It all started the day after the Christmas of 1973.

Islamic call to prayer at the beginning of the film threw America headlong into the first screening of William Friedkin's film The Exorcist. During the epic prologue, a Jesuit priest and archaeologist, Lancaster Merrin (Max von Sydow), finds a small head of the demon Pazuzu at excavations in northern Iraq, designed to fight the forces of evil, ie 'evil against evil'. statue. However, Merrin suspects that the demon has no intention of fighting or protecting anything.

The plot of the film moves to Georgetown in the United States, where XNUMX-year-old girl Regan (Linda Blair), daughter of the actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) begins to writhe in unexplained convulsions.

The doctors are helpless and so they start to think about the possibility that the girl is obsessed. After Regan commits murder, priest Damien Karras (Jason Miller) is called in to help. Convinced that he is struggling with a real demon possession, he asks the church for permission to exorcise. The church agrees and sends Merrin to help him, so they try to save the girl together. However, Merrin dies of heart failure during exorcism. Karras eventually manages to free the girl from the clutches of the demon, but only because he invites him into his own body. He jumps out of the girl's bedroom in the bedroom with all his might and falls on the stairs, where he soon dies.

The demon's manifestations were unprecedented at the time (and it must be said that they have not lost any of their horror). In a throaty, almost animal voice (Linda Blair was cursed by Mercedes McCambridge in these passages of the film - it is said that in order to achieve the desired color of the voice, the director forced her to eat raw eggs, drink hard alcohol and smoke a lot).

It is also interesting that in the original version of the film was only the voice of a child actress, but after several screenings and according to the audience, the creators decided that this was not the case, and remade the film with dubbing by McCambridge). Regan provokes various obscenities that were unparalleled in Hollywood until then.

Zvrát:

levituje:

turns his head by one hundred and eighty degrees:

masturbates with a crucifix:

and strangely walks the stairs:

Critics all over the world were horrified, while viewers were horrified. Although many of them collapsed during the screening of the film, they again lined up for tickets to see the film again. However, the film did not only evoke emotions in the cinema. In San Francisco, a mad pastor began exorcising demons, in Harlem, a priest was driving out drugs, and in Boston, a woman was missing from the stage at that moment, mumbling that it "cost her four dollars and only took twenty minutes."

By March 1974, more than six million tickets had been sold in the United States, and the film was ready to conquer the rest of the world. The Devil's Exorcist could be seen as a cleverly made film that set new, more liberal limits in Hollywood production. Nevertheless, the range of reactions suggests that the film - like William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel on which the film was based - hit a nail with its head. The exorcist touched on issues that were too lively for the world in 1973. It was no accident. It was not just a product of its time, the film sought timelessness. Like the carved head of the demon discovered in the prologue, the Exorcist depicted the struggle of evil against evil, or at least against what his creator, who was a conservative, practicing Catholic, had in mind.

In 1973, at a press conference, Warner Bros. announced that the story was based on a historical case. In August 1949, the Washington Post wrote that a boy from Mount Rainier in Maralynd had been freed from demonic forces through an exorcism ritual. It was an unusual step. The ceremony dating from 1614 was considered a remnant of the Dark Ages and did not correspond to the current understanding of mental illness. Interestingly, however, the boy's case was unusual. Speech in foreign languages ​​he never studied and spontaneous discovery of inscriptions and symbols all over his body. Newspapers became interested in the story because American society was in the throes of a crisis. America began to fear the growing power of communism. Not to mention espionage scandals and trade union strikes, which heightened fears of a communist enemy that had long since infiltrated the United States.

With such a foreign development, at least one reader has seen a glimmer of hope in successful exorcism. William Blatty, a young student at the University of Georgetown, saw obsession as proof of the existence of supernatural evil and success of exorcism as proof of the existence of supernatural good. Twenty years later, and with a new crisis, Blatty communicated his convictions to the public. Although he made a living as a successful comedy writer, he found that the genre limited him. He wrote The Exorcist and then produced it as a film to scare a new generation of Americans and bring them back to God, or church. Blatty made no secret of this goal. He nicknamed his novel Apostolic Work. Thirty years after its publication, he stated that he considered the fact that the book had become a bestseller to be a divine intervention, which secured him an invitation to Dick Cavett's show.

Blatty's novel explicitly depicts evil in modern times. At the beginning of the book we can read an example from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus confronts a demon, supplemented by a series of quotations referring to the present. These include an excerpt from an FBI wiretap in which a gangster tells jokes about torture and murder of people and a list of communist atrocities against priests, teachers and children from a letter from Dr. Tom Dooley, an American doctor who served in Vietnam, evoking the Nazi extermination of Jews in Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Dachau. In the middle of the book, there is again a mention of the actions of American soldiers, which again concern Vietnam.

At the end of 1969, the world learned that the US military had massacred about two hundred civilians in My Lai. The war turned into a perverted would-be industrial enterprise in which military units were rewarded according to the number of dead; as insurance sellers. And it was this aspect of the war that attracted Blatty's attention. The third part of the book concludes with an article from 1969, published in Newsweek: 'There was a competition between the military to kill a thousand Vietnamese in a luxurious residence of the colonel himself'.

The novel also mentions an event that many Americans consider to be the original sin of the modern era: the murder of JF Kennedy in 1963. Regan visits JFK's grave and the church in Georgetown, where Kennedy's marriage began and which is the scene of repulsive desecration.

Blatty tried to gather various manifestations of evil - crime, communism, genocide, war and murder - and the result was an Exorcist.

The offer to revive the devil Blatty was very interesting. At a press conference, Warner Bros. pointed to the forthcoming work of the German theologian Herbert Haag entitled Farewell to the Devil. However, it was not only the German theologian who longed to revive interest in evil. In November 1972, Pope Paul VI called on Catholics to return to the study of Satan: "Evil is not based on scarcity, but is an effective means, a living spiritual being, reveling in perversion and thwarting things." The film was supervised by two Jesuits: William O ' Malley (also played by Father Dyer, a friend of Karras) and Thomas Bermingham (played by the head of Georgetown University).

After its launch, the Exorcist received a mix of different ratings. Many squinted at the blasphemous blasphemy, child sexuality, and the raw presentation of evil. Reactions to the film were thus diverse, from the designation R (children under the age of seventeen only with an escort) to the cases of viewers who collapsed mentally or committed suicide after watching it. As a result, the film was condemned by a number of clerics, such as the Protestant Billy Graham. However, the Catholic News periodical came up with this headline: The Devil's Exorcist needs your attention, regardless of its language and style.