The Enduring Legacy of The Exorcist: A Film’s Deep Impact on Fear, Motherhood, and Loss
A woman is startled awake by a loud sound. She pulls on a robe and rushes down the hall to the room where her daughter rests. She finds the girl sleeping peacefully, but all is not as it was. The window is open, frigid air blowing in. Light from the streetlamp below streams in. The drapes flap in the breeze. The sheets on the bed have been yanked down, leaving her daughter’s prone body exposed to the cold. Strange, the mother thinks, but nothing more. She closes the window and rewraps the covers tightly around her sleeping child. She kisses her forehead, tells her she loves her, and tiptoes out of the room. This iconic scene, unsettling in its mundane yet eerie details, is just one moment from the classic horror film, The Exorcist, a movie that has terrified audiences for decades and left an indelible mark on popular culture. Beyond its infamous special effects and shocking sequences, The Exorcist delves into deeper themes of faith, family, and the nature of evil, resonating with viewers on a profoundly personal level, often reflecting their own fears and experiences, particularly those related to loss and the complex bond between a mother and daughter.
A Mother’s Silent Stories and a Film’s Lingering Echo
Some mothers are reserved, sharing little of their past. Stories from their lives, like hazy memories, become fragmented recollections for their children. Raised on a farm in a small Oregon town, the author’s mother played high school volleyball until a knee injury left a long scar. She appears in old photos, smiling by lakes surrounded by fir trees. Even years after her death, these shards of narrative remain, pieces sought after to build a whole picture. Yet, one story stands out, crystal clear: the one about her mother and The Exorcist.
When The Exorcist, a film centered on the possession and eventual exorcism of 12-year-old Regan MacNeil, premiered in December 1973, the author’s grandmother, Marlene, forbade her 14-year-old mother from seeing it. Marlene, a devoutly religious, chain-smoking woman who swore like a sailor, saw the film not just as blasphemous but dangerous—a potential corruptor of the mind and soul. For Marlene, a conservative Catholic in rural Oregon, it was a simple rule: Don’t talk to strangers, don’t cross the street without looking, and don’t watch The Exorcist.
Marlene’s fears weren’t entirely unfounded. Weeks after the film’s release, reports surfaced of increased requests for exorcisms. News broadcasts were filled with accounts of filmgoers fainting, vomiting, suffering heart attacks or miscarriages, and leaving theaters shaking and screaming. Incidents included a man throwing himself at the screen and several women reportedly needing psychiatric care after viewing it. The film was even banned in West Germany after a teenager’s suicide was linked to it, and a highly publicized inquest in England connected a boy’s death to the film, even when it was later revealed he died from an epileptic attack. The public suspicion lingered. In the U.S., the film resonated deeply with a nation grappling with the cultural upheaval of the previous decade, leading to increased paranoia about youth safety and morals. Johnny Carson famously warned his viewers before interviewing screenwriter William Peter Blatty that children under fifteen shouldn’t see the film.
The Secret Viewing and Its Haunting Aftermath
Defying her mother’s strict rule, the author’s mother saw The Exorcist anyway. One cold Friday night, she snuck out her bedroom window, crawled across the roof, and climbed down a tree to meet a friend waiting in a car. They drove to the town’s small, dingy cinema and paid three dollars to see the movie stirring national hysteria. “It was the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life,” she would later recount. “I wanted to scream and run out of the theater, but I couldn’t move. The whole placed seemed colder than normal. My breath just hovered in the air. I swear to God there was something else in that room, sitting there with all of us. I could feel it.”
After seeing The Exorcist, she lay awake each night, staring at the ceiling, terrified the devil would rush into her body. Night after sleepless night, pale-faced and red-eyed, she sat at the breakfast table, unable to eat, haunted by the image of the little girl Regan (played by Linda Blair) and the horrifying things she was forced to say and do. She thought of how Regan snarled and barked like a feral dog, and how the worse her condition became, the further everyone, even her own mother, pulled away.
Marlene, sitting across from her, eyed her daughter with stony suspicion. Without needing to be told, she knew—the way mothers often do. After a week of sleepless nights, the mother finally drifted off. Marlene crept into her room, leaned close, and whispered, “Mary, did you go see The Exorcist last Friday night?” A pause, sensing looming punishment, before the dull drone response, “Yes, Mother. I did.” Marlene nodded, grinning with satisfaction. “Good,” she said. “Very good. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
The next morning, Marlene confronted her, mentioning their “interesting conversation” the night before. The author’s mother collapsed in tears, promising confession, wearing a crucifix, and saying the rosary nightly—anything to rid herself of the horrifying movie images. Marlene held her daughter, rubbing her back and running fingers through her hair. “It’s just a movie,” she whispered. “Everything will be okay.” To her daughter’s surprise, Marlene didn’t drag her to a priest or confine her. Seeing The Exorcist and living with its images imprinted on her mind seemed punishment enough.
More Than Just Shock: Cultural Anxiety and the Mother-Daughter Core
While the pea-green vomit, spinning head, and desecrated crucifix were the most attention-grabbing and traumatizing elements of The Exorcist for the author’s mother and many viewers in 1973, these were not the only unsettling aspects. Set against the heated backdrop of the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe v. Wade, Regan’s mother, Chris MacNeil (played by Ellen Burstyn), was also controversial. A single, divorced actress with short hair and a sharp temper, Chris embodied a challenge to traditional American ideals of female domesticity and passive motherhood. Earning enough to rent a beautiful Georgetown house, employing staff, and living an unconventional life of red carpets and trips to Europe, she represented the privileged second-wave feminist. Crucially, she didn’t believe in God and only turned to the Catholic Church after medical and psychological solutions failed.
The Exorcist can be interpreted as a cautionary tale for women like Chris who ventured beyond male control. By horror-movie logic, a female-led household, much like in the adaptation of Carrie (1976), is inherently more vulnerable to invasion by external evil than a home with a strong male figure. Chaos and moral disorder ensue, only to be restored by the intervention of Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who sacrifice themselves to save the “wayward” females. Yet, paradoxically, for a film seeming to express fear of female independence, The Exorcist was unusual for its time in foregrounding strong female characters. A single woman and her adolescent daughter have significant roles and ample screen time, and the film passes the Bechdel Test. Gore, profanity, and chilling horror aside, at its heart, The Exorcist is a story about a mother and a daughter. It’s a notable piece within the landscape of hollywood movies.
Early scenes in The Exorcist carefully depict the intense love between Chris and Regan: playful wrestling, shared jokes about horses and board games, Chris tucking Regan in and whispering “I love you.” Without these moments of intimacy and warmth, the later horror—Regan self-harming with a crucifix, assaulting her mother, growling “Eat me”—would lack its profound shock value. The film brilliantly dramatizes their close bond before brutally exaggerating its decline, showing how deep love can curdle into hate, and how attachment and dissolution can coexist.
Beyond the political and social anxieties of 1970s America, The Exorcist taps into a primal fear: the daughter will reject the mother, the mother will fear the daughter. The relationship is shadowed by the specter of betrayal and loss. As Adrienne Rich noted, “The loss of daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.” Yet, Chris and Regan’s relationship also holds the promise of redemption. At the end, there’s the unfulfilled promise of mothers and daughters: the daughter, waking from a nightmare, calls for her mother, who, though hesitant, rushes to embrace her, everything forgiven. This theme echoes in other horror narratives exploring vulnerable figures, such as the innocents.
Loss, Fear, and Finding Connection Through Horror
The author’s mother left her hometown four years after seeing The Exorcist, attended college, experienced loss, became a nurse in Portland, and married at thirty. Two years later, her own mother, Marlene, died of brain cancer. A year after grieving Marlene, the author was born. And, like her mother before her, the author’s mother forbade her from seeing The Exorcist long before it was even a plausible option. It was just one of life’s simple rules.
At eight years old, the author caught a glimpse of The Exorcist while watching TV with her mother: a little girl in a nightgown crawling down a staircase backward, her mother looking on in horror. The screen went black—her mother had the remote. Her mother’s hair was just growing back after treatment for the cancer that had killed her own mother less than a decade prior. This brief flash, likely a trailer for the twentieth-anniversary re-release featuring the infamous “spider walk” scene cut from the 1973 original, terrified the author. It terrified her mother too, as if the horror from her own youth had followed her into the twenty-first century.
Fear, like disease, can mutate and spread. When The Exorcist terrified her mother at fourteen, she may have seen in it the looming threat of her own monstrousness or failures. When she saw those brief scenes as a mother herself, perhaps she feared the possibility that the person she loved most might one day hate or destroy her. “It’s just a movie,” her mother repeated as the author cried in her arms, pressing her lips to her forehead and rubbing her back, just as Marlene had done for her.
The author didn’t sleep that night, or many nights thereafter, staring out her door crack at the staircase, waiting for the little girl. She feared the girl, but also feared becoming her. Having seen the darkness her mother warned about, she was convinced some latent evil within her would be unleashed, leaving her helpless. She saw herself as pre-possessed, a body awaiting destruction.
The Exorcist is notably haunted by dead mothers; both director William Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty were reportedly obsessed with their mothers, who died shortly before production. Friedkin described his mother, a Ukrainian refugee who became an operating room nurse, as “a saint.” Blatty was raised in “comfortable destitution” by a deeply religious single mother. During filming, Blatty was not only concerned with the film’s perceived lack of religiosity but also attempted electronic communication with his dead mother, recording what he believed were disembodied voices. On one tape, his voice can reportedly be heard whispering, “Mother. Mother. If you are there, come.” The film’s exploration of complex, often strained family dynamics finds echoes in various horror subgenres, including films like the unholy which delve into similar supernatural themes impacting individuals and families.
At age fourteen, the author became foul-mouthed and sullen, prone to angry outbursts and isolating herself. She and her mother fought often, alternating between screaming matches and icy silence. When her mother’s cancer returned, it didn’t soften her but terrified and confused her. The family saw her anger and isolation not as adolescent angst but as something hateful and cruel. Her mother would say, “If only I could film you right now, you’d be ashamed.” The author felt she was becoming the loathsome girl she swore never to be. She dismissed religion, leaving crucifixes from her mother tangled in a drawer, knowing even then that part of her was pushing her mother away to make the eventual loss easier.
She left home after high school for Spain, returning for Christmas six months later to find her mother’s hair thin, her arm bloated—a new tumor blocking blood flow. Within three months, she was gone. Her death became a great divide. She saw cancer as a kind of possession: an evil invading and corrupting the body from within. Even when trying to heed Susan Sontag’s warning against finding metaphors in illness, this one stuck. It made sense. She no longer feared the devil’s possession, but this new invasion, one no priest could save you from. She saw herself as precancerous, simply waiting, hoping in secret that this shared vulnerability to illness might, at last, bring her closer to her mother.
The author finally saw The Exorcist in its entirety five years after her mother died, at a screening of an original 1973 print. The theater was cold and less than half full. Like her mother had said, she felt something else in the room, but this time she wasn’t afraid. She watched the film from start to finish, amazed, her eyes welling up during the final exorcism scene, that moment when the mother and daughter hold each other.
After that night, she watched The Exorcist obsessively, seeing it as a way to connect to her mother, to the versions of her she never knew, a means of understanding someone she had lost in ways she had forgotten to care about while she was alive. She accepted the film, with all its problems, as part of herself, perhaps a larger part than it was of her mother, and she didn’t mind. Watching it was a way of calling her forth, of keeping her close. Mother, mother, she whispers with each passing frame. If you are there, come.
(Note: The original article includes an author bio and a call to subscribe to The Yale Review. These are specific to the original publication and are not included in this recreation for Shock Naue Entertainment News, which focuses solely on the article content as requested.)
