Girls, Possessed

Hi! I’m back and it’s SPOOKY SEASON!

I love Halloween. I love all holidays. I enjoy nostalgia and Reese’s Pumpkins as much as the next gal in the HomeGoods checkout line. I also LOVE horror movies. Some of my faves are The Shining, Jennifer’s Body, the Alien franchise, It Follows, 10 Cloverfield Lane and anything that has to do with being in water (has shark, will watch).

I don’t know why I enjoy horrifying content so much. I think it’s because my mind already tends to ruminate on the dark and terrifying, so I like to experience those feelings in a way that’s controlled and involves popcorn. Basically, watching people get slashed by a masked villain on screen is a nice distraction from the voices in my head.

All of this is to say that when my friends asked me to see the new iteration of The Exorcist, I jumped at the chance.

The Exorcist: Believer is technically the sixth installment in the franchise, launched by the original smash hit that premiered in 1973. The original attracted huge crowds due to controversy surrounding its rating (which I learned from watching VH1’s I Love the '70s - why was I literally 11 years old watching a TV special that reminisces about gaucho pants and Shaft? I don’t know, I had nothing better to do. Until I got an AIM account and made a fake profile that was a hot girl so I could message all the boys in my homeroom and ask who they had a crush on). Anyways, multiple audience members fainted and vomited in response to the film’s “shocking” content, and cities wanted it banned from theaters, claiming it should be rated X.

In the original Exorcist, actress Chris MacNeil begins noticing strange behavior in her 12-year old daughter Regan, who is initially presented as an innocent little girl who just wants a pony and a father figure! Ultimately, with the help of the Catholic church, Chris discovers Regan is possessed by the devil!

The film, despite being pro-Catholic propaganda, is truly from a different time and therefore can be viewed as campy and creepy with an iconic score. Plus, 1970s Catholicism is a stunning aesthetic, and the priests are hot and kind of fun. They all live in a dorm together and drink, smoke, make existential jokes and sing songs.

I expected that The Exorcist: Believer, remade for a 2023 audience, would have all the fun of the first with less sexism or at LEAST less pro-Catholicism, given… everything…? I’m also a fan of David Gordon Greene’s Halloween remakes, so I was pumped to see this!

The new film (written, directed and produced by men) focuses on photographer Victor Fielding who is raising his teen daughter Angela alone after his wife died in an earthquake. Angela has a best friend named Katherine, and one day they both run into the woods after school to perform a seance, which goes awry (classic seance move). The girls disappear for three days and you better BELIEVE when they return, something’s a bit off!!! These girls are not right!

There’s a scene when the girls first return home that hinted this remake may be taking the girls’ experiences more into account than the original did, maybe even treating them like human characters! Both girls are in medical exam rooms with their fathers when the doctors begin examining them for signs of sexual abuse, assuming they may have been abducted. The focus of this scene shifts more to the POV of the fathers who are haunted by the idea of their daughters being violated. One father (Victor) stays in the room and holds Angela, but Katherine’s christian father leaves her alone because he can’t handle his discomfort. Interesting to explore how toxic masculine standards prevent men from being emotionally present with their daughters! Okay, I’M WITH YOU! But then they started doing weird stuff demonizing periods and abortions. Come on, guys!

Much like Carrie, the seventies Exorcist is soaked in men’s fear of young girls and what happens when they become women. Carrie gets her witch powers right when she gets her period and becomes fatally dangerous to the world. Regan’s devil possession manifests in horrifying exaggerations of puberty - rotten body odor, mood swings and the sudden urge to be sexual. I won’t go into details but soooooooo much of the horror in the original Exorcist centers on Regan performing or describing sexual acts, often involving violence. And in the end, Regan can only be saved by a religion that designates women as either sexless baby vessels or naked whores who can’t resist forbidden fruit despite the danger of eternal damnation.

I wanted the updated Exorcist to change the narrative, but Believer’s villain is still teen girlhood and its savior comes in the form of Ann Dowd playing a pious, wannabe Nun who was kicked out of the novitiate because she had to get an abortion but it’s okay, don’t worry, her abortion had a purpose and is thus box office friendly! Because in the end it inspires her to help the families of the two possessed girls begin the exorcism process.

In the lead-up to the exorcism itself, one of the possessed girls’ fathers posits their whole disappearance into the woods could have been caused by “hormones”. Mid-possession, one of the girls is hospitalized and her hospital bed suddenly fills with blood, evoking the idea of menstruation in a scene that is meant to strike horror in the audience. The demonic sexualization of the girls also continues in this film. It felt like yet another attempt by men to write from an understanding perspective about girls, without having reflected on why/how society has conditioned them to be terrified of us.

I understand where these men are coming from. Teen girls ARE dangerous! They’re out here making fake AIM accounts to trick boys into confessing their crushes! And it must be scary and confusing to interact with, witness or raise girls when you’ve never been taught to understand them as nuanced human beings.

It would be terrifying to believe that little girls are PURE and PERFECT and FRAGILE and must be PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS from men like yourself, but to also be told that young women are HOT and BARELY LEGAL, but then if they’re too young YOU’RE A MONSTER IF YOU GET CLOSE TO THEM but then also adult women’s vaginas are only sexy when they’re CHILDLIKE but DON’T THINK ABOUT IT THAT WAY and DEFINITELY DON’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING GAY and also … to have no one to talk to about any of that? Because if men do, they risk appearing less masculine and masculinity is a currency more valuable than gold?

So, girls are left with the onus of reflection, in the veiled chaos of male fear, anger and desire that surrounds us. We still have to become ourselves, to discover that we want more than a pony but less than eternal damnation, and to accept our complicated, angry, sad, happy, horny, and often nameless feelings.

In other words, I’m saying justice for Angela and Katherine and Sister Ann Dowd, and especially for Regan, in whom I can (almost too easily) see myself…..