The Exorcist was one of the most profitable horror films ever made. It cost twelve million dollars to make, and it made well over one hundred million dollars in its first year of release. The film was on theater screens for more than two years. Moreover, it was the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture by the Academy Awards; it earned nine other nominations beside.
People were utterly captivated by this film: critics and casual filmgoers alike.
Roger Ebert gushed about the film: “The Exorcist is one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious efforts in the same direction as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.”
Some responses to the film—equally powerful—were not nearly so intellectual.
An article in the Times in January 1974 noted that “It’s been reported that once inside the theater, a number of moviegoers vomited at the very graphic goings-on on the screen. Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks, a guard told me. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said.”
People who saw this film responded with a profound physiological aversion.
They were sickened by it; they were harmed by it. They were broken open.
Theater officials reported that it was rare for a screening of the film not to end with at least one person fainting or vomiting. Countless audience members sought the support and reassurance of priests and clergy in the wake of seeing the film. This film made people feel things—too many things, and too intensely for many audience members to tolerate.
And yet they kept going back, for two years. What people who went to see the film again and again responded to most was the horrific supernatural dynamic of the horror that befalls Regan, and the salvific power of Father Damien, as representative of Catholic order.
The public, in-print response to the domestic violence in this film was muted, to say the least. But of course, not everything that happens in a culture makes it into print or explicit public consciousness—at least not right away.
What slowly filtered into American consciousness, with two years on the big screen, was the abuse that Chris and Regan suffered. Americans got to witness and imaginatively participate in the domestic torture of two women—a daughter and a mother—in a way they could witness, think about, and take home with them. People watched Chris transform from a powerful, stylish, assertive woman into a bruised, battered, beaten, terrified, and trapped domestic pawn.
Thousands and thousands of women, who were silently enduring regular beatings in their own homes, watched this externalization and literalization of their own experience, of being possessed, tortured, and abused, on the silver screen. They watched it in the theater, in public, in community with others. They looked around during the scenes where Chris gets beat up. They looked around during the scene where Chris appears in a scarf, a coat, and sunglasses. They thought about the possibility that this wasn’t just happening to Chris, but that there were countless other “demons” out there, inflicting crushing physical and sexual harm on the wives and daughters in their lives. They were registering, even subconsciously, that for many women, as for Chris in the film, “home” was not a safe space but a dangerous prison where no human authority could intervene on the woman’s behalf—not the police, not the doctors, no one. Only God and his ambassadors.
The Exorcist played a shaping role in American consciousness about domestic violence and sexual abuse, coming out, as it did, just before the massive uptick in protests against domestic violence and sexual abuse of women.
The film came out in the final days of 1973. Earlier in 1973, the Rainbow Retreat, the first shelter for women in the US, had opened in Arizona; in 1974, a second battered women’s shelter opened in California. In that same year, the aforementioned groundbreaking essay collection Violence in the Family was published.
In 1975, prominent feminist Del Martin started publishing her findings in major venues, like The New York Times, and in 1976 she published Battered Wives, arguably the single most influential popular press work on domestic violence up to that point. In 1975 the National Organization for Women formed a task force on domestic violence. In 1976, it was found that nearly two million American women were in situations of severe domestic battery. In 1975 and 1976, numerous articles ran in The New York Times about battered wives and the challenges they faced. These articles clamored for change at local, state, and federal levels; they demanded more resources, more shelters, changes of social consciousness. By contrast, between 1970 and 1972, The New York Times had run zero articles about the problem.
Although many of the books published in the mid- and late ’70s that helped guide reformist public policy were in the works before The Exorcist came out, and although there was some cultural and legal movement toward reform prior to 1973, it is equally clear that this film was reading the writing on the wall and screaming it at the top of its lungs: The sociocultural and legal sanctioning of domestic abuse needed to come to an end.
It’s one thing to read a powerful feminist study on the incidence of domestic battery in the United States; but watching Chris get terrorized, abused, beaten, and slowly broken, watching Regan transformed by a demonic male in their household from a healthy young girl to a bloody, brutalized creature, and watching their transformations on a huge screen, in a theater with scores of other people who were yelling their lungs out at the pain and suffering these women endured? That was something else entirely. Moreover, the sheer popularity and visibility of the film exceeded the popularity or visibility of any scholarly work or activist publication by orders of magnitude. We’re talking about a film that earned $193 million in its initial theatrical release-millions and millions of Americans saw this film. Both through its innate artistry and through its wide cultural reach, The Exorcist changed public awareness about domestic battery in a way that, I believe, the public couldn’t bounce back from.
I have interviewed a number of women who either watched The Exorcist in the theaters in 1973-75 or who have seen it since. Many of them commented that, for them, the most horrifying part of the film was watching Chris’s conversion from a powerful woman into a helpless victim. Many commented that the brutal violence directed toward her body and Regan’s body were the parts of the film that really frightened them. Some commented that the doctors were totally unsympathetic to Chris and didn’t help her enough with her situation. All commented on the entrapment and physical torture of mother and child. What male reviewers generally responded to – the Catholic crisis of faith, the male actors in the film—wasn’t central to the terror felt by women who watched this film in 1973 or now.
Women’s horror hangovers were and are tightly pinned to the domestic violence they witnessed onscreen.
As one woman I interviewed stated, “I recognize that demon. I lived with him, too.”
Perhaps more important, however, than its ability to speak to victims and survivors of domestic violence is that this film enabled men and women who had not lived with this demon to grasp some portion of what it might be like to be imprisoned by a sadistic torturer in your own home, with your own child.
This is what is so politically powerful about art, and about horror art in particular: It can make viewers feel their way into the action. It gathers up and performs human vulnerability in a way that is psychologically and physiologically participatory for audiences. It gives us that horror hangover so that we go home, having seen Regan and Chris ultimately escape the hell on earth of their domestic torture, but we go home feeling just a little less comfortable climbing into our beds at night, a little more aware that this whole notion of the domestic space as a safe place might just be a fiction.
Maybe this place that we’ve been taught to think of as a refuge is actually a place of peril.
hexafu 