Everything is Filth: A Cultural Retrospective on The Exorcist
For this article I overview the most important scenes of The Exorcist (1973) and its "extended director’s cut"--the scholarship they inspire, historical contexts they intersect, and new assertions made possible through this cultural retrospective. The film represents a crisis in American i...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
|
| In: |
The journal of gods and monsters
Year: 2025, Volume: 5, Issue: 1, Pages: 37-49 |
| Further subjects: | B
Cathsploitation
B Otherness B defacement B Moral Panic B Exorcism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | For this article I overview the most important scenes of The Exorcist (1973) and its "extended director’s cut"--the scholarship they inspire, historical contexts they intersect, and new assertions made possible through this cultural retrospective. The film represents a crisis in American institutionality, not just of politics and government but of religion, public and social morale, and even medical and psychiatric treatment. Author William Peter Blatty laments the decline of the Catholic Church and its reception by the public. The film acts as religious propaganda, disseminating key components of Christian paranoia that later shape folk transmissions of the Satanic Panic, reinstituting the stakes of traditional Catholic authority and values, and dramatizing the dangers brought about by modern secularism. Implicitly, Blatty extends this religious declension narrative to the institution of the family. His narrative seeks to uphold the patriarchal status quo by terrorizing a single, working mother and her adolescent daughter into believing in Satan and, therefore, by the rules of dualism, God. Regan MacNeil grows rebellious against her mother as with the uncontrollable youth of her generation, monstrous in what many scholars interpret as an allegory for female puberty, and morally and existentially dangerous such that it is only through the Catholic patriarchy that order is restored within the fatherless home. Regan, as with other young women in exorcism cinema, is made abject through nonconsensual bodily manipulations and other markers of unmodulated "Otherness." Her abjection functions as a defacement of purity, a visceral surplus of negative energy that reveals an unwelcome public secret (everything is filth). Audiences were especially receptive to being revolted in 1973, perhaps resultingly underwhelmed by the ideological underpinnings of said viscera. The Exorcist, as executed by director William Friedkin, is a victim of its own success in special effects, sound design, and direction, achievements that obscure for a general audience the film’s sermon on "Catholic truths." The film is ultimately a "theological commercial" on divine grace but one that does not incite the masses, despite their enjoyment of the commercial, to "purchase" the product of institutional Catholicism. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2689-7032 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of gods and monsters
|
