I wouldn’t call it that (“Psycho,” in its day, was scarier), but “The Exorcist” is the movie that terrified people into believing.
But He’s now going to be reborn as occult tabloid sensationalism, with a patina of Old Time Religion.”Ī lot of movie buffs, especially if they saw “The Exorcist” at a certain age, will tell you that they think it’s the scariest movie ever made. “Rosemary’s Baby,” in 1968, famously pictured the Time magazine cover that asked “Is God Dead?” This trilogy of incidents - and, beyond all of them, the film version of “The Exorcist” - answered that question by saying: “Yes, He is. In hindsight, that case, along with the alien incident at Roswell in 1948 and the 1974 Amityville haunting, constitute a kind of popular triptych of the otherworldly: a testament to how the spirit of the uncanny got recast - re-mythologized - for a secular age. Friedkin sketches in how William Peter Blatty came to write his smash-hit novel “The Exorcist,” spinning it out of a 1949 case of demonic possession that he became obsessed with when he was a student at Georgetown. The real theme of “The Devil and Father Amorth” is the degree to which people now believe that exorcism is real. That’s a standard shlock-TV-news ploy, but in this case it has a resonance. The director also returns to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., where he shot “The Exorcist” 45 years ago, and speaks to us from the famous concrete stairway where Father Karras met his death, as if something genuine had happened there. For them, it’s like Californians getting high colonics - either that, or the Devil is alive and working overtime in Italy.
Friedkin serves up a shocking statistic: that 500,000 Italians, out of a population of 60 million, have undergone exorcisms.
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