Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [48]
Rarely has a novelist had more power over his material in an adaptation for a major studio. And yet, in the era of the auteur, the least prominent director still wields more power than the most powerful writer. Friedkin, blustery and foul-mouthed, was not exactly known as a pushover. The first gauntlet was thrown right away. After reading the adaptation of the novel for the first time, Friedkin told Blatty he wouldn’t work on it. It was, he said, “the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen.” He needed a rewrite. In the transition from the novel, Blatty had taken out the masturbation and the profanity in an attempt to make the material palatable. Friedkin said that he had sanitized the story and destroyed its essence. It was also a way for the director to show the writer who was boss. Blatty made the changes, returning to something closer to the original book.
To Friedkin, the essence of the movie was the mystery of faith. Just as Polanski maintained ambiguity about whether the Devil was merely in Rosemary’s head, Friedkin wanted to keep the audience guessing whether this girl was possessed by a demon or suffered from an unknowable disease. Regan’s mother searches for a cure, first in traditional medicine and psychiatry, before consulting with Father Karras, who despite his initial skepticism helps her find an experienced exorcist. When Father Merrin arrives in her bedroom, Regan curses at him, levitates, and eventually kills him, before Karras challenges her, yelling “Take me!” He then tumbles out the window, with the demon. The ending never made sense to Friedkin. Why would the demon jump out of the girl and into Father Karras just because Karras ordered him to? “I thought that was weird, but I justified it, thinking it might be, he became crazed and kills himself because of the death of Father Merrin,” Friedkin says.
The tension between Friedkin and Blatty centered on this question: Why did the Devil choose this girl? Blatty spells this out quite explicitly in the book, and it appears in the original screenplay in a few places, as in a monologue spoken by her mother saying that her daughter is not the target. It was to make everyone in the house, and in particular the fallen priest, despair and think that even if there was a God, he could not love us. “That was the moral context,” Blatty explains, “and it would allow the audience to not hate itself for liking what it was seeing on-screen.”
Another scene between the two priests includes speculation that the possession was a test from the Devil of one man’s belief. Blatty saw Karras making the ultimate leap of faith for his God, but Friedkin preferred to leave his motivations mysterious, as well as those of the Devil. To him, the randomness of the possession was what made it compelling. Friedkin cut the explanatory scenes and Blatty balked: “Without these scenes,” he angrily told Friedkin, “then why is it this girl? What is the point here?” Friedkin replied: “I’m not doing a commercial for the Catholic Church.”
This disagreement was not just about religious conviction. It was also about aesthetics. Blatty was slightly more conventional artistically. Like Carpenter and Romero, Friedkin rejected the simple explanations of most genre movies, but he found inspiration from an alternative model of horror: the theater.
SOME OF the most terrifying entertainments for adults in the 1960s were onstage. In some ways, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee anticipated the fright of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and while it is not thought of as horror, that says more about the lack of respect afforded