The Exorcist

Released: 1973
Horror
Director: William Friedkin
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair
Running Time: 122 minutes
Rated: R

The breakdown:  After exhausting all other medical methods, a desperate and scared mother tries the church to help her very disturbed daughter to feel better.


So, I know that this is on the top of a lot of scariest movies of all time lists.  I know there's so much talk about this movie and it's well respected in the horror community.  I guess, for these reasons, I was expecting a lot of the movie.  I expected at least to be scared once.

First off, if you haven't seen it, here's a quick rundown.
An actress is temporarily living in Washington D.C. shooting a movie.  She lives with two housekeepers, a personal assistant, and her 12 year old daughter, Regan.  The father is estranged for reasons never explained and lives in Europe.
Meanwhile,

A young priest is losing his faith after struggling to come to terms with his elderly mother's terminal illness.  He's been trained in psychology and used to be a boxer.  He's getting ready to possibly leave the church.
Meanwhile,

An elderly priest in Iraq is on an archaeological dig site.  While there, the team finds strange objects, but the most strange and focused on, is a small carved figurine, possibly resembling some ancient representation of the devil.
The elderly priest takes the figurine with him telling one of his associates he must do something and has to leave Iraq.  The figurine is never seen again, nor do we know what happens to it, or what, if any power it has.

Meanwhile, the actress' daughter is getting sicker and the mother is getting quite worried.  She begins taking the girl to all sorts of doctors, who can't find anything physically wrong with her.  Then they turn to psychologists for help.  After every medical possibility has been exhausted the medical team refers the actress to the church for an exorcism.

The actress' family is not religious but finds a cross under her daughter pillow in bed.  She asks everyone who put it there, but no one confesses.

The girl gets more and more ill, violent, and very dangerous.

The movie concludes with the big exorcism scene.

I can see why some people think this movie is super scary.  The idea of an innocent young child being turned into a deadly strong, mentally strained, physically abusive force is a terrible idea to live through for a parent.  Also for the religious, the idea of the devil himself taking over your child is also difficult to imagine, but for me, it wasn't so scary.

I thought some of the special effects were good.  The acting was solid, the story's essence was intriguing, but I think they left some of the things to be interpreted a bit too vague.  The statue in the desert and the small figurine was shown, but no connections were made, and nothing ever explained.

The cause of this particular girl's possession was never explained either.  Was she ever near the figurine?  How do those things connect?  Are they supposed to?  Does it have something to do with the house?  Who knows?

Overall, a good movie, but not the scariest of all time for me.
3 out of 5 stubs.