The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

"I've seen The Exorcist thirteen times, and it gets funnier every time I see it!"

So, famously, said Beetlejuice, and I can't argue with him as I don't think I've seen the film of William Peter Blatty's generation-defining horror classic quite that many times. But I've certainly read the book often enough to appreciate the slow descent into Hell of Regan's Mum.

But neither film nor book (which came first) was entitled Regan's Mom. The identiity of the titular exorcist seems, at first glance, clear: Lenkester Merrin, a fictionalised version of the archaeologist, phenomenologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who saw his Christ not only as a god-man who once walked among us, but also as a point in the future upon which all Being will converge to partake of divinity. A mystical prefigurement of the Singularity, if you want, combining Hegel's eschaton with a vision of Christianity that is all too seldom allowed to precipitate from distant esoteric peaks, and all to often condemned as heresy when it does.

However...

Spoilers follow!

Merrin dies during the exorcism, leaving it to be finished by his assistant, a Jesuit academic called Damien Karras who is conflicted about his faith.

That last part is important. You might, perhaps, take the exorcism of Regan MacNeill as the vomit-soaked centre around which the film rotates; admittedly, that head-spinning scene is hard to ignore. But the film has to give its viewers a memorable (if not unforgettable) fright in a few quick jabs, which is not the case when you read Blatty's far more nuanced book.

(For example, the head-rotating scene, which in reality would be unsurvivable, is seen in the book by Regan's Mum "hazily, as if in an undulating fog". When mother's and daughter's eyes meet, MacNeill Sr finds herself looking into those of Burt Dennings, a family acquaintance who was found with head facing backwards at the bottom of the storied Exorcist steps. Hence the significance of the scene - it's easy to forget, when watching the film, that The Exorcist is not simply a horror story, but has a murder investigation running through it.)

Since Blatty himself adapted the films's screenplay from his novel, a decent amount of time is taken in both showing and telling the vital element of Damien Karras' struggle with his faith. At the centre of this is how he managed the primal break between mother and son which can assume disproportionate proportions in Catholic priests' livez, given the vow of celibacy which they are still told they have to take to exercise their ministry. Karras dealt with this by running away from it: he joined the Jesuits and swore a vow of poverty, leaving his mother to die penniless and alone, and him to inhabit a world of bleak self-disappointment in which, to paraphrase Freud, the dead mother is more powerful than the living one ever was. Damien, then, is an ordained shade, an uncompleted man whose hollows hide a boy turned to stone by conscience's unremitting stare. He is thus unable to manage the leaking boat of the Catholic Church in the early 1970s for himself, let alone the seminarians he counsels.

Blatty considered himself a devout Roman Catholic, so its no surprise that when he decided to write a horror story in the late 1960s, The Exorcist is what emerged from Harper & Row's presses in 1971; so a little sitz-im-leben might be called for.

During all the time of the novel's gestation, its publication and the cinematic release, the Catholic Church was a house divided. The Second Vatican Council had sat from 1962 to 1965, and subsequent to this the traditional Mass was replaced by another form with many controversial changes. What was most controversial, however, was not the changes themselves, but the fact that they were not actually called for by the Council, which also did not stipulate that the traditional Mass be traded in for the new model. This may not mean much now even if you're a Catholic - and Blatty realised he had to tell a story for everybody - but at the time earthquakes were ripping the church in two, which is what's behind Pazuzu's quip "As you know, I’ve spent much of my time in Rome"; both readers and cinemagoers who watched the news and wondered what was going on behind Vatican walls would have gotten the reference, and readers may have smirked at the demon's remark upon meeting Karras, "we've nothing to fear from you at all".

But Blatty isn't content to stay on current affairs, and writes a much older conflict into The Exorcist. Whereas in the film Pazuzu is cast in the role of the Christian Bible's pantomime villain, in the novel we see the personalisation of a much older adversary, and what's more one who plays a salvific role. Lieutenant William Kinderman is the Jewish detective-cum-grand inquisitor investigating Burt Dennings' fatal fall out of Regan's window. He provides an opportunity for escape from addiction for Elvira, the daughter of Karl and Willi Engstrom, the MacNeills' Swiss servants, who doesn't make the transition to celluloid. (I wonder if Elvira might make ripe fodder for the retelling industry?) One might see him as a better exorcist than either of the priests, since he actually survives his ministry of deliverance. In his relentless winkling out of truths so that they can be dealt with, he resembles the Satan who is a member of God's court in the Jewish Bible, whereas the Christianised version is only allowed to perform his prosecutorial function once in the Judaean desert before being cast as said villain to have ink and stones thrown at him, and be perfunctorily rejected at Christenings before the knees-up.

For me The Exorcist is more enjoyableas a book than as a film. In print, Blatty can crush Regan, her Mum and Damien Karras in their respective vices at his leisure, and at the same time say things important to him about his faith, all with a literary flair all to often absent from the horror genre. I guess I've read the book and watched the film about five times each, so I definitely haven't caught up with Beetlejuice. But I might just make it on agregate before I switch off my earthly reading lamp for good.