Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [50]
In the screenplay, the priest defeats the Devil by throwing himself out of the window, and then there’s a coda that serves the same reassuring purpose as the one in Psycho. Detective Kinderman and Father Dyer, a friend of the deceased Karras, talk about seeing a movie together in the bright glow of daytime. But when the movie came in at 140 minutes, Friedkin cut it, leaving a much more abrupt conclusion—a shot of the dead man at the bottom of the stairs. Blatty hated it, arguing that the trimmed-down version opened up the possibility that Satan might have actually won, transforming his material from a sympathetic take on faith into a nihilistic tragedy with an apocalyptic shock. “My ending was meant to tell the audience that everything is all right. Everything is cool. What was left is a melancholic look on the priest’s face,” Blatty said. “Let’s face it: the message was adroitly snipped out of the film.”
Blatty called up John Calley at Warner Brothers and complained about losing the original explanatory scenes, but got nowhere. Calley liked the new editing, no doubt in part because the length of the movie could have had an impact on ticket sales. Rumors started flying about a rift between Blatty and Friedkin. Industry trade publication The Hollywood Reporter reported that there had been a fight over the dismissal of the composer Lalo Schifrin, which was not true. In reality, their split had more to do with a squabble over credit, since Friedkin wanted to scrap opening titles. Blatty agreed, but after talking to Mario Puzo and learning that he was lobbying to have his name above The Godfather, he changed his mind. This set off a feud, but the underlying dynamic was established earlier.
Blatty’s vision of the movie as something that could support the faith of believers proved naive. Instead, Friedkin turned the final scene into an old-fashioned gross-out. Regan is tied down and tortured, spewing vomit and swiveling her head until it moves around 360 degrees. And when the demon enters the soul of the priest, some awkward makeup transforms his face into sinister features. When he jumps out the window, it’s shocking, but to what end? If Psycho ties up the psychological ends neatly, this movie tangles them even more, leaving a chaotic heap. Many audience members thought the Devil had won. Even people involved with the film did. After seeing the final cut of the film, Blatty had dinner with Frank Wells. “Can you believe that people think Satan won?” Blatty asked. There was silence before Wells confessed: “That’s what I thought happened.”
THE SITUATION was summed up aptly by Newsweek in a cover story that began this way: “On December 26 a movie called The Exorcist opened in theatres across the country and since then all Hell has broken loose.” Audience members were fainting and vomiting, screaming at the screen. One woman had a miscarriage and another suffered a heart attack. Police were called in to stop riots in Kansas City and New York. One man saw a demon in Berkeley. The hysteria over The Exorcist, which opened over the holidays in 1973, fed on itself, generating more outbreaks of panic and anger, leading to reports on the evening news and newspaper stories soberly noting that a team of psychiatrists gave this social disease a name: cinematic neurosis.
The Reverend Billy Graham called it a “dangerous and strange situation.” But the people who really became unhinged were the movie critics who could not find enough hyperbole to describe what they were seeing. They used terms like “thoroughly evil” and “religious porn.” Pauline Kael attacked the Catholic Church for allowing its faith to “be turned into a horror show.”
The overheated reaction to the movie reflected its story rather