More than any movie we’ve seen so far this semester, The Exorcist relies on the explicit permeability of the body. A demon possesses Regan; she loses bladder control; puss oozes out of facial wounds; writing erupts on her torso; blood pours from her mouth while she spider-walks down the stairs; she attacks herself sexually with a crucifix. Even statuary is turned bloody and pornographic in the film. In what way do you think viewers react differently to this kind of intense body horror than they do to other kinds of horror-inducing techniques that we’ve discussed?
12 thoughts on “Exorcist 2–Body Horror and Grossout”
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In this movie it’s unusual to see a 12-year-old girl committing self-harm and acting so grossly. In a way once she was being controlled by the devil and had so many scars and her voiced changed i honestly had forgotten I was viewing a 12-year-old. In my mind when she’s interacting with the mother and father Karras, I viewed her as a 20-year-old male with the voice and the scars on her face that made her seem this way. Throughout the movie however i noticed she was in fact a 12-year-old making these scenes seem even crazier and making her self harm harder to watch. In this case i would say it’s easier to watch someone who I’ve identified as an adult and especially male committing these acts. Maybe it’s because men tend to have a closer connection to barbaric acts? Even to those who view movies with a similar atmosphere to the Exorcist and have high tolerances for viewing such content without being disturbed, I bet were at least shocked to see a little girl doing non-little girl things. This movie however unlike chainsaw massacre i felt utilized essentially no jumps care tactics nor any loud or abrupt music tactics to induce fear and suspense. I can’t honestly say i felt scared and horrified but rather disturbed and interested in the plot.
I think this type of body horror is particularly disturbing because it isn’t simplified like other movies. It’s not the classic more blood equals more gore which equals more scare. It distorts the body in ways that are hard to even imagine, let alone watch. The gore also being linked to Christianity makes it even more disturbing, because the source of terror is something that is fairly unknown and abstract. What makes this gore different is that it is hard for the reader to understand the reasoning and execution of the gore.
The body horror component of The Exorcist made an impression on me as it didn’t center around death but about the distortion and decay of Regan’s body while still keeping it alive. As we discussed in class, it doesn’t seem that death is the biggest threat in the movie. Although many characters die by the movie’s end, their deaths aren’t dragged out or anticipated. The grossness of twisting Regan’s body parts beyond what’s physically possible provokes a scatological fear that comes from within rather than something external. When I think about how I’m often scared, I can think of outside and internal fears. Outside fears might come from the environment (like a chase or a dangerous setting) and trigger an evolutionary flight or fight response; these fears are often very situational, and although scary, once the threat is gone, the emotional response often fades away. This is the case for movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the characters are put in a dangerous external, life-threatening scenario. The internal fear that The Exorcist portrays evokes a similar fear that sickness might cause. Since we all share the universal experience of having a body, we all relate to the fear of our body failing us and behaving in ways that is harmful to us. Seeing Regan’s body twist and spew vomit is inherently unpleasant and creates a lingering fear akin to the feeling you get when you feel your body behaves in ways that it is not supposed to, like encountering a lump somewhere or feeling a parasite inside you. The “scariness” from this is less momentaneous and more of a constant feeling of lingering uncomfortably. Body horror takes this to an extreme by reconfiguring the human body into something “other” than human. This culminates in the final scenes of the film, as Regan doesn’t even feel human anymore for the viewer, falling somewhere in the uncanny valley, in the strange realm between being human and not.
I think that body horror is so striking because its something that we can relate to so strongly. There are few sensations we understand as deeply as feelings in our own body, and while a lot of us have never been shot, stabbed, or had limbs cut off like in the other films we watched, its easier for us to imagine the pain that we see in the exorcist. While what we see in the movie also doesn’t happen commonly in real life, we can understand the feeling of your limbs twisting the wrong way and imagine that pain, and because of this it brings us closer to the character. Regan is 12 years old, and that vulnerability creates more horror for us as we are not just afraid that she will die, but how she will continue living after going through all of this.
Typical horror methods we’ve discussed so far are focused more on fear and anxiety involving an inevitable death. The exorcist doesn’t really make you fear death at all, it instead makes you fear what happens next because it’s so shocking and unexpected. We went from an overwhelming number of physical beings murdering others for various reasons to a supernatural entity inflicting harm for no reason other than to cause mischief. I think viewers react much more physically with The Exorcist than with the other movies we’ve discussed. The content of the film is mostly body horror and is so disgusting that it makes you feel it. Your skin starts to crawl, you may even start to feel ill, and you feel like you don’t have complete control of your body. You can no longer just sit and watch the film. Also, I think that because The Exorcist is much more religious, vulgar, sexual, and overall inappropriate, it’s safe to say that audiences were much more offended by it than the other films we’ve discussed.
I completely agree. Unlike in other films, where death is the main fear of the characters, The Exorcist makes you fear the process of dying. It is far too creative with the ways in which the characters can be tortured without actually dying, making the viewer realize that the process of death can be far more painful than death itself.
While many films we’ve watched this semester rely on feelings of uncertainty to evoke horror, The Exorcist creates fear through explicit images of bodily violation. Viewers respond to this intense body horror with visceral and almost instinctual reactions – graphic scenes of oozing wounds, uncontrollable bodily functions, and self-inflicted harm elicit deep feelings of discomfort, disgust, and even physical revulsion. These unsettling images push viewers to confront Regan MacNeil’s vulnerability, forcing them to empathize with her loss of bodily autonomy and the invasion of her physical self. The horror in this film feels personal, as it compels viewers to imagine similar vulnerabilities within their own bodies. While earlier films we’ve watched utilized monstrous beings that can be avoided, The Exorcist turns horror into a personal problem of one’s mind and body – destroying the separation between on-screen terror and the audience. In this sense horror in this film is not simply something observed, but something felt intimate.
The Exorcist is a different type of horror film because it’s more of a gory film that focuses on the supernatural aspect of the world. During this time, horror films focused on slasher killers such as Halloween and Texas Chainsaw, but not on the supernatural world. The Exorcist introduces a new world of demons and evil spirits to the audience. The exorcist is more noticeable when it comes to it’s intense and bloody scenes; the director doesn’t hide it. For instance, most slasher films at this time do not show us scenes where we see the bloodiness of the victims or them killed and murdered; it tends to get cut off. However, in The Exorcist it doesn’t, nor does it try; it full on shows the horror and intensive scenes that children can’t watch, leaving the audience horrified and surprised.
For the audience, I think the disgust and the repulsion to the film is greater than the fear and the suspense/anxiety that a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspires. The body horror in this film and the “self” infliction of a lot of the violence displayed in this movie distinguishes it from the other films. The image itself of a little girl mutilating herself with the crucifix as a means of masturbating, and the decay of her body which is not due to any real ailments, but is the intentional doing of the demon inside of her (as suggested by her appearing less green and puss-ly after the demon possesses Father Karrass).
Furthermore, the gore is also a lot less “heroic” violence; what I mean by this is that it isn’t inflicted by a sword-like object or the many knives and subversively phallic objects from before. In my opinion the gore is unlike that of other movies because it isn’t the type of bloodshed we view as an honorable effect of surviving the enemy. The “gore” is her neon green vomit, a bodily fluid not as easy to look at as blood, repulsive in it’s essence, similar to the puss seeping from her face every time we get a shot of Reagan’s face; it’s the self inflicted wounds that bleed from her vagina – eliciting images of period blood, a less glorious blood, a type of bloodshed that is not heroic/honorable because you didn’t “fight” for it. The use of the crucifix not as a subversively phallic killing mechanism, but instead a literal phallic object used repeatedly on screen caused me (and I imagine others) to recoil in the way that the trowel scene in Night of the Living Dead didn’t.
The Exorcists’s body horror is different from all of the other films we have watched thus far because it is far more visible and attached to the victim. In The Night of the Living Dead, there is body horror, but it is seen mostly after a victim is dead (such as when the zombies eat the body pieces of the young couple). Alternatively, the camera cuts allow you to imagine the body horror that is occurring but does not explicitly show it. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is excellent at alluding to violence without showing too much of it. There is violence, but there are always shadows or camera cuts to allow the viewer to imagine but not truly see the blood and gore that is going on. When Leatherface is cutting up one of the men with his chainsaw, the body is dark and the camera mostly focuses on his girlfriend’s reaction. The body horror in the Exorcist is explicit, in front of the camera, and it is what is happening to who. For a lack of a better word, the body horror is literally attached to Regan as she is slowly decaying with the demon inside of her. We can clearly see blood pour out with her mouth, see her projectile vomit, see her head spin, and see her stab herself with the crucifix.
Because of how in your face the horror is, I can image that most audiences were much more horrified and shocked to see it on screen. It is one thing to imagine it, and another to see it in a way that was not typical of the times. It is easier to be scared when you are left to imagine what is happening, and it is easier to be taken aback in horror when something is fully shown. While what happens on screen is frightening, I imagine that for many, surprise and disgust overwhelmed any feelings of fright.
I think that employing body horror as the primary means of discomfort really changes the feeling you get as a viewer. This perhaps changes by the person, but for me it feels like distortions of the body create a different, more visceral sense of the uncanny.
The monster is not in pursuit of humans, but instead in control of one, distorting the girl, and briefly the priest into something beyond humanity. Grotesque would be the word I’d use to describe the overall feeling of the movie. I guess sacrilegious works as well if not better. The grossness of the movie employed with clearly advancing special effects stood in for total need for clarity, or even a ton of suspense.
I don’t think that the overall pacing of the movie was as good as something like Texas Chainsaw, and I don’t enjoy the metaphors and symbolism as much, but the Exorcist was upsetting and hard to watch without a doubt. The connections to the devil move the discomfort’s power beyond the physical, relying on oftentimes deeply ingrained religious feelings to amplify the horror we see inflicted on the physical body. That this possession may occur, and that demonic entities may exist, was probably an especially effective mechanism during the time that the film was released. I think it still is, though I would not watch this movie again and would not say I enjoyed it.
This film seems to take the entire notion of body horror and elevates it to level 100. It at some points feels like simply body horror for the sake of body horror, to elicit immense shock in the theater, but there are so many elements that contribute to the horror here that audiences are bound to react differently. This movie has visuals that you can’t bear to look at but you also can’t bear to look away because it’s like nothing ever shown on film before. All the horror aspects seem to present a challenge to Christianity and conservatism, so it is likely audiences didn’t fully know how to react. The Exorcist is not exactly the next step that would be expected after films like Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it seems to be a full out assault on horror audiences, incorporating excruciating amounts of body horror that is fully reliant on the grotesque. The movie is also very sexual at times, and to associate that so heavily with Catholicism is bound to elicit striking responses that are all new. This was also an exhibition of full, on screen violence and gore, which other movies up to this point have shied away from.