Ten Statements About....THE EXORCIST (1973)

The only thing backwards looking about the film is
Regan herself....

“Where is Regan?"
“In here. With us.”

1) One of the reasons this film is so brilliant--and the scare scenes so shocking--is how Friedkin approaches it almost as a police procedural.  The clinical way in which the story unfolds, and the way it progresses, mirrors a mystery story.  Hell, it’s probably the only reason Lee J. Cobb’s Lt. Kinderman is in the film!

2) Part of the reason the key scenes continue to shock decades later is that these scenes are shot with an almost documentary-like clinicalness and without music.  What Friedkin seems to be doing is forcing us to realize these things are happening just because awful things happen to everyday people, and they happen without drama or elaboration....and that elevates what should be a shocking effects scene into something that feels all the more grotesque.

3) Supposedly Friedkin wanted Jack Nicholson for Father Karras, and Stacy Keach had been cast.  Thank God he changed his mind and cast Jason Miller.  In a film full of great faces, Miller’s is the best.  His craggy features and sad eyes speaks volumes of his inner conflict and his past before he even utters a word.  And when he utters those words, it makes us sympathize with him immediately.

There is no way any of the other, more famous actors could
do better than Jason Miller.

4) Yes, the film can be a little plodding in the first act--but I love how Friedkin uses the parallel structure contrasting Ellen Burstyn’s Chris’ life of leisure and her loving relationship with Linda Blair’s Regan and Father Karras’s more austere life and complicated (but no less loving) relationship with his mother.  Friedkin doesn’t judge or come out one way or the other when examining these two lives, but allows us to decide who is using their time on earth more wisely.

5) Okay, I’ll call it--there’s no reason for that beginning sequence in Iraq and connecting Regan’s possession with it.  If anything, it detracts from the concept that this horrible thing is happening at random.

6) As I watched the Extended Director’s Cut, I can safely say I didn’t care for the spider walk sequence.  It seems to detract from the very gradual and subtle turning of Regan into a vessel for Pazuzu, and doesn’t have nearly the impact the other scare scenes have.

One of the single most iconic images in 70's cinema...

7) You have to give Blair credit.  Yes, she’s a limited actress (something we cannot write off due to her youth once you take into account her full body of work), but she does work to make the bond between her and her mother, and her physical acting as she slowly falls under Pazuzu’s control is very effective.

8) As scary and disturbing as the scenes of Regan possessed are, the single most uncomfortable scene for me involves the spinal tap and encephalogram.  The sheer quietness of the scene makes her cries of pain sound like rifle shot.

9) One of the things Friedkin excels at (and still excels at, as witness from some of his recent efforts) is making the best use of limited spaces.  So much of this movie takes place in a single bedroom--hell, there’s really only two or three sets where most of the action takes place--that it needs someone of Friedkin’s spacial creativity to break up the visual monotony.

10) Reasons This Film Could Not Be Made #57: The bittersweet ending, where Father Karras knowingly sacrifices himself by damning himself to Hell, would never stand. And because it would never stand, the film’s ambivalent nature would collapse in on itself in an instant.

Overall...still pretty hard to watch after 40 years, a seminal movie for students of horror.

Ten Statements About....BUG (2006)



Michael Shannon shows Ashley Judd the budget for this film.

 "It's not a matter of opinion. An organism just is or isn't...so, is there bugs or aren't there?"

1) The first thing that strikes me? How Ashley Judd is not afraid to look unglamorous. Without make-up or haircare, she seems downright normal...although her behavior in the opening, near-silent first ten minutes makes it clear she's anything but.

2) The biggest problem director William Friedkin had to overcome was how to make a film that's, at its core, a one-set stage play...and it's remarkable how he chooses to keep the film vital through framing and camera movement.

3) And speaking of that framing...I find it interesting that the Jodd's Agnes and Michael Shannon's Peter are originally framed normally only for them to be framed further and further away from the center of the frame when their dementia starts taking over. It's a subtle cue, and an effective one.

Boy, this remake of Singing in the Rain took a weird turn...

4) You know, it's obvious right from the start that Peter is not right in the head, even when Shannon is behaving all amiable in the film's first act. But the genius of the script is that we get a big ol' heaping slice of Harry Connick's Jerry as a compare and contrast in that first act. Because Jerry is so obviously malevolent, we are tricked into overlooking Peter's obvious off-centeredness....and by the time we have to accept that yes, this is the Wrong Man for Agnes to get together with, it's too late.

5) A lot is made of the way Agnes' son disappeared while she was in the supermarket, and some unperceptive viewers might think that plot thread is discarded without any resolution...but it's not there to be resolved. It's there to further illustrate Agnes' descent into Peter's insanity, as she connects every bad thing to his conspiracy-theory-addled delusions.

6) I can understand why we get these cutaways to insects and the like, but they're not really necessary--Friedkin's direction is strong enough to carry this film without these tricks. More effective is the heliocopter cues every time our couple's mental state deteriorates.

7) Yeah, this is a psychological horror story that doesn't rely on shock effects, but as someone who had some serious dentist phobias, the sequence involving Peter and a set of pliers...shudder.

8) Boy, that last act, taking place after Peter and Agnes has covered the entire apartment with tinfoil, turns a set we're intimately familiar with by now into an alien landscape. It helps that the tinfoil casts everything in a bluish light.

"I see you did the place up in early nutbag..."

9) It's obvious that Brian F. O'Bryan's Dr. Sweet's fate is marked right from the start...but so good and mannered is O'Bryan's performance that you actually feel sad that he's about to be cut open by a mentally ill man.

10) If I ever had any doubt about Judd as an actress, they're gone after her monologue in the third act. Watching her very subtlely yet slowly start to weave her sad reality with threads of Peter's conspiracy-based dementia is stunning.

Overall...an interesting curiousity that manages to transcend its one-set two-character limitations through canny camera movement, framing and some excellent central performances, this may not be for those people who find the PG-13 CGI horror drivel the height of the genre...but if you have a more adventurous taste for the genre, this might be worth a watch...