Gareth Higgins on THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER
Gareth Higgins on THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER
OK, so the new Exorcist film made me cry.
But the original did that too - William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic is ultimately one of the most moving stories I’ve ever seen. It’s much more about the love of a community for a vulnerable child than anything else; but at the time no one had seen something so visually terrifying in a mainstream cinema, so the now-garish special effects and sense of dread are what people remember. A national religious figure apparently said there was “a power of evil” in the film, and some audience members fled the theaters. That was a pity, because if they’d stayed to the end they might have seen that The Exorcist actually has deep faith in goodness; it knows that life itself is the miracle, and that any time someone gives a glass of cold water to a hungry person, or a blanket to a naked one, the miracle is proven. The Exorcist climaxes not in terror but sacrifice, ends not in despair but the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Every time I watch it, I cry the tears that often come with honoring those who have invested their lives (or even given them up) for the sake of others.
The visceral reaction fifty years ago seems difficult to believe now, but that’s partly because the most shocking imagery in The Exorcist has been repeated (and remixed) so often. It’s also partly because as the world has gotten smaller, our individualistic sense of self has gotten larger, and the idea of there being an agreed set of values or a cohesiveness to our lives has been so strongly undermined. “We” used to believe there was a “there” there. There are lots of reasons why that belief has frayed; chief among them might be that decades of exposure to media images of the worst things that people can do to each other, and more recently to the uncensored publication of the inner monologues of our neighbors (and ourselves) have left us with an overstimulated sense of how broken things are. Without intentional contemplative practice, it’s easy to confuse headlines with contexts and drama with depth. As John O’Donohue said, to enshrine “the ugly as the normal standard”.
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