CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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Welcome aboard :)Â As to your questions:
1. The idea is that the demon is a trickster, trying to make Karras think that the possession is fake – so the demon, knowing preternaturally that it's tap water, goes along with Karras' trick, out of spite and gleeful cruelty.
2. I think the Japanese sign means something like “Help me” or “Save me”.
3. The Devil didn't win. That may have been the interviewee's theory, but it wasn't Blatty's idea at all:
Blatty is on public record myriad times saying that the Devil didn't win. First, the Devil did “go there for Merrin”, but NOT TO KILL MERRIN. The demon wanted to KILL REGAN while Merrin watched on helplessly. Merrin died before the demon could defeat Merrin by killing Regan, so the demon lost its main plan. In the novel, the demon rages and raves that Merrin “would have” lost, and cheated the demon of its victory by dying before the demon could kill Regan.
The demon did not kill two priests. The demon wanted Merrin ALIVE, but Merrin died of a simple heart attack. The demon did not kill Karras. Rather, Karras took on the demon deliberately and took the demon out the window, which is not a case of suicide, but of “demonicide”. The book makes it very clear that Karras attained salvation and, Christ-like, gave his life for Regan's. The movie is less explicit, but between Karras' receiving absolution from Dyer and Regan's baffled kiss at seeing Fr Dyer's Roman collar, the movie still makes it clear that Karras lured the demon out the window, saved Regan, and that the Roman collar unconsciously reminds Regan of the two priests who risked their lives and sanity to deliver her.
No answers for the characters certainly, none of whom were party to the complete picture. But for the reader I felt Blatty made things clear.
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I tend to agree with that. As a reader, my shock was overcome, and I was not awaking in tears, because Blatty invested Karras’ sacrifice and the end of Regan’s captivity with undeniable meaning and sanctity. As you said, if some of the characters are left somewhat clueless, we as readers are not. Blatty repeatedly said, “I don’t want people to think that the Devil won” – thus delivering a crystal-clear announcement to his audience: the possession was real, and Karras really overcame the real demon by his real self-sacrifice. Without this final certainty, the story decays into a pointless tale of a crazy child, self-molested by an unnamed disease, and an equally crazy priest who bought into the illusion and stupidly and uselessly destroyed his own life, for the sake of superstition. Definitely not the story that Blatty intended and wrote.
Sorry, but the jpg's are unavailable: “Server not found”, and the French site has no Translator that I can see, and there is no prominent reference to Ex: III.
Worked fine for me. I disagree with Friedman that it ruined the announcement of Burke's death by creating a double climax. Coming moments after the announcement, the spider walk complemented the first, psychological, shock, with a second, physical shock. As to the bloody mouth version vs. the tongue flicking version, they both work for me. I personally haven't seen the spiderwalk done in any other movies outside of the Exorcist franchise – it's used in Blatty's Legion with Ms Cleilia's ceiling walk, and is mimicked in Exorcist: the Beginning with the possessed woman's cave/rock climbing escapades.
Damien Karras is a man, a Jesuit priest. He is named after another man, Fr. Damien of Molokai, who worked with lepers and finally caught the disease himself. I'm sorry, but I really do not understand your question and what Damien Karras' gender has to do with Regan being restricted to her room.
I don't think any explanation that has Regan running around at night doing the task holds much weight either
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The difference is that the case of Regan herself doing the desecrations, is not mere conjecture. Blatty's story nearly confirms it. Kinderman scrapes paint off one of Regan's scultpures, labs it, and the lab confirms that Regan's paint matches the paint used in the church desecrations. Regan, under the demon's influence, is the obvious culprit. Moreover, the blasphemous altar card found in the church was typed on the MacNeils' typewriter – another pointer to Regan. That Regan secretively desecrated the church is not an imaginative scenario. It's what Blatty, through Kinderman's research, states.
Thanks for your interest 🙂
My name over there is bastasch8647.Â
I think they just initiated a new process for new members, which may be creating some problems for folks trying to get in for the first time … luckily, I was “grandfathered in” so the new application process doesn't involve me.
I think Blatty resolved the issue in the final pages, slightly on the side of the supernatural explanation.
Had he not done so, he failed miserably at his stated intent of writing a supernatural detective story.
Had anyone or anything but a real demon caused Regan’s possession, then Blatty would have removed the two spiritual pillars of the story: a real supernatural intervention via possession; and a real redemption for Karras.
Removing the supernatural-redemption themes would collapse the novel into the same mess that the Dennings molestation theory results in: a crazy child murders her molester, fakes a possession complete with religious themes utterly foreign to her psychology, rapes herself with a crucifix, stresses Merrin into a heart attack, and drives Karras to such distraction that he himself goes nuts, imagining a non-existent demon whom he thinks he can defeat only by committing suicide. Plainly, that’s just bad writing. as well as a betrayal of Blatty’s own authorial intentions.
Blatty hints that the intervention, and Karras’ redemption, are real. E.g., Dyer tells Chris that Karras was struggling with his faith, but Chris replies, “I’ve never seen such faith”. When Karras takes on the demon, he says to the effect, “You’re good at torturing people … little girls … take me.” Then: “No, I won’t let you hurt them”. These sentences, although only heard by the people downstairs, nevertheless take us indirectly into Regan’s room, and show us the process of Karras’ regaining of faith and willingness to sacrifice his life for Regan.
Immediately after this scene, Blatty underlines this central theme by his description of what Dyer sees in Karras’ eyes at the base of the stairs, eyes in which there is “peace … and a glint of triumph”. This coda serves to gently push the reader into the supernatural/redemptive view of the story.
Blatty explicitly stated that he wrote The Exorcist as a “supernatural detective story”. If, at the end of the tale, we are still left ambivalent, or worse, conclude that Karras “caught” Regan’s “disease”, then Blatty ruined the premise of his own story. If the supernatural intervention/Karras redemption themes are seen as incorrect or delusional, then the whole notion of a supernatural and religious story evaporates, and we are left with a malicious, vicious story which treats its major characters with great cruelty, for no better reason than a rare form of mental illness. But we know that this was not Blatty’s intention:
We know it because in the voluminous remarks Blatty made about The Exorcist, one of the most repeated statements was “I hate the idea that people think that the Devil won”. There we have it: Blatty believed in a real supernatural intervention, and a real victory for Karras. If his writing skills were so inept as to leave the reader ambivalent, or convinced that mental illness was the culprit, then Blatty should have hired a writing coach. But thankfully, as it stands, I think Blatty skillfully completes the story with a real redemption and a real defeat of a real demon.
