CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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I still need to watch the film and have it fresh in mind and also re-read the novel – for the same purpose.
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SPOILERS
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Off the top of my head
the movie curtails the length of Karras' involvement in the Regan MacNeil case – e.g., toward the end, he dresses in “civies” to look up medical records. He needs to look like an off-duty doctor, not a priest, plus he knows that the black priest clothing material has a certain detectable aroma. So he does this investigation “under the radar”.
Also there are several brief encounters between Karras and Kinderman that are not in the film – each of them a subtle brushstroke that Blatty uses to tell a much fuller story than does the film.
Jerris (sp?), Chris' agent, is not mentioned.
Mary Jo Perrin, although apparently cast (she's the lady in black on the couch during the dinner party), has no lines – she's the one who warns Chris about the Ouija board.
Obviously, the Karl-Elvira subplot never made it into the movie.
Karl's special sense of affection for, an dprotectiveness toward, Regan is not shown in the film.
Due to the calustrophobic, one on one character of the exorcism scenes, the novelistic demon's attacks on Chris, Sharon, Karl and Willie are not present in the movie.
Humorous lines were dropped in the movie, althought they resurfaced in Legion, e.g. the carp in Kinderman's bath tub, and Dyer's “lemon drop junkie” joke.
Missing, too, is Chris's prank of putting a stuffed toy mouse in one of Karl's mouse traps. Karl finds it and only mutters, “Someone is funny”>
In the book, Karras runs across (iirc) a note that the pre-posssessed Regan had written to her mother, and the child's innocence cuts through Karras like a knife and Blatty writes word to the effect of “he could not bear this chance encounter”.
In the novel, Karras likes to watch the sunset from a prominent point – didn't make it into the movie – nor did his hearing of Red River Valley being played on a harmonica during one of these vigils..
The more horrible and sadomasochistic elements of both Kinderman's and Karras' research into possession does not exist in the movie – a few brief voice-overs as the two characters are reading would have been effective and would have added a chill.
That's all I can come up with for right now.
Right – in the movie the demon is not named. Merrin knows it's the same demon he fought in Africa, but apparently not even Merrin knows its name, if it has one. The earlier exorcism is not described in the movie beyond a few lines like, “Besides, he's (Merrin) had experience … twelve years ago in Africa … supposedly the exorcism went on for months. I heard it damn near killed him.” Three other films attempt to show the African exorcism – Exorcist II the Heretic, Exorcist the Beginning, and Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist. But Blatty's own novel and screenplay do not give any details of the African exorcism.
We don't know what the demon said about itsefl, if anything, in the African exorcism. In Regan's possession, among other gibberish, it says, backwards, “I am no one”. But of course the demon IS “someone”. So its backwards-speech saying “I am no one” doesn't really identify the demon – it's just another trick to deceive Karras.
You are very welcome :) To be fair, there are others who do make a case for Pazuzu being the same entity as the “African” demon (of course, demons, if they exist, probably don’t really have nationalities). But I follow what Blatty himself said about Pazuzu:
“Even in terms of my novel, I have never known the demon’s identity. I strongly doubt that he is Satan; and he is certainly none of the spirits of the dead whose identity he sometimes assumes. If I had to guess, I would say he is Pazuzu … but I’m not really sure. I know only that he’s real and powerful and evil and apparently one of many and aligned with whatever is opposed to love.” (The Exorcist: from Novel to Film, Bantam, 1974)
When considering the demon’s identity, I take the “guesswork” out of Blatty’s formula and go with his agnosticism – The Exorcist’s author himself doesn’t know the demon’s identity. That’s my prime data-bit. The author doesn’t know, we don’t know, I don’t know. This not-knowing preserves us from pinning a defunct Assyrian god’s name to the demon and diminishing him by “domesticating” him.
The Roman Ritual insists that the exorcist try to obtain the name of the demon, which supposedly gives the priests power over it. Now: if Merrin knows that the demon is really Pazuzu, surely he would have addressed it by name at certain points during the exorcism. But he doesn’t: he can only refer to the possessing entity anonymously, as “the demon”. It does not seem that Merrin identifies the entity with Pazuzu. He simply identifies it with that nameless demon he fought twelve years earlier in Africa. So I prefer to leave the demon nameless and simply keep Pazuzu as a skillful symbol for “demonic presence/demonic activity”.
Pazuzu is not the possessing demon. The real demon is nameless. Pazuzu is only a symbol of “the demonic”. The real demon is the one Merrin defeated in Africa twelve years eariler. it is not the Middle Eastern god known as Pazuzu. True, the Pazuzu statue shows up during the exorcism, but this is merely a vision seen from Merrin's point of view – the culmination of all his premonitions at last manifesting in a demonic vision.
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The real demon is an anymous spirit that Merrin encountered in Africa. Pazuzu is just an ancient Middle Eastern god. They are quite separate, linked only by the premonitions that Merrin receives while working on the Iraqi dig. Pazuzu is “demonic” but is not THE demon from Africa who possesses Regan.
Captain Howdy is the real demon's “friendly mask” by which it induces Regan's trust. So Regan is not really possessed by Howdy – Howdy was always just a fictional, temporary, throw-away trick device – but by the anonymous, faceless demon.
Good catch :)Â The guy is a huckster and manipulator who deceives those who have an unconscious desire to be deceived …
I think the only people who want to see it are either pre-convinced choir members or non-believers who'd watch it solely for laughs…
I have heard the tapes. Constant screaming thickens the vocal cords. If you’ve ever heard what constant smoking can do to the female voice, you won’t be surprised what Anneliese’s continual screaming did to hers. It’s not the voice, it’s the content/meaning of the speech, that would determine or at least suggest a supernatural origin. Anneliese’s “demon” did not say – or do – anything to indicate its existence. “It” was an alternate personality, a dissociated fragment from Anneliese’s unconscious. She was just a very sick girl, and with help from parents and clergy, the sickness killed her.
Glad you like the forum, hope you continue to post 🙂
Thanks, Fr Bowdern. I'll accept documented evidence of parnormal stuff and documented OBE's (veridical “seeing” of objects not visible except by a “floating consciousness”) …. same deal with a “superhuman” personality (but I wonder how you'd really be able to “prove” such a thing). So I'm not theoretically opposed to possession, but pragmatically, I need to see … evidence 🙂
listen to the Anneliese Michel tapes. No one has the answer
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The answer is to be found in the excellent book, The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel, by Felicitas Goodman. Anneliese's brain was undergoing a process that anthropologists used to call “the shamanic illness”. Had she received the correct care – i.e., shamanic initiation which was not available to her in her own culture – there is a good chance that she could have worked through her “possession” and been cured, or perhaps become a shaman herself. A shamanic culture would have recognized which “spirits” were surfacing from her unconscious and could have integrated the experience into an appropriate cultural channel. Tragically, her culture only recognized one form of possession: “demonic”. Her priests and parents basically permitted her to starve to death. Moreover, the transcripts of her “possessed” vocalizations are simply mad ravings, without a single hint that a supernatural demonic personality was inhabiting her body, nor were there any supernatural activities associated with her condition. Her family's and priests' folk superstitions about “demonic possession” had a very strong hand in killing her.
Any claim of supernatural possession is extremely extraordinary, and requires and extraordinary investigation and confirmation of extraordinary evidence. None such apply to Anneliese Michel's case.
Thanks for your kind words, etrigan. I myself am now a panentheist (not pantheist) and a solitary practitioner of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, which is the result of a long search after I left the Catholic Church after some 27 years as an active Catholic. Yes, the judgmental creator-god, who blames his own creatures for flaws that the creator could have prevented or eliminated or simply forgiven, is one of the major factors that drove me out of Christianity. I already have enough problems without committing myself to a co-dependent relationship with an abusive deity…
Splake wrote:
“I think this movie brings some people closer to Christ, ( motivated by fear)”
I believe exactly that happened in the months immediately following the film's first release in December, 1973. However, I do not think this is a good thing. Any religious conversion based on fear is, imo, an extremely negative outcome. Fear of The Exorcist's content is the cinematic equivalent of scaring people with Hell-fire, because the implicit message is that if you don't convert, you'll be joining “the Legion” of demons of the type that are tormenting Regan. What is wrong with this is:
1. It encourages an uncritical belief in, and fear of, demons. Blatty's demon was fictional. Real, documented possession cases do not exhibit anything like the “entity” so chillingly evoked in Blatty's tale. On the contrary, most “demons” in Western possession cases – e.g., the “Robby” case that inspired Blatty, or the Anneliese Michel case – have nothing of the supernatural about them. They are simply adolescent thugs – bad-tempered fragments of dissociated personality that have temporarily escaped from the victims' unconscious, not truly supernatural, nonmaterial spirit entities.
2. It makes God the object of soul-devouring fear, because “He” puts a gun to the potential convert's head and essentially says, “You have free will. Reject me if you like. But you'll spend eternity burning in Hell”. Some choice.
It turns a Being who is infinite compassion and infinite wisdom into a vicious autocrat who would do things like burn “His” creatures in Hell, or murder King David's baby as “He” is said to have done in the Jewish Bible.
3. It makes the conversion process dependent on the truth or falsity of demonic possession. When a person converts out of demon-fear, and as they mature and turn away from that superstition, they vitiate the very reason that caused the conversion in the first place. The threat of Hell is removed, demons are removed. Escaping Hell is no longer a viable reason for having converted. The convert is then faced with either continuing on in the religion for trivial reasons such as “uplift” and companionship, or rejecting it completely. Thus a crisis of faith has been created out of the convert's original, misplaced, fear of God, Hell, and demons.
Therefore, true conversion, imo, must be motivated by love, never fear.
Well, thank you very much for your kind words, Cap'n. … If Karras “was killed by the demon”, then the story becomes less than pointless – it becomes an exercise in gratuitous cruelty and despair, the victory of a somehow contagious, vile mental illness with no true heroism or real sacrifice involved …
Baffling that you two recall exactly the same line. Sorry, I can't help. It was not in the theatrical release that I saw in 1974, or in any subsequent versions I've seen. It is not in Blatty's screenplay. But it “sounds like” something Chris would say … so, as I say, it's baffling and I hope someone can address your question.
