We are very pleased to bring you this exclusive chapter preview from the forthcoming House of Leaves publication, Scared Sacred: Idolatry, Religion and Worship in the Horror Film (out next year).
In this chapter, Samm Deighan explores the directorial work of William Peter Blatty (author of the 1971 novel The Exorcist) in The Ninth Configuration (1980) and The Exorcist III (1990).*
The chapter is previewed below, and we also want to urge you to consider supporting this indie horror endeavour. You can pre-order the book from House of Leaves Publishing’s website.
You can also check out a video trailer for Scared Sacred below.
I Believe in Death: William Peter Blatty and the Horror of Faith
Samm Deighan
One of the single most iconic American horror films of the last 50 years is undoubtedly director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). The film follows a possessed young girl, Regan (Linda Blair), and the psychiatrist-priest (Jason Miller) who is forced to put aside his reliance on science and his own spiritual angst to save her. Even the late Roger Ebert, a mainstream critic who typically looked down his nose at horror cinema, declared it to be “one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious efforts in the same direction” (1973). Based on a 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty—who also penned the film’s script—The Exorcist is a rare example of an American horror film with religious themes written by someone of devout faith.[1] As a tale of Christian occult terror, The Exorcist not only skyrocketed Blatty to fame, but established him as a vocal Catholic and introduced the recurring religious themes central to most of his novels and the two films he helmed as a director: The Ninth Configuration (1980) and The Exorcist III (1990).
This chapter will primarily focus on both of these films, which are also adaptations of Blatty’s own novels, respectively Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane (1966) and its rewrite The Ninth Configuration (1978), and Legion (1983). It will explore how the films function as horror texts via Blatty’s themes of madness, violence, and sacrifice. Blatty’s protagonists are typically tormented men who confront violence and undergo spiritual transformations as the result of an ultimate sacrifice. In some sense, The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III represent the inevitable consequences when men of belief and faith confront evil within the nihilistic modern world—whether that manifests as satanic possession, serial murder, or insanity as the result of trauma.
While The Exorcist is a relatively straightforward tale of a young girl’s possession, her mother’s (Ellen Burstyn) desperate attempts to save her, and the intervention of two priests, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III instead explore labyrinthine plots packed with eerie dream sequences, flashbacks, and fantasies, as well as roving monologues filled with references to everything from Shakespeare and The Bible to contemporary horror films. They both explore madness as a function of evil, the failure of science, medicine, and logic, and the challenges of living with faith in a corrupt, demoralized modern world. Unlike The Exorcist, which focuses on the relationship between a mother and daughter, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III are overwhelmingly masculine worlds.
Though it includes numerous horror elements, The Ninth Configuration is not a straightforward horror tale, but follows the arrival of military psychiatrist Colonel Kane (Stacy Keach) at an isolated castle in the Pacific Northwest. The forbidding location is a temporary mental hospital for disturbed soldiers who served in the Vietnam War. Kane is there to help the traumatized men, but becomes particularly determined to save a disgraced astronaut, Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), who seemingly lost his mind just before a planned moon launch. Blatty’s disorienting plot eventually makes it clear that Kane is not really the psychiatrist, but a patient; his brother, Dr. Fell (Ed Flanders), is using experimental therapy in the hopes of saving Kane. Kane was responsible for a massacre in the jungle—though his broken mind has convinced him that his dead brother “Vincent” was responsible for these acts. Fell believes that through helping other patients, Kane can regain some of his sanity.
Though The Ninth Configuration is not directly a sequel to The Exorcist as Legion/The Exorcist III was, it exists within the same universe: Cutshaw appears in both films. During a holiday party thrown by Regan’s mother in The Exorcist, Captain Cutshaw (Dick Callinan) is standing by a piano, where the partygoers are singing together. In a nightgown, a disturbed-looking Regan comes downstairs, looks directly at him and says, “You’re gonna die up there,” before urinating on the carpet. In The Ninth Configuration novel, Kane has a dream in which Cutshaw asks him to perform an exorcism. Mike White (2013) writes that The Ninth Configuration “serves as a true sequel to The Exorcist,” and the three films certainly exist within the same tormented, nihilistic universe (p. 115). Cutshaw is introduced in The Ninth Configuration as having experienced a mental breakdown before his next mission, likely a reference to an event that occurred between The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration.
Blatty’s fractured cinematic universe is full of such fits and starts: characters that appear and disappear with different names, fames, or identities, all of whom are concerned with the problem of spiritual evil. Despite critic S. T. Joshi’s (2001) snide interpretation of Blatty as a horror author, he rightly notes that the question, “‘How can there be evil coexistent with a good God?'” is Blatty’s central fixation, as “This single utterance could serve as the hallmark for Blatty’s entire work” (p. 52). Like the mythical Hydra, Blatty’s characters—both heroes and tormented antagonists—change names and faces throughout his loose exorcism trilogy. From a practical standpoint, characters in The Exorcist appear as different actors throughout, such as Dick Callinan and Scott Wilson as Cutshaw, or J. Lee Cobb as Lieutenant William F. Kinderman in The Exorcist, a role reprised by George C. Scott in The Exorcist III, where the character is refigured as the film’s protagonist. To complicate matters, Father Damien Karras—the protagonist of The Exorcist played by Jason Miller—also reappears in a central role in The Exorcist III as the patient in Cell 11, as well as appearing as an entirely different character in The Ninth Configuration. Effectively, like The Exorcist, the central problem of The Exorcist III is two bodies occupying the same space, which Blatty cinematically depicts in a literal sense: in some scenes Miller is visible as Patient X and Damien Karras, and in others, actor Brad Dourif appears as the Gemini Killer.[2]
The Exorcist III effectively follows Kinderman, years after the events of The Exorcist, who has maintained a friendship with Father Dyer (played by Father William O’Malley in The Exorcist and Ed Flanders in The Exorcist III)—which they celebrate annually by going to the movies together. Kinderman vents to Dyer about a recent murder investigation: a gruesome, seemingly satanically-motivated crime that reminds him of the so-called Gemini Murders from years ago. Dyer is hospitalized for an illness and is soon also killed, joining a growing list of bodies—though each crime scene has different finger prints. Though the Gemini Killer was executed years ago, the details of his crimes—which had been kept a closely guarded secret by the police—are now being mimicked on the new bodies: for example, the right index fingers are severed and the Gemini Zodiac symbol is cut into the left hand. Kinderman comes to realize that the man locked away in Cell 11 of the hospital’s psychiatric ward—Patient X—is likely possessed by the same force that tormented young Regan and motivated the original Gemini Killer.
A key reference in The Exorcist III is to the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life. Both Kinderman and Dyer cite the film as their favorite and attend a cinema showing together early in the first act. “It’s a wonderfull life” is written in blood on the wall of Dyer’s hospital room after he’s murdered—a trademark of the Gemini Killer was adding an extra “l” into words. It’s easy to read this Capra reference as a wider connection to Blatty’s use of shifting identities and realities: in Capra’s film, George Bailey (James Stewart) is so depressed by the difficulties in his life that he considers suicide, but a helpful angel (Henry Travers) takes him to an alternate reality where he never existed, to show him how much worse the town of Bedford Falls would be without him. Lorraine Mortimer (1995) describes the events of It’s a Wonderful Life as “a series of wounds that can’t be healed” (p. 660). George is similar to Blatty’s protagonists in that his character is driven to despair and madness because his idealism, his optimistic vision of the world, is destroyed over and over again—a theme common to Capra. Mortimer (1995) writes, “Capra consistently acknowledges the encroachment of nothingness upon his characters” (p. 663).
George’s dream—his journey into an alternate reality by the side of an angel—is also reminiscent of Kane’s experimental therapy, as the patients of The Ninth Configuration are encouraged to temporarily live out their fantasies, however wild or violent. Such fantasies include adapting Hamlet with dogs and reenacting the escape sequence from The Great Escape (1963), another one of the film’s loaded cinematic references. This hint at alternate possible worlds is also reflected in Blatty’s wider universe, in which characters struggle with choice and sacrifice, and narratives are often concerned with the tension between what is real and what is illusory. Hospitals, psychiatry, mental illness, and madness are prominent themes in The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III, where horror tropes are often bound up in dilemmas of seeing and concerns of sanity.
For example, though The Ninth Configuration is not directly a horror film, Blatty flirts with genre tropes throughout. The film is set in a Gothic castle—allegedly located in the Pacific Northwest, but shot in Hungary—which is being used as an experimental psychiatric facility for men suffering what would come to be described as post-traumatic stress disorder: it is more or less a madhouse. Gargoyles and eerie statues litter the castle, both inside and out, and one of the main rooms is home to an oversized poster of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Dracula, as a character, is referenced in dialogue, though he is not the only Universal monster to make an appearance; at one point Cutshaw wears a Frankenstein mask. Blatty’s films are packed with cultural references—particularly rapid-fire mentions of other films in The Ninth Configuration—though it is also worth noting that The Exorcist centers on a major character who is an actress and film star: Regan’s mother, Chris MacNeill. Similarly, in The Exorcist III, Kinderman and Dyer keep their long friendship alive through their previously mentioned shared love of the cinema.
Thus Blatty’s references to Dracula and early cinematic horror in The Ninth Configuration seem intentional, particularly in terms of the connections between horror, madness, and war. Part of Dracula is also set in an asylum, and mad men—such as the inmate Renfield—are used to do his bidding. Valerie Pedlar (2006), in her treatise on representations of madness in Victorian culture, describes the era as a period of degeneracy, hysteria, and anxiety (p. 133), which is reflected in the horror literature of the period, such as Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Pedlar (2006) writes, “When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897 he added a number of new features to the established tradition of vampiric literature, including the lunatic asylum, the madman and the doctor” (p. 136).
Like Dracula’s reliance on newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III are essentially organized around fact-gathering sessions: police reports, psychiatric evaluations, and interviews with suspects and patients. As with Dracula, though The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III are ostensibly tales of supernatural terror, they are all reliant on modern medicine, including psychiatry, as a fundamental foundation of the narrative. Pedlar (2006) writes that Dracula belongs to “a tradition of literature which sees facts and science as obscuring rather than revealing the truth about life” (p. 153). In The Exorcist, medical science has no explanation for what ails Regan and the tests she is forced to undergo appear to be a form of torture; similarly, conventional psychiatry fails to cure the patients of The Ninth Configuration and the hospital staff are at a loss to explain the behavior of the patient in Cell 11 in The Exorcist III. All three stories essentially follow a male protagonist who is forced to abandon his reliance on science or rationality because it fails to help him find a resolution.
This reliance on facts, logic, and science takes its form in Dracula in the character of Dr. Seward, head of the mental asylum, and his attempts to understand and even categorize Dracula’s servant Renfield. Like both Jonathan and Mina Harker, Seward keeps extensive diaries as a means of recording his experiences and experiments, but also as a way to understand the seemingly inexplicable. Madness and the supernatural are similarly regarded as sources of unpredictability or instability, which these male protagonists seek to control:
Seward invents a new classification for the lunatic and calls him ‘a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac.’ This term was not part of nineteenth-century nosology, but is borrowed from natural science, and the transference underlines the degree to which Renfield is seen as an animal, a specimen for the scientist to observe and catalogue, a not unusual attitude in Victorian medicine. (Pedlar, 2006, p. 138)
Similarly, Blatty’s films are concerned with men exerting similar types of control over situations in which they feel powerless. Karras, Kane, and Kinderman—note that many of Blatty’s protagonists have alliterative surnames—all spend significant early sequences attempting to measure and classify the situations in which they have become embroiled: Karras tests whether Regan’s disturbances are psychiatric or spiritual; Kane attempts to understand the nature of Cutshaw’s insanity; and Kinderman warily begins to link recent murders with the past Gemini Killer case.
Though journal entries and letters aren’t used in quite the same way as Dracula, voiceover narration and musing monologues feature regularly in Blatty’s films. For example, though Regan and her possession are allegedly the focal points of The Exorcist, Karras is the film’s true protagonist. The real dilemma of the narrative is Karras’ crisis of faith as he is torn between conflicting identities as a priest and as a psychiatrist. As with Kane and Kinderman, Karras’ voice, his memories, and his dreams—which all reflect his inner conflict—come to dominate the film. Like Dracula, the crisis of masculinity that plagues Blatty’s protagonists rests at the heart of each film and is essentially the crux of each supernatural or spiritual conflict.
As with Stoker, Blatty’s texts explore deep-seated—if unfocused—anxieties about gender relations, where madness—and thus evil—exists because of uncertainty about one’s place in the world, either as a man or as a Christian. Dracula himself, as a figure of absolute evil, seems to cause instability and thus madness in Renfield, as well as other characters. Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, and Abraham Van Helsing think at some point that they are also mad, whether because of hypnotism, mental control, or exposure to horrifying and otherworldly events. Trauma causes a fundamental division within the self, which cannot be solved in these texts by reason and science alone:
Dracula is a novel of ambiguities and contradictions, in which the generic mixture of realism and fantasy is mirrored in the two modes of understanding and interpretation: the folkloric or superstitious, and the scientific. It presents a vision of a society in which the attempt to live according to traditional Christian or chivalric moral codes is likely to be defeated by the inexorable workings of biological determinism. Madness is a focal point. Its representation in this novel incorporates the customary conception of insanity as the loss of self-control which can lead, if unrestrained, to violent behaviour, thus relating the human to the animal. (Pedlar, 2006, pp. 155-156)
In the sense that madness can be seen in Dracula as a state of liminality between good and evil, civilization and chaos, life and death, these themes are also central components to early film adaptations of the novel like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Browning’s Dracula, as well as to another experimental vampire tale, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932).[3] Madness and physical illness as a central theme in horror effectively began with German expressionist cinema in the 1910s and 1920s; not only Nosferatu, but particularly Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920). In many of these films, madness and horror can be seen as direct responses to the savagery of World War I, which left much of Europe decimated.
The shadow of the Vietnam War similarly lingers over The Ninth Configuration and, more generally, these themes are represented in Blatty’s personal life. The child of devout Lebanese immigrants, Blatty established his career in the film industry and as a novelist in the 1960s and 1970s, during a period when conservative values—such as his own Catholic beliefs—were aggressively challenged and even upturned by American countercultural movements. After receiving undergraduate and master’s degrees in English literature from Georgetown University, Blatty enlisted in the Air Force and joined the Psychological Warfare Division.[4] Nick Younker (2015) reported in the Latin Post that Blatty used these techniques in The Exorcist: “on top of creating effective propaganda in warfare situations, [Blatty] was also chief of a division that studied the effects that certain psychological tactics had on people, especially negative effects” (para. 3).
A cinematic example of these transferable techniques is the use of subliminal messaging through flash frames of the eerie face of the demon Pazuzu. The terrorizing effect was certainly felt by unsuspecting audiences in the 1970s watching The Exorcist in theaters and, in a sense, Blatty’s means of applying psychological warfare tactics into a horror film becomes a sort of spiritual assault on the viewer—drawing a parallel between cinemagoers and Blatty’s characters. This connection between physical, psychological, and spiritual violence is perhaps Blatty’s defining trait as a writer and director, and he transitions effortlessly between the three to show the similarly devastating effects of violence and trauma on the human psyche.
These themes of psychological destabilization and war trauma are central components to The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III; both films are also intimately concerned with male violence. While The Ninth Configuration follows soldiers traumatized by war, the protagonist of The Exorcist III is a homicide detective. The men in the two films live in a world characterized by violence, and Blatty seems to posit that violence defines masculinity on some fundamental level. Kane and Kinderman are wracked with guilt, presumably as they have not done enough to ebb or appease this flow of violence. As a result, both of the films involve conversations between two male characters attempting to work out how to live in such a violent world—just as The Exorcist is predominantly concerned with similar interviews between Regan, Karras, and the experienced exorcist, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow).
The Ninth Configuration is essentially part horror film, part social satire, and part talkie drama. The film’s tagline describes it being “somewhere between mystery and terror.” Kane and Cutshaw debate the possibilities of existing in a world that has known such violence, and such evil. It is a place where Kane, as a result of his war trauma, participated in a massacre that shattered his very psyche, and where Cutshaw also succumbed to madness after losing his faith in God. The two argue the origins of evil and Kane says, “I don’t think evil grows out of madness, I think madness grows out of evil.” The film depicts madness as a way of avoiding responsibility, avoiding the horrors that the soldiers’ eyes have been opened to through war, a necessary response to the nihilism of existence. Cutshaw declares, “All of creation is an open wound, a fucking slaughterhouse.” This echoes Kinderman’s assertion in The Exorcist III: “The whole world is a homicide victim, Father. Would a God who was good invent something like death?”
This struggle to exist in a violent world is at the heart of The Ninth Configuration, which spends much of its narrative speculating on the role of madness: both as a disease, but as a possible curative—a way to preserve a shred of humanity in the face of absolute evil. Blatty also grapples with notions of real versus performative madness, a theme he plays with by employing references to Hamlet and to Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). Jason Miller returned to work with Blatty after The Exorcist for the role of Lieutenant Reno, an asylum patient who is attempting to stage Hamlet with dogs instead of people. One of his monologues, directed at Kane, touches on the heart of the film’s question of madness:
Considering how Hamlet is acting, is he really and truly crazy? […] If Hamlet hadn’t pretended to be crazy, he really would have gone crazy. Hamlet isn’t psycho, he’s hanging on the brink. […] Acting crazy is a way to let off steam, a way to get rid of your fucking aggressions, a way to get rid of your fears and your terrors. […] The crazier Hamlet acts, the healthier he gets.
Blatty mimics Shakespeare’s use of madness in Hamlet, particularly Shakespeare’s concerns about the function of madness itself as a response to death, grief, violence, and evil. With the possible exceptions of Kane and Cutshaw, the numerous characters in The Ninth Configuration are vague character sketches, tormented men playing out various tropes of madness. In his recent study, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, Rhodri Lewis (2017) writes:
Shakespeare made the best of the dramaturgical situation by having Hamlet riff the stock theatrical roles of the Clown, madman, Vice, and devil—all of which figure his feelings of disenfranchisement. What might look like the revenger’s madness (qua insanity rather than rage) is, in fact, literally antic: ludic, grotesque, and self-consciously metadramatic. (p. 5)
Despite its horror elements, eerie dream sequences, and violent conclusion, The Ninth Configuration is often described as a dark satire, and Blatty certainly is self-conscious with his use of madness tropes, resulting in some unsettlingly humorous moments. Strangely, the film came out nearly a decade after a series of loosely similar films about madness, war trauma, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, including titles like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), MASH (1970), and Taxi Driver (1976), among others. Blatty himself wrote a treatment for the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), several years before the version directed by Miloš Forman was produced. Like many of these films, The Ninth Configuration presents trauma and war-related madness as a transformative force, and one that must essentially be exorcised before the afflicted person can return to normality—though this positive resolution is proven impossible in the case of Hamlet or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which ends in literal or psychological death (lobotomy).
In Hamlet, much is made of the character’s transformation into something other than himself and the Prince’s seeming otherness to the characters in the play who knew him before his father’s death. Claudius states:
Hamlet’s transformation—so I call it,
Sith nor th’exterior nor the inward man
Resembles what it was. What it should be,
More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him
So much from th’understanding of himself
I cannot dream of. (Shakespeare, 1996, 2.1.5-10)
This unfathomable transformation is present in The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III, where characters are confronted with supernatural evil, are changed by it, and are, to varying degrees, existentially tormented by the thought of a world without God. This sense of hellish torment is carried out—embodied—in the body itself. Unlike in other horror film formulas, where characters are pursued by ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, or even masked killers, which they must battle and vanquish, the central conflict in Blatty’s films takes place within the physical body—and mind—of a central person. The protagonist becomes monstrous.
In Blatty’s narratives, a sense of horror emerges from the fragility of the body and of the soul in such a universe—particularly if there is no God to offer salvation. In a sense, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III replicate the loose narrative structure of The Exorcist, in that a central man fights a battle for the soul of another person invaded by evil: this battle is not in a literal warzone, but takes place in dialogue and is often enacted in the very body of the afflicted. In his essay on exorcism in classic art and the horror film, “The Face of a Fiend: Convulsion, Inversion, and the Horror of the Disempowered,” James Clifton (2011) describes this threat to the body as central to the concept of horror itself:
Much of the horror in fiction writing, film, painting, or any other medium is predicated on threats to the body: its destruction, dissolution, fragmentation, usurpation, and so on. Even the monstrous Other can be perceived as horrifying not simply as a direct threat, but also vicariously, as evidence of the potential deformation of one’s own body. […] Horror lies in the threat to humanity and humanness, both individual and collective, whose destruction is emblematised, as we shall see, by a loss of both face and voice. (p. 377)
As Regan’s body is invaded in The Exorcist, so is Karras’ in The Exorcist III, among other characters in that film; while Cutshaw’s crisis of faith in The Ninth Configuration is less of a direct possession, it can be said to result from his brief encounter with the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist. Clifton (2011) compares the victims in recent exorcist films to medieval demoniacs and hysterics (p. 378), such as at the infamous 17th century possessions at the convent in Loudon, France—the subject of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Though Russell was a Catholic like Blatty, in his film, possession serves as a symbol for political corruption and the abuse of power.
Regardless of the reason behind it, demonic possession is what Clifton (2011) describes as “invasive” horror: the threat comes from within the body itself: “A quintessential feature of demon possession is the loss of bodily control, or, more specifically, an involuntary cession of control to a possessing demon—the invasive agent” (p. 379). This likewise applies to demonic possession, as found in The Exorcist and The Exorcist III, but also madness or hysteria, as in The Ninth Configuration or The Devils, and even loss of bodily control via parasites, as in some of the films of David Cronenberg like Shivers (1975) or Rabid (1977). All such cases are marked by bodies out of control: writhing on the floor, gnashing of teeth, foaming at the mouth, causing bodily harm to themselves or others, and, as in the case of The Ninth Configuration, behavior that is deliberately contrary to socially accepted norms. Clifton cites this behavior as present in the biblical tale of a young boy possessed by a spirit (Mark 9:14-27), which is notably depicted in Raphael’s Transfiguration (1516-1520).
This loss of control over the body turns it into a site of horror and monstrosity with the head or face as the focal point of terror. Regan’s dramatically transformed face and voice are crucial elements of horror in The Exorcist: she takes on an otherworldly visage that resembles an old hag or a demon more than a little girl. Regan’s body also seems unbound by the laws of physics: she vomits green fluid on command; words appear embedded in her flesh; and her body bends in strange shapes. The screaming face is a recognizable source of horror in modern culture—take, for example, Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream (1893)—and expressions of terror and abjection litter The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III. As Clifton (2011) writes: “The inverted screaming mouth recalls aspects of a Barthesian punctum—a point, an attracting or distressing detail, always uncoded; a prick, a sting, a wound, a ‘point of effect’, an ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’” (p. 389).
It is this “sting” or “wound” that serves as a reminder of the dehumanization of the body, where it is rendered “unfunctional, strange, confusing, and unrecognisable as such” (Clifton, 2011, p. 390). The head is a particular source of horror in The Exorcist III, such as in a key sequence where a nurse is decapitated with a pair of industrial medical shears. The use of violence and mutilation within the film—heads, blood, and limbs are displaced frequently—suggests that the wholeness of the body is only transitory, and the dehumanized flesh is more easily disassembled than one would like to believe.
The particular horror that emerges from this dehumanization in The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III is tied up with the loss of control of the body, and likewise the mind and the spirit. Regan is possessed by a demon, but the demon can travel, infecting other bodies like a plague. Legion, the title of Blatty’s novel and the intended title of The Exorcist III before studio interference, stresses the importance of this seemingly limitless manifestation of evil. Your flesh is not your own, but your dreams and memories and even sense of identity may also not be yours. The Gemini Killer, inhabiting the body of Karras in The Exorcist III, remarks: “I have dreams of a rose […] and of falling down a long flight of stairs.” These are not the dreams of the demon, but of Karras, distorted and confused by the other entities possessing his consciousness. Similarly, in The Ninth Configuration Kane has memories that don’t seem to belong to him, of a brother named Vincent who died, while he, a separate being, survived.
Effectively, in Blatty’s films, exorcism is struggle for the soul carried out on the battlefield of the body. Blatty’s films thus represent a spiritual contest, a war not just for the soul but for specifically masculine identity in a world threatened by chaos and darkness. The sense of nihilism and of lingering terror that resonates from The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III stems from the fact that the antagonist in each narrative is external or nonhuman, so there is always a possibility the evil will return. Clifton (2011) writes of such exorcism narratives:
The staying power of such works resides in the convulsing and unformed details that threaten to break loose of meanings, in the perpetual presence of the horrific, in the anticipated return of the escaping demons, in the certain knowledge that though this battle may have been won, the body is always at risk of twisting from the human to the monstrous. (pp. 391-392)
Faith, in this case, is not a balm against evil, but an unstable force that provides both relief and torment. In The Exorcist III, the demon Pazuzu, speaking through Patient X, says, “If you looked with the eyes of faith, you’d see me,” indicating that religious belief allows for a more horrifying vision of the world. In other words, the belief in a Christian god, and in Heaven, also necessitates the belief in the Devil, in Hell, and in spiritual evil. Kinderman—who declares himself a nonbeliever early in The Exorcist III—seems to retract this statement as he comes to understand the true identity of the Gemini Killer. They face off in Patient X’s cell, where Kinderman yells:
My God, help me. I believe in death, I believe in disease, I believe in injustice and inhumanity and torture and anger and hate. I believe in murder, I believe in pain, I believe in cruelty and infidelity. I believe in slime and stink and in every crawling putrid thing every possible ugliness and corruption, you son of a bitch, I believe in you.
While the 1970s and 1980s were awash with films about men affected by violence and masculinity as a threatened, enraged force—such as the Dirty Harry and Death Wish series—Blatty’s protagonists are not required to become more violent in order to regain control of a chaotic universe, but they are required to sacrifice themselves. The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration have directly parallel endings, where Karras and Kane knowingly sacrifice themselves, with implied suicide, to save another person. When the exorcism drives Pazuzu out of Regan’s body, Karras takes the demon into himself and throws himself down a flight of stairs. Kane similarly sacrifices himself for Cutshaw: in a state of despair, the astronaut escapes the castle-asylum and goes to a local bar. He is harassed and beaten by bikers, with an implied attempted rape. Kane intervenes, allowing his violent, repressed self to emerge, and kills the bikers with his bare hands. Later, he dies of a stomach wound, which is implied to be self-inflicted.
Kane’s bargain with Cutshaw was that if a genuine act of selfless kindness could occur, then God must be real. He tells Cutshaw:
If we’re nothing but atoms, molecular structures, no different in kind from this desk or that pen, then we ought to always be rushing irresistibly, blindly, towards serving our own selfish ends. So how is it that there is love in this world? I mean love as a God might love, and a man will give his life for another.
When Cutshaw returns to the castle, years later and obviously returned to sanity, a fellow soldier says, “I heard they had a doctor there who was really a killer.” Cutshaw replies, “He was a lamb.”
Kane’s Christlike sacrifice is also echoed in The Exorcist III, in a combined effort from Kinderman and Karras. In one version of the film, the director’s cut, Kinderman shoots the Gemini Killer’s father—the reason the Gemini Killer remained on Earth, determined to kill, thus ending the cycle with an act of seemingly cynical violence. In the studio version, the film ends with an exorcism. Kinderman must save the priest, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson), in a battle of wills with the Gemini Killer. Karras, whose spirit still lingers, buried within his body, is temporarily able to regain control and drive the demon away. He begs Kinderman to kill him, who obliges. Essentially, the conclusions of The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III render each film as religious horror, as they all hinge on the notion of sacrifice. Violence is committed, not as a selfish or self-preserving act, and not as an act of vengeance, as in vigilante films, but as an act of kindness and love. These acts of sacrifice are attempts, however futile or violent, to drive away some of the very horror of being in the modern world. As Kane says to Cutshaw, “You’re convinced that God is dead because there’s evil in the world? Then why don’t you think He’s alive because of the goodness in the world?”
Check out a sneak peal of Alexandra West’s chapter from Scared Sacred on The Conjuring films here.
NOTES
[1] For example, Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Omen (1976), both part of the same occult-horror boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, had largely Jewish creative teams: writer Ira Levin and director Roman Polanski for Rosemary’s Baby, and writer David Seltzer and director Richard Donner for The Omen.
[2] This was not Blatty’s original intention: Jason Miller wasn’t available for the filming of The Exorcist III and the scenes including Patient X were entirely shot with Brad Dourif. Later when Miller was available and the studio requested a more literal link to The Exorcist, his scenes where added in and Blatty chose to blend the two performances.
[3] Though Vampyr was based loosely on Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” (1872), it follows a similar framework and puts an equal emphasis on characters suffering from undisclosed illnesses of the blood and/or madness.
[4] Created during World War II, this Anglo-American division was temporary home to a number of well-regarded filmmakers, such as John Huston and Luchino Visconti.
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*This chapter may be subject to change in its final print publication.
