Reshaping the intensity of horror films
The Exorcist shocked a generation, It, Stephen King’s latest, is comparatively easygoing
Horror, like every other movie genre, comes in every style, every degree of blatancy. Sometimes we’re in the mood for the worst, because the times reek of disillusionment and moral rot. And other times, worse times, we yearn for some nice, scary comfort food.
The biggest-ever Stephen King movie adaptation recently set a record worth noting, and examining.
Recently, director Andy Muschietti’s “It,” set in Maine in the 1980s and full of nostalgic references to our pop culture past, broke the horror film box office record set by “The Exorcist,” which opened to long lines and sporadic incidents of vomiting on Dec. 26, 1973.
Nobody’s throwing up at “It,” now heading toward $500 million in worldwide gross receipts. (The film’s production budget was a relatively modest $35 million.) That makes “It” the most lucrative King movie to date, bigger than “The Green Mile,” and much, much bigger than my favourite, Brian De Palma’s adaptation of “Carrie.”
The dark fairy tale about Pennywise the killer, shape-shifting clown and the lovable “Losers’ Club” of bullied, isolated misfits now ranks, by many measurements, as the biggest R-rated horror title in movie history. (“Jaws” got a PG rating, and many argue that it isn’t a horror film, really.)
The caveat: Adjusted for inflation and in 2017 dollars, “The Exorcist” in its various domestic theatrical runs made a little over $1 billion. It was huge, in other words, as opposed to “It,” which is merely big.
The Exorcist’s influence on later generations of horror filmmakers can never be fully measured. That influence is largely pernicious, I think, and it opened the door to a new degree and marketability of screen cruelty. (Many thought the same about Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” back in 1960; I consider “Psycho” an achievement far, far above and beyond “The Exorcist.”)
Compare the blatancy of “The Exorcist” to the tamer but more suggestive nightmare Roman Polanski whipped up with “Rosemary’s Baby,” five years earlier. Polanski made a sly adult thriller that went just far enough. “The Exorcist” deliberately went too far, got away with it and redirected American popular culture in the process.
It was a solemn sort of gross-out. The “Exorcist” sensation of late 1973 and early 1974 culminated with 10 Academy Award nominations (it won two) including a first-ever best picture nomination for a horror movie. Certain sequences and individual shots, notably that of the possessed young girl (Linda Blair) stabbing herself in the privates with a crucifix and then rubbing the horrified face of her mother (Ellen Burstyn) in the blood, never would’ve gotten by with an R rating unless a stalwart such as Warner Brothers had its name above the title.
The Catholic iconography and rituals bought “The Exorcist” respectability, while it sold the opposite.
Most people, critics included, were too rattled by the shock effects to care. Roger Ebert admired “The Exorcist,” though with reservations (it rose in his estimation with the passing years). From his original 1973 review: “The film contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying . ... I am not sure exactly what reasons people will have for seeing this movie; surely enjoyment won’t be one, because what we get here aren’t the delicious chills of a Vincent Price thriller, but raw and painful experience. Are people so numb they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything at all?” The answer, in retrospect, was “yes.” Opening a few months before Richard Nixon’s resignation, “The Exorcist” felt like every malignant thought and half-processed rant millions of disillusioned Americans had about a craven, dishonest president on the way out. “It” works somewhat differently. It’s a comparatively easygoing opportunity for audiences of at least two separate generations to freak out over a vicious, malignant figure of fun, in a story that’s really more about the underdogs vanquishing that foe.
At the same time, “It” lets us take a vacation from our most conspicuous real-world clown for a couple of hours. I really do think that’s part of its broad appeal. Also, the movie’s new without being unfamiliar. Audiences who grew up with the 1990 TV movie version enjoy a little compare-and-contrast. People who held fond memories of “Stand by Me,” director Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s story, respond to the abused but unbowed adolescents running the show. For millions, “It” director Muschetti handles the blend of comedy and horror in a satisfying way.
And now a record has been broken. “The Exorcist” is now No. 2. I wonder: What sort of horror movie would it take to make a billion dollars in today’s dollars? A movie roughly twice as scary as “It”? Or a real-world context roughly twice as threatening?