Thanks to the Howell Carnegie District Library in Howell, Michigan, who invited me to give the talk from which this article grew.
One afternoon on a late summer weekend in 1983, I was flipping through the channels looking for something to watch on TV. I’m not even sure cable was something ordinary folks could have back then, but in any event, my family didn’t have it, just plain old network TV. For some reason on that summer weekend afternoon, one of the stations was playing The Exorcist, and I discovered it while flipping through the channels. I was 11 years old; I don’t think before that moment I knew that a movie called The Exorcist even existed. I was too young to have found it on my own, and I didn’t have older siblings to frighten me with it; that job was left to network TV. I happened to tune in to one of the most disturbing scenes, when the two priests are performing the Rite of Exorcism and the devil is using the possessed girl Regan’s body to thrash around, vomit, and say a wide range of alarming things (some of which were awkwardly censored).
