So The Exorcist did devilishly good business in its heyday, which began smack in the middle of the holiday expanse between Christmas and New Year’s. The only wide December release to do better is James Cameron’s Titanic, and that opened nearly 25 years later. But unlike the film about the sinking boat, The Exorcist actually is a Christmas movie. We’re serious.
While there isn’t a hint of the holly or the ivy on screen, Friedkin and perhaps more crucially screenwriter William Peter Blatty, who adapted his own bestselling novel of the same name, went out of their way to make one of the most heartfelt and spiritual pictures ever conceived for a wider audience of skeptics, agnostics, and apostates. The film is even set adjacently to Christmastime, although the picture never draws attention to this fact. Early on in the film, we Ellen Burstyn’s character walk home on what is supposed to be the beginning of Halloween eve. The sun is still shining and leaves are falling from the trees, but children dressed as ghosts and witches run past her on their way to trick ‘r treating.
The scene in question occurs at the very start of the film, before Linda Blair’s poor little Regan MacNeil has shown any symptoms of coming down with a case of the Pazuzus. Still, we are clued in that a fair amount of time passes between Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil wrapping production on her unnamed film-within-a-film and their Georgetown home turning into a battleground betwixt good and evil. Along the way, we can spot that the wind has picked up, the nights have turned wintry, and in some wide shots of Georgetown, a Christmas decoration or two can be gleaned.
Friedkin never brings attention to the time of year, but enough weeks and months pass in the story for poor Father Karras (Jason Miller) to bury his mother, and Chris to take Regan to every medical expert in D.C. who come to the same conclusion: call a priest. Friedkin, of course, was himself a secularist like Chris—an agnostic man who was raised in the Jewish faith and who in 1973 didn’t believe in demons and ghouls. The film’s screenwriter did, however.
Pulling from an alleged case of actual exorcism that he studied while attending Georgetown, author Blatty believed deeply in the biblical definition of evil and he created a story intended to remind his readers and viewers of its existence too. This was done to scare you, yes, but also to inspire you to believe in the goodness of men’s souls. It even became one of Blatty’s biggest contentions with Friedkin after the director removed a line in the theatrical cut (which was later reinserted in the extended version) where the film’s vessel for most absolute goodness, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), says: “I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly, to reject the possibility that God could love us.”
This is obviously Blatty’s theory on the alleged phenomena of demonic possession, but the film doesn’t revel in just the abject horror of the concept, but also in the goodness of people doing what is right. In the end, the priests Merrin and Karras are close to saints (at least if you ignore the character assassination of a disparaging Chris MacNeil in the recent The Exorcist: Believer). They give their lives so that poor little Regan will be spared. They don’t lose sight of God’s love and recognize the little girl trapped beneath the hideous monster we bear witness to in the third act.
