Why ‘The Exorcist’ Still Haunts Us 50 Years Later
It’s a big year for the devil. The late William Friedkin’s gruesome masterpiece, The Exorcist, turns 50 in December. Earlier this October, the impresario of ill-conceived horror reboots, David Gordon Green, brought the franchise half-back to life with The Exorcist: Believer. Most excitingly, a new wave critical perspectives on the original film has begun to crest, and gliding high atop the pack is Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist by Marlena Williams.
Structured like a traditional Roman Catholic exorcism, the series of essays that comprise break fresh ground by weaving a trenchant analysis of “The Exorcist” and its fraught cultural context together with a searing personal reckoning. Just as Regan’s condemned soul and scarrified body haunt her mother, Williams revisits the shattering final months of her own mother’s life. Grief possesses Williams’s agile, edifying prose, but rather than weighing it down sets it aloft, propelling, from the racialized family fears of Nixon’s America it mined to the production’s death-haunted history. I sat down with Williams ahead of the release of to discuss why the world is still riveted by the film all these years later.
