Last night, we watched The Exorcist. I had already seen the movie, but hadn’t seen it for many, many years. Since I first watched The Exorcist (way too young, I might add), I had watched so many other scary movies: The Babadook, The Ring, Don’t Look Now, The Omen, Psycho, Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, Hereditary, Audition, Hush, Smile, Train to Busan, The Vanishing, Us, Let the Right One In, A Quiet Place, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring, The Devil’s Backbone, Poltergeist, The Descent, and so many more.
Old and new. Campy and bone chilling. American and international.
So many movies, each different from each other, but each tied together by a common thread: horror and the ability to disturb you.
After all those movies, I thought that I had become jaded and that it would take a lot to scare me. Surely, after all these years, The Exorcist would no longer be scary to me. We all remember the pea soup vomit scene, and it was still neon green after all these years. But I watched it with my family for a scary movie night, and I was terrified. There aren’t a lot of jump scares in the movie, a cheapish tactic guaranteed to scare anyone, but there is an overwhelming sense of dread that permeates the movie, building to a horrifying crescendo that splatters the screen in madness and sacrifice.
As I have gotten older, the nature of what scares me has changed.
I’m a mother now, and the fear that Chris MacNeil has for her daughter and her rage at being powerless to care for her little girl were emotions that I could now instantly relate to -- and that alone had the power to amp up my own fear by an order of magnitude. The scenes where Regan cries out in pain for her mommy while she is undergoing horrific medical procedures had my guts tangled up in knots. My husband too mentioned how watching the movie now touched on how he feels about his relationship with his mother. Both he and I understand so well those feelings of obligation tangled with guilt when it comes to dealing with aging parents.
And of course there was the religious element, and the notion of both keeping and losing faith. I was baptized Catholic but was not raised in a religious household. My family had traveled too much for any one religion or religious community to ever take hold. The same was true for my husband, although he went much further along the Catholic path then I ever did. Even though we are lapsed Catholics, the trappings of the religion, the recitations, the opulent churches with their dark brown wood furniture and blood red velvet upholstery still have the power to enthrall us, and the desecration of those holy artifacts still packs a punch even after all these years of being away from religion.
Finally, the idea that you can somehow be responsible for inviting some demonic being that can possess you and only wants to hurt you and everyone around you terrifies me. I’m a pragmatic and logical person. Of course, I don’t believe in such things. But there is some very tiny part of my mind that thinks, ugh, just thinking that you don’t believe in the devil is enough to invite evil into your world. I suppose that seed of an idea was planted in my mind when I was young and impressionable, and it is an idea that never leaves me no matter how old I get.
Yes, for me, even after all these years, even after so many horror movies that kept horror tropes going (and many that completely subverted standard horror tropes), even after witnessing real-life horrors, The Exorcist still has the power to terrify me.
How about you? Does it still have the power to scare you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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