Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

6. Haunted Houses

167 She doesn’t need a psychiatrist, she needs a priest . . . Jesus Christ won’t somebody help me! —The Exorcist Mark glued the Frankenstein monster’s left arm into the shoulder socket. It was a specially treated Aurora model that glowed in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus he had gotten for memorizing all of the 119th Psalm in Sunday School class. —Stephen King, Salem’s Lot In late December 1973, film patrons lined up around the block in every American city to watch some of the most terrifying images ever put on film. Using a documentarian style that created both a sense of cinema verite and of claustrophobia, director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist dragged America, literally kicking and screaming, into the bedroom of a teenage girl and forced them to face the devil. The Exorcist invites us into a bright, well-lit, Georgetown townhouse , the home of movie star Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter Regan (Linda Blair). Chris is starring in a film being made at Georgetown University about campus protest and the Vietnam War (that she laughingly describes as “the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story”). The household is busy with the demands of McNeil’s career and social life while Regan, her adolescent daughter, seems well Six HAUNTED HOUSES Monsters in America / 168 adjusted in school, has an artistic bent, and wants a pony. All in all, this does not seem the setting of an American monster tale. But strange things begin to happen to Regan. An Ouija board moves on its own. Regan’s bed shakes violently, and she uses foul language at the most inappropriate moments possible. At one point, she interrupts one of her mother’s fashionable dinner parties. Standing in her nightgown and voiding her bladder on the carpet, she pronounces doom on one of the guests, an astronaut who is about to begin an orbital mission. “You’re going to die up there,” she snarls. McNeil goes first to the medical establishment, certain they will find some somatic explanation for her daughter’s behavior and the odd events that surround her. Neurosurgeons put the young girl through a battery of torturous examinations. Regan worsens and her upstairs bedroom becomes a chamber of horrors. She displays enormous strength, hurling a doctor across the room. Her skin has turned a garish green, covered with gashes and scar tissue, while her eyes have become feral and inhuman. In one harrowing scene, she masturbates with a crucifix.1 Unable to find a medical solution, Regan’s physicians suggest to Chris that she find a priest to perform an exorcism, noting that “the power of suggestion” might help the young woman. McNeil revolts at the idea of finding a “witch doctor” but finally turns in desperation to Father Damien Karras, a young Jesuit with training in psychiatry. Karras receives permission from church authorities to conduct an exorcism with the help of an older priest, Father Merrin, who has experience with the ritual. The ensuing struggle with the demon that possesses Regan administered a series of brutal and visceral shocks to audiences. The high production values of the film, unusual for a horror film in the early 1970s, made the makeup and special effects especially convincing. Perfectly paced, Friedkin’s film created massive unease, followed it up with shock, and moved to a climax of fear and, for some, the feeling that the ending had left the devil in charge.2 The Exorcist released right after Christmas 1973. Horror author Stephen King remembered that a terrified America could not get enough and began “a two month exorcism jag.” At one New York theater in early January, patrons waited four hours to purchase tickets. Showings of the film became spectacles that reflected the action on the screen. First time viewers fainted, ran out of the theater, and vomited. Others reported weeks of sleepless nights. Catholic priests, and soon Protestant pastors, received requests for exorcisms from frightened moviegoers, convinced that they had become possessed. One ticket-buyer for an early showing Haunted Houses / 169 of the film told an interviewer that he or she “just wanted to see what all the throwing up was about.”3 Friedkin’s brilliant direction and the film’s revolutionary manipulation of cinematography and special effects accounted for some of the extreme audience reaction. Perhaps even more significant than these factors, The Exorcist touched on both...