Recently a rumor that Hollywood was thinking of remaking the 1973 classic horror film The Exorcist was dispelled. However, in a recent piece in Washingtonian magazine, William Peter Blatty, the author of the 1971 novel on which the movie The Exorcist was based, revealed that he is in talks with Sony to create a four-hour mini-series based on the book. “The whole novel from scratch!” Blatty said to the interviewer, apparently enthusiastic about the idea.
While I was appalled by the prospect of an attempted remake of The Exorcist, which is the greatest horror movie of all time, I can support the idea of a mini-series. Given four hours instead of two, a good director, working in the more subtle medium of television, could delve into the most important element of The Exorcist: sex.
More precisely, a longer Exorcist could explore the way in which the novel critiques a culture where sex has been degraded, and us along with it.
Perhaps distracted by the vomit, spinning heads, and levitation scenes, people forget just how heavily sexual The Exorcist is. It tells the story of an adolescent girl named Regan who is possessed by a demon until a priest casts the demon out. (Author Blatty based his 1971 book on a real case of demonic possession that occurred in Maryland in the 1940s.) The most disturbing scenes in The Exorcist are those involving demonic sexual abuse of Regan, some of which remain almost unwatchable.
Yet as Blatty has said in interviews, the most important part of the novel was left out of the film—a section so crucial to the story that its absence in the final cut caused a rift between Blatty and Exorcist director William Friedkin. Near the end of the book, Father Lankester Merrin, an older priest, is explaining evil to Father Damien Karras, a young Georgetown Jesuit. The demon’s target, Fr. Merrin says, is not the innocent girl he takes over. The target is us—those of us who are watching. Fr. Merrin says, “I think the point is to make us despair, to reject our own humanity, Damien, to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; unworthy.”
Fr. Merrin then explains that the devil is not to be found in geopolitical events, but in quotidian cruelties: “In the senseless, petty snipes; the misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends, between lovers.” Enough of these, he says, and “we don’t need Satan to manage our wars.”
These scenes of dialogue were shot in the movie version of The Exorcist but left on the cutting room floor. Blatty was outraged, and with good reason. To flip the perspective of the entire film from the girl writhing in agony to those viewing her—that is, us—would have been a brilliant stroke. It changes the perspective of the film and makes the vital theological point that much of the power of evil is in its ability to make us think of ourselves and others as less than human—as animals.
George Weigel has noted how Pope John Paul II once described marital intimacy as “an icon of the interior life of God.” Sex is something that brings us into intimacy with God, who is truth and beauty and love itself. It follows that this realm of both human and divine expression is the perfect place for the demonic to strike. For the past fifty years America has been on a path of more ruthless, explicit, punishing, and violent pornography, resulting in a sex industry that is bigger than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. Sex columnist Dan Savage tells people that we are, to use Fr. Merrin’s phrase, bestial, a collection of raw urges that need to be satisfied. Many of our sit-coms are a tiresome string of vulgar sex jokes.
In the book, the demon refers to Regan’s mother, a famous actress named Chris, as “Pig,” and to Regan as “Piglet.” Part of this is also in the film, where the demon calls Regan “the sow.” This is the dehumanization that Fr. Merrin talks about—the way evil attempts to make us despair and consider ourselves animals unworthy of God’s love. It’s no wonder that when someone like Beyoncé comes along and exhibits both faith and dignity she’s treated like some otherworldly presence, a goddess who is barely comprehensible to those below. But the way Bey sees herself is available to everyone. They—we—simply have to choose to believe what spiritual thinkers from many different faiths believe: We are transcendent beings created by a divine power.
To reconnect with that reality we have to lose our taste for degrading ourselves. We have to cease believing that the best we can produce in our culture is the demeaning of others. And we have to stop listening to the demon, who as Fr. Merrin reminds us, is always “a liar.”
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