A compelling read by Matthew Walter, editor of The Lamp, on what a horror masterpiece has to say to a skeptical and disbelieving age:
When it came out, “The Exorcist” didn’t just shock audiences with lurid scenes of projectile vomiting and spinning heads. It also forced them to acknowledge a tension, most acutely felt in the Catholic Church but omnipresent in Western society, that had grown between two rival conceptions of religion. Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s?
“The Exorcist” came down on the side of tradition. After the conclusion in 1965 of the Second Vatican Council, from which the vernacularization of the liturgy and other changes in Catholic discipline emerged, the church experienced a deepening crisis: a decline in its moral authority, a collapse in vocations and Mass attendance, and a widespread rejection of the supernatural, even by clergy, in favor of a more sociological understanding of the faith.
That crisis was, in a sense, the subject of “The Exorcist.” The film, adapted from a novel by William Peter Blatty, depicted a world in which the modernizing element of the Catholic Church was a source of spiritual weakness, while the old guard sustained the power of the true faith. That Mr. Friedkin compelled modern-day viewers to reckon with a more traditional conception of religion, in all its otherworldly dimensions, is the source of the film’s enduring importance.
That director William Friedkin compelled modern-day viewers to reckon with a more traditional conception of religion, in all its otherworldly dimensions, is the source of the film’s enduring importance.
In an interview about “The Exorcist” in 1973, [the director William] Friedkin was explicit about his intentions. “The film,” he stressed, “is primarily about the mystery of faith.” This was not an ad hoc characterization. The phrase “mystery of faith” is said at every Mass, including the one celebrated near the end of the movie. It is a mystical formula that refers to Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. The phrase also lent itself to the title of an encyclical issued by Pope Paul VI in 1965 in an attempt to assuage anxieties about the status of traditional Catholic teachings in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
In “The Exorcist,” the opposition of modernity and tradition is dramatized through the two main priest characters, Father Damien Karras and Father Lankester Merrin. Father Karras is a typical clergyman of the modern era, a young liberal Jesuit disillusioned with the priesthood for whom secular learning and even physical exercise have usurped the role of dogma. When the mother of the possessed girl asks him how someone obtains permission for an exorcism, he replies, “I’d have to get them into a time machine and get them back to the 16th century.”
By contrast, Father Merrin is an older, traditionally minded scholar-priest, an expert in ancient Near Eastern cultures who accepts the reality of the demonic and fears it. He is an embodiment of what Pope Benedict XVI once called the “hermeneutic of continuity,” a refusal to regard the 1960s as the beginning of a new divine dispensation.
