Director: William Friedkin
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Linda Blair
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. My most memorable screening is when I managed to convince someone who at that time was simultaneously a devout Christian and deathly afraid of demonic possession to watch it with me. Truly, the spirit of Pazusu was working through me.
Did I Like It: As we prepared to remedy a glaring blind spot in the canon of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, I decided to deep dive into the world of Lankester Merrin (von Sydow, for whom the old age make up may look fake at times but is a pretty decent approximation of the man he would become in his later years) and pals. I really enjoyed William Peter Blatty’s original novel, and especially Damien Karras (Miller) as a character, and unfortunately you might soon be subjected to my thoughts about the various Exorcist sequels (except for Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), because even I have my limits*).
And the act of going through the same story in the movie is fine. It hits all the right beats and manages to shake off some of the fat in the original story, but there is something missing in the translation. Such is life when comparing movies to their source material.
Where the movie succeeds wildly (and specifically either the unwieldly “Version You’ve Never Seen Before” or the Extended Director’s Cut) is in its ability to subtly unnerve. One might be able to find the occasional splicing in of Captain Howdy to be a bit of a parlor trick, but for me it is the best kind of cinematic horror. It’s the kind of thing that Murnau excelled at, around which The Blair Witch Project (1999) built an entire movie, and Muschietti occasionally tripped over in IT - Chapter One (2017), where you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking at sometimes, and it seems to live within the shadows which were the stuff out of which the earliest photography was made. That’s simple enough, but then you find yourself thinking about it that evening, and looking at the darkness in the distance as you’re feeding the cat, and before you know it, the movie has stuck in your mind.
*Although I’m not weirdly fascinated by it now. How do you make an early-oughts horror movie (with all of the requisite Matthew Lillard-ness that might entail) with these characters that a studio would feel comfortable releasing? The mind boggles, but that’s probably a discussion for a whole other review.