One marriage, two movie reviews: The Exorcist

Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil, Max von Sydow as Father Merrin, and Jason Miller as Father Karras in 'The Exorcist', directed by William Friedkin, 1973. Photo / Getty Images

Greg and Zanna look for, and find, the source of all fear.

SCARINESS SCORES
Projectile vomiting: 1
Head turning: 2
Inappropriate stabbing: 3
"Captain Howdy": 4
Spider: 5

SHE SAW

After we watched The Exorcist, Greg asked me why I thought it had been so popular. I threw out some half-baked ideas: People are fascinated by possession - the idea that they, or their loved ones, could be inexplicably controlled by evil. "No," he said definitively, "It's not that." The visual effects would've been quite terrifying at the time (people actually fainted in cinemas)? No, he assured me, wrong. Could it be because the person possessed was a sweet little girl? No. Was it that some of the things she did were deeply disturbing - gruesomely masturbating with a crucifix for example? Wrong again. Maybe it was because horror films speak to the fears of the era and something about possession touched a nerve in the 1970s? No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Was it because it spoke to the plight of the disbelieved woman: the mother knew something was terrifyingly wrong with her daughter but rooms full of male doctors repeatedly told her there wasn't. "Hmmm maybe," he said, unconvinced. Some combination of all these things? "Nope," he said, "It's something else," and went to have a shower.

Later, he bounced into the hallway, overcome with excitement. The Exorcist is about people being scared of their teenagers' hormones, he announced. The girl is on the cusp of puberty and is about to turn into a crazed teenager and that speaks to the fear of all parents, he said, declaratively and nakedly. He was naked. It sounded so stupid, more stupid even than the absurd way he was drying himself, which involved wiping water off his body with his bare hands while holding a perfectly absorbent towel.

I came away revelling in my husband's buffoonishness, until it dawned on me that, once again, he had stumbled on to something quite insightful: a feminist critique he didn't fully articulate but which was at the heart of his theory. The Exorcist is about men's fears of women's sexuality: A sweet, innocent young girl is possessed by the devil, who makes her say and do perverted sexual things. It's men's greatest fear for their daughters, born out of panic over the sexual revolution. He was bloody right.

A film like this couldn't be made anymore. It's inappropriate to have an adolescent girl act out these scenes, especially for a male director. It's also no longer scary. Gross, but not scary. At times like these, it's quite nice to be reminded that the things that are scaring us right now will one day be as laughable as projectile pea soup spattered on a priest's glasses.

HE SAW

Zanna, a scaredy-cat who has never voluntarily watched a horror movie, whined for days about having to watch The Exorcist, which she felt would put her further on edge at a time of already-high anxiety. Honestly, I wasn't thrilled about it either, but it was the right thing to do, this being Halloween and The Exorcist being the most famous horror movie neither of us had seen.

I was a bit scared early on when 12-year-old Regan was talking about "Captain Howdy", who sometimes helped her with ouija, but once it became clear what was going on, I was pretty much fine with the projectile vomiting, head turning and inappropriate stabbing. Fear is about possibility: Once it's been realised, it can only be as bad as the film-maker is capable of making it look, which, in 1973, was not very bad.

After the movie finished, I was walking down the hall towards our bedroom when I saw on the wall a spider the size of my hand. It was all I could do to keep breathing. I lost all physical integrity in my limbs, throat and chest. As the bottom fell out of me, I lurched desperately out of the hall and into the relative safety of the bedroom.

With a shaky voice, I called Zanna, who came out with a cup and a sheet of cardboard. Although I was hyperventilating, it seemed important to my illusion of control that I watched. As she put the cup over the spider, I was able to remain standing only because of the intensity with which I was holding the door frame. At any time, I knew, the creature could squeeze between cup and board, fall to the floor, make two leaps and affix to my face, at which point I would have to drop dead to relieve my future self of the burden of carrying for all eternity the horror of that moment.

As she carried it outside. I followed, 4-5 social distances behind. I wasn't comfortable with her letting it live, but she was already doing me a solid and it wasn't my place to impose my bioethics on her at 10.40pm, although I did make her carry it off our property. I wanted her to put it in a neighbour's garden, but she said she wouldn't do that. I wondered aloud about echo-location, but she just laughed and poured it into the world like it was just another of God's creatures. In bed a few minutes later, I lay awake, reading the same page of my book over and over, unable to take in a single word. Zanna fell asleep in seconds.

The Exorcist is streaming now on Netflix.