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the exorcist – the horror of domestic imprisonment – cont.

The Exorcist‘s aggressive staging of the dangers of women’s liberation sets up an equally strenuous critique of domestic violence as a habitual practice in the US.

As Chris gets brought to heel by the demonic forces in her home, as she gets unmade as a women’s libber, Chris’s and Regan’s imprisonment in their home reflects the real-life situation of countless American women in the 1970s.

Although it was legally possible in many states in the 1970s—albeit very difficult – for a woman to leave her abusive spouse, it was often extremely difficult logistically.

Women in the 1970s often did not have incomes of their own, had many children to care for in their flight from violence, and did not have a place to seek shelter.

Indeed, in 1973, there were only a couple of domestic violence shelters in the entire United States. There was no way to escape a domestic abuse situation for the vast majority of women who were in one.

Chris and Regan’s entrapment, however harrowing and supernatural, actually reflected a situation of domestic battery with shocking accuracy. For so many mothers and their children, there was no way out.

One might protest that the violence in The Exorcist is not really domestic violence against Chris, in the traditional sense of wife beating, because it’s her daughter who’s doing it to her, not some evil husband.

But in the fiction of the film, it is a “powerful man” who is abusing her—the police officer whom Chris speaks with in the latter half of the film says so, verbatim.

More specifically, it is a male demon who has entered her house and made her daughter his own personal plaything. A male demon who has decided, in effect, to construe Chris’s house as his own domain. A male demon who has turned Chris’s daughter into an instrument of torture for both Regan herself and for Chris. A male demon whom the surprisingly helpful, kindhearted, and well-meaning police officers in the film cannot detect, let alone capture or remove from Chris’s home.

This diabolical plot element is crucially important to the film’s critique of domestic violence. In fact, it’s right in the intersection between the possession narrative and the ideologies of domestic violence in the United States that the film’s energy turns from being anti-feminist to being pro-feminist and extraordinarily sophisticated in its feminist critiques.

First, the demon clearly understands himself to be “correcting” Chris. He’s curbing her, subordinating her, and breaking her down because she fails to acknowledge his complete and total right to her daughter and to her daughter’s body. Second, and most important, the possession narrative taps into and literalizes the core and horrific truth of Anglo-American legal history: Women were property.

Women were owned; they were, literally, possessed by men—as were children.

The possession narrative of this film isn’t just supernatural; it’s also a representation of lived reality for married American women and their children.

The supernatural possession plot of The Exorcist is not extraneous to its feminist critique; it is its feminist critique.

The film represents how women are further trapped by their fundamental vulnerability to the danger their children are facing.

Regan is physically possessed by this new, male, powerful, interloping presence in the domestic space. And, because of her possession, there is nothing Chris can do, either to save her child or to save herself. Because the reality is that Chris, too, is possessed by proxy: There is no way for Chris to escape because there is no way she will ever abandon her child. No matter how much the demon beats her, no matter how much the demon terrorizes her, Chris cannot leave her child. She is vulnerable to demonic abuse because she is a mother who loves her child.

This film recognizes something that the battered women’s movement was desperate to get Americans to see: When a woman stays in a physically abusive situation, it is often because she believes staying there to be essential to the safety and survival of her children.

That reality wasn’t just psychological for women; it was also logistical and legal.

In the 1960s and 1970s (and before), if a woman fled her abuser but didn’t bring her children with her—even in the heat of abuse – she ran the very real risk of losing custody of them to her abuser. Moreover, if a woman did flee with her children, it was not clear there was anywhere to go— precious few domestic violence shelters and even the most sympathetic and supportive friends and family typically couldn’t house a woman and her children for an extended period of time.

In The Exorcist, Regan’s possession results in her being so physically dysregulated that she has to be tied down to the bed, imprisoned in the house. So her mother can’t leave because she can’t leave Regan behind, alone, to be tortured or killed by the demon.

Through the possession dynamic and its staging of domestic violence, the film forces viewers to connect with a version of domestic violence in which the woman is in no way at fault for the physical battery she and her child endure. However liberated Chris may be and however foulmouthed, however “unpleasant” she may have appeared to some anti-feminist viewers, we cannot in good conscience say that she or her daughter deserve to be brutalized like they are.

Moreover, the male character who commits the violence has zero moral complexity: He is an allegory of pure evil who possesses and violates a little girl and beats the living hell out of her mother. He is, literally, a demon, as well as a child rapist, a batterer of women, a murderer, and a sociopath. As the degree of his demonicness is confirmed, our ability to condemn Chris as the reason for Regan’s problems drains away.

There is no room for sympathy toward the demon or understanding for why he might be committing this domestic violence. It’s brutal, horrible battery, pure and simple. No way to justify it. No way to pretend it’s complicated. No way to say Chris was asking for it. No way to say Chris needed correction as violent as the demon is doling out – even if a viewer had initially found Chris to be brash, abrasive, unpleasant, unfeminine, or in any other way offensive to patriarchal norms of femininity or womanhood.

In its allegorical presentation of domestic violence, The Exorcist was fifty years ahead of its time. It forced Americans to view the torture and abuse of women by a malign, inexcusable male force, and to recognize how utterly and completely trapped both Regan and Chris were. Doctors and psychiatrists fail to help her. The police fail to help her. This pervasive failure, of doctors, of police, and of law, is made all the more horrible because it reflects reality in the early 1970s: There were no social institutions that a woman could easily turn to for support in a situation of domestic violence. Chris’s case of abuse wasn’t exceptional for being unprosecutable and irremediable – it was typical.

In forcing the American people to witness the torture of a woman and her child in their own home, to witness the total impotence of the police to help, The Exorcist created itself as a masterpiece of consciousness-raising. Through the film – with all its supernaturalness—we actually bear witness to a totally quotidian, familiar, tragically pervasive reality. The only place a woman could turn, often, for help in situations of domestic violence was a priest.

Paralleling reality again, Chris eventually finds help in the very place from which the logic of couverture, the logic that, in the domestic space, man and woman are of one flesh, originated: the Church. And even though the film’s turn to the Church seems only to reinscribe Chris and Regan within the patriarchal power systems that got her into trouble in the first place, it is her choice to turn to the Church that allows Chris to appear in full relief as exactly what she is: a battered supplicant who seeks the support of the institution that is, in principle, supposed to advocate for the weak, the desperate, and the disempowered. By this point in the film, Chris certainly is all those things.

And so, in weary resignation, having become convinced that no doctor or psychiatrist can help her or her child, Chris arranges to meet Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a disenchanted Catholic priest whose life has formed the secondary plot of the film up to this point.

In the scene where she meets Father Damien, we see Chris radically physically transformed from her first appearances in the film. Initially, she was brash, loud, sexy, and liberated, wearing formfitting clothing and classy makeup. Now, she wears a headscarf, tucked tight to her face, and a heavy coat, collar turned up. And in a stark symbolic gesture, she dons big, dark sunglasses to cover her eyes and cheekbones. She looks, for all the world, like a victim of domestic abuse who is trying to hide the signs of her battery from the world. Which, of course, she is. And like countless tens of thousands of other women in the 1970s, she is ashamed of her brokenness, her vulnerability, her own pain, and she seeks to hide it from public scrutiny.

Indeed, when she talks with Damien, at one point, she pulls off her glasses, and we can see that her face is in fact all bruised and beat up. This scene is a revelation of domestic violence. There is no way that women who were living through domestic abuse and watching the film would have failed to notice this iconography.

Although skeptical that he can help, Father Damien agrees to meet Regan at their home. Upon seeing him, the demon reveals that he cannot tolerate the priest’s presence. After all, the demon’s structural and symbolic role is that of the paterfamilias, “correcting” those whom he has taken possession of, whether bodily (Regan) or psychologically (Chris).

When Father Damien comes in, a true “father” enters into the domestic sphere and challenges the demon’s right to exert his patriarchal power over Chris and Regan.

Of course, that’s a problematic place for the roiling feminism of the film to turn: Chris cannot help herself, and she can’t help Regan. But Father Damien, who steps into the role of the paterfamilias for the rest of the film – he can help.

By challenging the primacy of the demon for the role as the father in the home, Father Damien is the only one who can help Regan and Chris out of their plight.

Chris, the liberated, profane, professional mother, has to be reinscribed within the norms of Christian domestic space in order for her and her child to be saved, soul as well as body. And that dual soul-body salvation of Chris and Regan is made possible-as it is in traditional Christian doctrine—only by an act of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of a Christian male.

In the end, Father Damien takes the demon into himself, seeing that there is no other way to end the gradual destruction and dehumanization of Regan. The demon appears to penetrate into Father Damien’s eyes, which grow wide and wild, and then take on a demonic cast. But Father Damien retains enough of his humanity at this critical moment to choose to leap out the window to his death, and that of the demon.

So, can we call this film a feminist masterpiece, determined to showcase in allegorical form the true horrors of domestic abuse? Yes. Can we also call this film an anti-feminist screed, determined to showcase the dangers to the family posed by the liberation of women and the necessity of that liberation being limited and regulated by Catholic Christianity? Yes.

This tension is not unusual in domestic horror. Domestic horror is often ambivalent toward women and their suffering. When we gaze on Rosemary’s suffering, we cannot help but notice her beauty, her sweetness; there is a fetishism in that film, as well as a resistance to the dehumanization to which Rosemary is subjected. Here, The Exorcist revels in disciplining Chris for her unfeminine ways. But it also forces us to align affectively with her in the end.

In The Exorcist, we may or may not like Chris at the start, but we definitely want her and Regan to escape their hell. And they do—with the audience being shown, all the while, the true entrapment and horror of being “possessed” by a demonic male. But they only escape through their willing submission to Catholic ritual and to the reinstatement of Catholic paternalism within their household.

After Father Karras’s self-sacrifice, Regan heals, and she and Chris pack up to leave Washington, DC, we assume forever. In the final scene, Chris is a restrained, depressive version of her former self; she wears conservative clothes, little makeup, and the tight-lipped expression of someone who expects pain and fear to come raining down on her again at any time.

In my own work with abuse survivors who have extricated themselves from the demons in their own homes, I’m all too familiar with that particular facial expression. It is very, very hard to accept that the demon is really gone.

Because all too often, he isn’t.

So, however much the film may have raised awareness about the domestic violence inflicted on women and children who are “possessed” by demonic men, trapped in their own homes to be “corrected” by that man’s law of violence, it simultaneously critiqued and cast doubt on any vision of a future in which a women could be truly independent or free from such domestic horror. Chris may get out from under the demon’s violence, but she only does so with the help of the Church, and her face clearly tells us, in the final scene, that she will never feel truly safe again.

November 19, 2025

domestic abuse, domestic horror, feminism, horror, horror movies, patriarchy, scream with me, the exorcist
the exorcist – the horror of domestic imprisonment

The Horror of Domestic Imprisonment

The panicked anti-feminism surrounding Chris and Regan is not, however, the film’s only commentary on the status of American women. The other is a strong critique of the patriarchal structures of power—and, specifically, of the structures of power in a domestic sphere-that keep Chris (and Regan) imprisoned in their shared tale of horror and violent suffering. Because although the film is, on one level, an anti-feminist screed, eager to lambaste both working mothers and pubescent girls, it is also, on a deeper level, a crushing exposé of domestic violence and what sustains it in America culture.

Regan, after all, is not the only person in the film who is being physically and sexually tortured.

Chris, too, at the hands of the demon who seems to have taken possession of Regan, is abused. Regularly and brutally. Furniture is thrown at her, she’s hit, she’s pushed. Chris is being battered, tortured, domestically abused. Her daughter is a pawn in that abuse pattern.

Whether William Friedkin intended it or not (and I seriously doubt he did, the demonic abuse narrative in the film amplifies the emerging feminist awareness in the 1970s about the all-too-real and all-too-quotidian horror of domestic violence.

As we watch Chris’s transformation over the course of the film, we see a liberated woman get broken-both physically and psychologically—by a demon who has entered her home. We watch her suffer at the mercy of this male demonic figure because she cannot leave her child, and that child, in turn, cannot leave their home.

The film lays bare Chris’s complete and total helplessness and her inability to find help from the outside.

Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist showcases motherhood as a central site of vulnerability for domestic abuse—a social reality that, by the time the film premiered, had just begun to be acknowledged in scholarly conversations and at professional conferences.

To show how the film mounts its avant-garde critique of domestic violence, however, I need to take us on a brief tour of Anglo-American legal history.

For close to a thousand years, the beating of wives and children was a recognized and accepted fact of domestic life, first in English law and then in the American legal system that emerged directly from it. Domestic battery was understood as a good and necessary thing, if not done to excess.

Two pieces of logic underpinned the accepted practice of wife beating and child beating. The first was the idea that wives and children were in need of “correction”; women and children were understood to be mentally and morally weaker than adult men, so it was incumbent upon adult men to discipline, correct, and control women and children. The second was that wives and children were the property of their husbands—and I mean that quite literally.

By the doctrine of couverture (covering), when a woman married a man, she became of one flesh with him, and he had total legal control over her, her body, her children, her property, and her rights.

Legal commentator William Blackstone argued in the eighteenth century that “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”

Women belonged to their husbands, because their legally independent status died when they married, and their bodies became, literally, his to do with as he saw fit.

So, given this ideological bedrock of Anglo-American family law, if a man beat his wife, how would you prosecute him? For punishing his own body? A body he owned, by marriage, in the eyes of the law? The short answer is that you wouldn’t – even well into the twentieth century.

The head of the household in almost all of Anglo-American legal history was the absolute and uncontested paterfamilias, the “father” who ruled the family as a quasi-divinity and who had the power to correct, discipline, and harm his underlings as he wished. As a result of these beliefs and doctrines, the battering of wives and children was rampant in America throughout most of history.

Although rampant, it was also cruelly silent. Even in the relatively liberal 1960s, domestic violence was seldom featured in public writings or in legal and medical writings.

Indeed, a 1977 article from The New Women’s Times, which interviewed a domestic abuse survivor, noted that the survivor had only ever read or seen one article on wife beating during the time she was married.

An influential 1980 review essay noted that there was not one single article on family violence in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in the first thirty years of its existence-which is to say, up to 1969. There was precious little legislation that sought to curb the domestic abuse of wives, and there were far more articles in psychiatric journals about how wives provoked their husbands’ beatings than about how to support the wives who were being abused.

In fact, a very common and very erroneous belief among even psychiatric practitioners into the 1970s was that women in violent relationships were masochists who wanted to be there, and that, therefore, there was precious little a practitioner could do for them.

Even for more sympathetic medical practitioners and psychologists, there were no clear guidelines about how to help women who were clearly being abused.

Doctors routinely told women who reported being victims of domestic abuse that they, the women, were probably causing the problems, that they should try to reconcile with their husbands, or that they were simply “nervous” and needed medication.

Knowing the biases against abused women that existed broadly in American culture, abused women simply hid. They hid their bruised faces under large, dark sunglasses. They wore scarves to cover head lacerations and bald patches where their hair had been torn out by the roots. They wore bulky sweaters and coats to conceal injuries to their arms, chests, and necks. And more often than not, they simply stayed indoors, concealed from public view—which, of course, is where they were getting hurt in the first place. But they often stayed indoors anyway, often because it was an embarrassment to them if they were seen in such a state.

It was an embarrassment to them in part because so many Americans overtly supported the practice of spousal violence as a mechanism for corralling unruly wives.

Indeed, 25 percent of American adults in a University of Wisconsin survey in the 1960s confirmed that they supported husband-wife physical battles-with a higher rate of approval among better-educated respondents.

A Harris poll from 1968 showed that 25 percent of people with a college education approved of a husband slapping a wife. Now, 25 percent may seem like a small fraction, but think about it: If 25 percent of highly educated people actively approve of slapping a wife, how many are willing to turn a blind eye, especially if it happens behind closed doors? Perhaps 75 percent? Maybe 90 percent?

The high approval ratings of physical violence were part of what made it hard to prosecute—many people simply didn’t have a problem with it as a social practice, because they felt it was necessary and normal to correct the behavior of women. And, of course, it happened behind closed doors, where no one could see it and no law could hope to regulate it.

Compounding and complicating the dual culture of shame and condonation around domestic violence, there was the logistical difficulty of doing anything through law enforcement or litigation to curb wife battery.

In 1972 and 1973—right when The Exorcist was filming – there were fourteen thousand complaints of wife battery in the Family Court system in New York City alone; the reported figure is estimated to be approximately 10 percent of the true total—140,000. Almost none of these 140,000 suspected instances of spousal battery were successfully prosecuted, and not only because so few of them were reported. The legal system routinely dismissed cases or ruled that the husband was well within his rights to do whatever act of violence he did to his wife.

It is worth noting that, until 1966 in the relatively liberal state of New York, it was not possible for a woman to obtain a divorce because of beatings and, even after 1966, she had to establish a “sufficient” pattern of physical battery.

Let me pause to emphasize that: in a liberal state, if a husband battered his wife once, it was not even grounds for divorce in 1966. In New York State in the 1960s, to get a divorce, let alone for criminal prosecution of her own abuser, which was entirely out of reach for most women, a woman had to establish habitual beatings.

So, given the amount of shame surrounding wife battery, given the hesitation of police to get involved, given the inadequacy of legal mechanisms for combating it, and, of course, given the social agnosticism about whether it should be classed as criminal behavior in the first place, how could American public and legal culture go about changing things?

What did change? First, there were scholarly conferences and studies in the works, many of which led to mass market book publications. Second, there was a rapidly exploding grassroots movement in the early and mid-1970s to support beaten women and help them escape violence, while also raising the consciousness of the average American about what intimate partner violence really was.

One of the books that spurred the rapid and public awakening about wife battery was Violence in the Family, published in 1974. This essay collection opens by targeting three “myths” it wanted to debunk: first, the “class myth,” which was that the physical battery of people within a family was a “working class phenomenon.” Second, “the sex myth,” that sexual drives were what produced violence toward women in the family. And third, the “catharsis myth,” namely, that the battery of wives and children was the outgrowth of normal male aggression. From there, the book argues that violence, while not normal or healthy, has its origins in pro-violence American culture and in families in which there are generational patterns of violence – that is, men who witnessed battery in their childhood homes are more likely to beat their wives and children.

Although these are truisms of twenty-first-century discourse around domestic abuse, they were revolutionary in 1974 because they suggested that intrafamilial violence was pathological, heritable, and linked with cultural patterns and mindsets that needed to evolve.

They suggested domestic violence was not something a woman was ever “asking for,” nor was it something for her to be ashamed of. It was an undesirable byproduct of cultural and intrafamilial dysfunction, and it was rooted in the violent psychology of the abusive male.

Meanwhile, grassroots organizations had begun opening women’s shelters—the first to appear in the United States—and circulating information in small-scale publications to help women understand their rights, and to help women make escape plans from abusers.

In 1974, one of the first battered women’s shelters opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1975, Abused Women’s Aid in Crisis was founded, an organization based in New York to help women exit violent marriages.

By 1978, the “We Will Not Be Beaten” movement had inspired the founding of more than 150 battered women’s shelters across the United States.

So, 1974 was a watershed year for women’s rights to safety and for anti-violence cultural awareness.

And in movie theaters across the country, with viewers watching Chris and Regan get brutalized, that awareness had begun to consolidate and to pick up momentum. You couldn’t see into your neighbors’ homes, but you could, thanks to the silver screen, see into Chris MacNeil’s home, and what you saw there would stop you dead in your tracks.

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November 19, 2025

domestic horror, female rage, feminism, horror movies, misogyny, patriarchy, scream with me

the exorcist – the horror of domestic imprisonment – cont.

the exorcist – the horror of domestic imprisonment