston parading naked in front of the screen, shouting they were the devil.

The audience’s visceral reactions to the film were as polarized as their interpretation of it, whether it signified a victory of evil over good, or was an affirmation that God is not dead.

By the film’s end, the old priest Merrin has died and the young priest Karras has given his life to save the young girl. In an act of self-sacrifice — reminiscent of Christ’s death on the cross as a sacrifice for humankind — Karras invites the demon into his own body, then throws himself and the demon to their deaths. In doing so, in facing up to the reality of God and evil, Karras’ faith is reborn and his soul is saved.

This was Karras’s victory as “the” exorcist of the film: Death does not have to have dominion over us. Evil doesn’t always have to win in the end.

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.