Exorcist 1973 Filmyzilla
Socorro Henson
The Exorcist S01E08: I wondered earlier if the series had shifted the timeline of the original 1973 film at all, given that the series premiered in 2016 and it posits that Regan MacNeil, the 12-year-old girl from the original film, is now the mother of teenaged girls.
Two days ago, I wrote about the original movie. Yesterday, I wrote about the first two sequels and the first two prequels. Now, I\u2019m going to write about the TV spin-off version of The Exorcist, which aired on the Fox network just a few years ago.
I wasn\u2019t really much of a TV watcher when the show first aired, but Covid changed all that. Stuck at home with time to kill, and with very few new movies to watch, I started to catch up on a number of the critically-acclaimed shows I\u2019d heard about (The Leftovers, Hannibal, Watchmen, Black Mirror, etc.). I also started to watch some shows that were not so acclaimed. And somewhere along the way, I noticed that the Exorcist TV series was on Netflix, and since I\u2019d always been interested in the movies\u2026
I wasn\u2019t planning to review the series, but I did find a few episodes just stimulating enough to write about them on my private Facebook page. Now, with a new Exorcist movie coming out today, I figured I\u2019d re-post those comments here at Substack.
The Exorcist S01E01: One of the advantages of feature film is that you can tell an entire story in one sitting and, thus, set your own pace. But stretching a story over multiple episodes means breaking the story down into chunks that end on episode-ending cliffhangers, and\u2014if you\u2019re writing the show for an ad-supported network\u2014breaking each episode down into even smaller chunks that end on even smaller cliffhangers.
And so, whereas the 1973 movie The Exorcist was able to build its characters and build up suspense for quite some time, the 2016 TV series has to accelerate things. In the movie, the mother doesn\u2019t meet the priest and tell him her daughter is possessed until 74 minutes in\u2014until the movie is more than half over\u2014but there are ten episodes in the first season of the series, and the writers obviously can\u2019t stretch out the girl\u2019s diagnosis for a full five or six episodes. And so, in the series, the mother is asking for help only 18 minutes in. And the entire season has a total runtime of 413 minutes!
Maybe this series will go the Hannibal route and have multiple exorcisms per season, the way Hannibal had multiple taxidermically- and/or cannibalistically-inclined serial killers. That\u2019s going to get awful repetitive, though. But what\u2019s the alternative? Stretching out a single person\u2019s exorcism over an entire season? I guess I\u2019ll find out soon enough.
And yes, I did notice the brief glimpse of the website that mentions the events of the 1973 film. So this series doesn\u2019t waste any time establishing that it\u2019s in the same universe as that movie, on some level. I gather that there will be even more direct connections down the road, but I\u2019ll wait and see what they are.
Brief interjection: I\u2019m referring, here, to the fact that this episode reveals that Angela Rance (the mom played by Geena Davis) is actually Regan MacNeil, the girl who was possessed in the original film and is now a middle-aged woman.
Sharon Gless is 11 years younger than Ellen Burstyn, so I\u2019m not sure about the timeline here... but Geena Davis is three years (and one day!) older than Linda Blair, so that kinda checks out, at least. (Burstyn is 26 years older than Blair, but Gless is less than 13 years older than Davis, which is silly.)
The question is whether Gless is supposed to be playing older than her age or Davis is supposed to be playing younger than her age. Given that Davis was 60 when the series premiered and she\u2019s playing the mother of teenaged girls... I\u2019m inclined to say Davis is playing younger, which would mean the timeline has been shifted so that the original movie must have taken place maybe a decade after it came out.
(Alan Ruck, who plays Davis\u2019s husband and the father of their girls, is almost exactly the same age as Davis\u2014just a few months younger, actually. Which shocks me, frankly, as it means he turned 30 the year Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off came out\u2014i.e. he turned 30 the year he became famous for playing a high-school student. Actors in their early 20s playing high-schoolers, I get. Actors who are almost 30, though...? And I thought 27-year-old Tom Cruise was stretching things by playing his character as a teenager in the early scenes of Born on the Fourth of July...)
In that episode, Angela/Regan said she changed her name after her mother exploited their story by writing a famous book about their ordeal. But the mother\u2019s actions, as reported, sounded completely out of character to me, because the film made a point of showing how embarrassed she was by her daughter\u2019s situation, and how she tried to keep it secret.
This episode fills in a little more back-story, and reveals that the mother, a Hollywood actress, was dropped by her movie studio after the possession became a \u201Cscandal\u201D, and she wrote the book because she had no money and she needed to make an income somehow...
That explanation seems somewhat plausible to me, so, okay, I\u2019ll go with it. Though I\u2019m curious as to how the possession became a scandal. I guess when you\u2019re a famous movie star and a priest goes flying out your window to his death, it makes sense that eventually someone would snoop around and figure something out, though it would have been easier to keep stories like this suppressed in those pre-internet days.
Incidentally, we get a glimpse of some late \u201970s (or early \u201980s?) talk show that the MacNeils appeared on to promote the book, and the 16-year-old actress they got to play the young Regan (someone named Sophie Thatcher) is very believable as a young Geena Davis.
Also, it\u2019s funny to see that the Exorcist franchise has now contradicted the Linda-Blair-sequel part of 1977\u2019s Exorcist II: The Heretic, just as 2004\u2019s Exorcist: The Beginning and 2005\u2019s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist contradicted the Max-von-Sydow-prequel part of Exorcist II. (1990\u2019s The Exorcist III ignored Exorcist II, as it followed the trajectory of a completely different character from the original film, but I don\u2019t think it contradicted Exorcist II, per se.)
If Regan was truly 43 years older now, then it would mean her daughters were born when she was in her late 30s\u2014which is not impossible, but could be perhaps a bit of a stretch, and in any case, Sharon Gless, the actress playing Regan\u2019s mother in this series, is only 12-and-a-half years older than Geena Davis, the actress playing the older Regan. So obviously either Gless was playing older than her age or Davis was playing younger. (Actually, Davis is playing younger than her age in any case, as she was almost 18 when the 1973 film came out.)
However, just to complicate things a wee bit, young Regan is played once again by Sophie Thatcher, who played young Regan in an earlier episode, in a clip of an interview that she and her mom did to promote a book about the events of the first movie. Thatcher was around 16 when these episodes were shot, which was fine in the earlier episode\u2014it can take a few years to write and publish a book, especially if one doesn\u2019t write it until after one\u2019s existing career has fallen apart\u2014but it makes her a few years older than the 12-year-old character she\u2019s playing in this episode. (Four years can make a huge difference in one\u2019s early to mid teens. Just look at how Linda Blair grew between 1973\u2019s The Exorcist and 1977\u2019s Exorcist II: The Heretic.)
But hey, I can roll with it, for the purposes of this series. The age gap is a minor thing compared to the need for continuity\u2014the need to feel an emotional connection to the character between episodes\u2014and I do marvel, once again, at how perfectly cast Thatcher is as a young Davis.
Beyond that: It was hinted very early on that this series was going to take the franchise into newer, larger territory, as apparently the Pope (a fictitious liberal Francis-type character) is planning to come to Chicago. The last few episodes have revealed that members of the Catholic hierarchy within Chicago (and elsewhere) are part of some demonically-influenced conspiracy related to this visit. So there\u2019s church politics and all other sorts of \u201Cepic\u201D stuff involved here that the earlier films didn\u2019t care about at all.
(It vaguely reminds me of how what started as a little neighbourhood crime-family drama in The Godfather grew into a major Vatican conspiracy by The Godfather Part III. It even kinda vaguely reminds me of how Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom\u2014the fifth film in that series\u2014introduced outright murder and other stuff that had not been part of the franchise until then. It represents something of a shift, tone- and genre-wise.)
The conclusions to supernatural stories like these are always tricky, for a couple of reasons. I once attended a seminar (at a Christian arts festival) where a screenwriter said the climax to a story always has to be the result of a choice made by the protagonist. He said he would have given Raiders of the Lost Ark a failing grade because Indiana Jones ultimately had nothing to do with the fate of the villains, and the story climaxed with a deus ex machina. I told the screenwriter afterwards that Indy did make his choice, when he chose not to blow up the Ark, and that Indy\u2019s choice was to submit himself to the mystery of the Ark. Yes, the \u201Cdeus ex machina\u201D can be a lousy way to wrap things up, but in the case of Raiders, the whole point\u2014foreshadowed in dialogue throughout the film\u2014was that God himself was \u201Cin the machine\u201D, as it were, and that God was not something that the other characters could control. The screenwriter replied that I was being \u201Cacademic\u201D.
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