 |
| From the extended director's cut: Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is having a bad six weeks. |
[WARNING: major spoilers for a 70s-era story.]
William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist, published in 1971, spent 17 weeks at Number 1 on the New York Times's bestseller list (back when that list might've meant something) and 57 weeks on the list in total. Robert Pirsig once remarked on how his own bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), got its fame for being a kulturbärer, a bearer of culture, an expression of the current, changing Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), in which the person or work carries forward what is probably to become a newly dominant Zeitgeist, bearing on his/her or its back the new values soon to pervade the evolving culture.
The Geist in Zeitgeist is also relevant here; it's related to the word ghost (Ger. Heiliger Geist = Holy Ghost) and means something more akin to "spirit." The Exorcist is, fundamentally, a work about the workings of the spirit. Whatever lesson it's trying to teach, whatever morality it's trying to express, isn't meant to be easy or comforting, much like the lessons of the Bible itself. The story teaches that randomly bad things happen to the innocent, that primal forces exist outside of our control, and that salvation—which may include the rehabilitation of one's own unbelief—requires help from outside. The story also sees God/good as a subtle, invisible force, mirroring the way God in the New Testament continues his retreat from the forefront of human history to occupy a more background role while his only begotten son and the saints around him take center stage. Read Jack Miles's God: A Biography, in which Miles examines God as if he were a literary character in a story unfolding chronologically in the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh, what Christians would call The Old Testament); Miles concludes that, from what we see if we view the Hebrew Bible as a chronologically linear book, God is a receding character who ultimately yields the floor on the cosmic sage. Whether you agree with Miles or not, his way of seeing God isn't a bad template for viewing the deity's role in The Exorcist, which has, among other themes, the conflict between science and spirituality. In fact, many God/fate/cosmic force-referencing movies in Hollywood—like the Matrix movies, for instance—tend to see God or divine power as a subtle force working behind the scenes and almost never intervening openly like what happens in Stephen King's novel The Stand or in one of my favorite movies, The Hudsucker Proxy).
The movie The Exorcist, remarkably faithful to the novel except for a few crucial points, came out in 1973, indicating that the story got snapped up rather quickly by Hollywood and given to director William Friedkin (The French Connection, 1971), who was seen as a strong, stubborn visionary and a brutal taskmaster to many of his actors. You have doubtless heard the story of how actress Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, in portraying the scene where she was struck by her demon-possessed daughter Regan, was yanked so hard by a harness-cable setup that she wrenched her back, broke her coccyx, and suffered a permanent injury. She claims that her anguished scream in that scene wasn't acting but an expression of real, raw agony. Friedkin was known to get actors to startle by sneakily putting a gun close to their their ears and firing a blank round. And the set of Regan's bedroom was kept icily cold so that the actors' breath would be visible on camera. Friedkin was guilty of these and many other sins against his actors, but the result was one hell of a movie that produced, according to testimonies and rumors, violently extreme reactions from audience members who went to see the film looking for a thrill: fainting, vomiting, heart attacks, hysteria, and running out of the theater.
1. The movie The Exorcist (1973)
Almost like a stage play with a small cast, 1973's The Exorcist centers on the story of only five or six people: actress-mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), separated from her husband; Chris's 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair); 40-something Jesuit psychiatrist Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller); Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow, playing the exorcist in question), detective Lieutenant William Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb), and Chris's angry-drunk director Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran). Minor characters surrounding this central constellation include Chris's secretary Sharon Spencer (Kitty Winn), Father Karras's cheerful fellow-Jesuit friend Father Dyer (William J. O'Malley, a Jesuit priest in real life, who got face-slapped by Friedkin when he didn't emote enough for one scene), Karl the MacNeils' generally stoic housekeeper (Rudolf Schündler), and Father Karras's mother Mary (Vasiliki Mariaros).
The story begins in Iraq, with the weak and aged Father Merrin finishing an archaeological dig and encountering several statues, big and small, of an unnamed demon (called Pazuzu in the book). Merrin, who takes nitroglycerin pills for his weak heart, knows he must depart for America because he senses there will be a conflict there, a conflict similar to one he'd had in the past with the same malefic forces he'd encountered years earlier. Meanwhile, in the Georgetown area of DC, Chris MacNeil has rented a house on Prospect Street, just above M Street. She lives there with her daughter Regan, her secretary Sharon, and her two housekeepers—the husband-and-wife pair Karl and Willie (Gina Petrushka), both older Swiss people. We quickly learn that Chris's director for a movie being filmed on Georgetown University's campus, Burke Dennings, loves his alcohol, generally dotes on Chris, and absolutely loathes Karl, whom Burke refers to as a Nazi swine despite Karl's being Swiss. Little Regan, in looking through random items in the rental's basement, finds a Ouija board and makes an imaginary friend called "Captain Howdy." Chris begins to hear weird noises from the house's attic, which she attributes to rats. Over the following weeks, Regan starts acting strangely as the mysterious Captain Howdy seems to take her over.
Chris initially sends Regan to various hospitals for different treatments—X-rays, brain scans, and even one attempt at hypnosis that goes horribly wrong for one doctor and his crotch. Regan's condition worsens, and it becomes harder to sedate her. Regan becomes more menacing and even violent, and at a nearby church, an altar and some sacred statues are found nastily desecrated. In some of Regan's hospital sessions, she manifests foul breath, uses obscene language, and evinces what seem to be different personalities who say things that Regan cannot possibly know, in accents and speech cadences that are not her own. At home, Regan's bed shakes violently in ways that shouldn't be possible. Having seen a particular priest on GU's campus, Chris gets curious as to who he might be, and she eventually meets the priest, Father Karras, and confesses that she thinks her daughter might be possessed—something that's still hard to swallow since Chris is an atheist. Not long after, director Burke Dennings is found dead at the bottom of a famous set of stairs leading from Prospect to M Street (now known by GU students as "the Exorcist stairs") with his head having been wrenched 180º around. Detective Kinderman, assessing the scene, finds that a simple, drunken fall down the steps was unlikely to have twisted Dennings's head that way. Kinderman is also aware of the church desecrations, and he takes a seemingly friendly, avuncular interest in Father Karras, whom he keeps inviting to see old movies.
Karras, meanwhile, explains to Chris that he's a trained psychiatrist, a deep scientific skeptic (privately to another priest, Karras confesses he's lost his faith), and a man uninclined to believe that Regan is actually possessed. He also notes that the Church's standards for performing an exorcism are very strict in terms of requirements for proof, and that he is unlikely to get permission to perform an exorcism. But later encounters with the purported demon convince Karras the case might be genuine: Regan speaks French and Latin; at one point Karras records Regan as she speaks backwards in English); per the biblical episodes, the entity inside Regan sometimes claims to be legion, sometimes singular. Eventually, the Church hierarchy decides an exorcism is necessary, but they request that Lankester Merrin, who is back from Iraq and writing a memoir, be the leader of the ritual, with Karras both assisting and acting as the on-site psychiatrist. Karras has to fight his feelings of doubt and skepticism while also mourning the death of his mother, who resented her having been taken to a care center after an edema, blaming Damien before she died.
This brings us to the movie's conclusion: the exorcism itself. In scenes that were seared into the memories of a generation of vulnerable souls, then brutally parodied not even a decade later and beyond, the priests do battle with the spirit or spirits inside of Regan. There is much warm vomit, creepy instances of levitation, impossible 180º twistings of Regan's neck as the demon mocks the death of Dennings (whom, it's strongly implied, the demon had killed before pushing him of the window overlooking the famous set of stairs), the voice of people whom Father Karras didn't help, plenty of Roman Ritual chanting ("The power of Christ compels you!"), and assorted instances of both foulness and nobility. Ultimately, Father Merrin succumbs to a heart attack, and Father Karras, desperate and angry, pummels Regan's body and, utterly dispensing with the ritual, directly begs the demon to possess him. It does, and once it's inside his body, Damien throws himself out the same window from which Dennings was defenestrated, tumbling down the steps and landing in a heap on the M Street sidewalk, a bloody, ragged pile. Father Dyer finds him right as the police and emergency teams do; Dyer performs last rites. In the following weeks, Regan has returned to normal, with no memory of what happened. Filming at Georgetown has ended, so Chris and Regan are moving back to California. Father Dyer sees them off, but before they drive away, Regan stops upon seeing Father Dyer's priest collar and gives him a kiss on the cheek.
Now that I consider it, it's amazing to think that, in a movie featuring so much violence, obscenity, cruelty, and horror, only four characters die: Burke Dennings, Damien's mother, Father Karras, and Father Merrin.
As movies go, The Exorcist—to use an awful cephalocervical pun—turned heads. As a kid, I'd initially seen the edited version of the movie on TV, and it definitely gave me nightmares. Only years later did I read the novel, which was vivid, then I reread the novel decades later and rewatched the uncut movie many years later as well. While parts of Friedkin's film now have a laughably 70s-era look and pacing about them, the movie overall still appears remarkably modern, with effects—all practical back then—that still hold up even these days. Everyone still marvels at the excellent makeup work done on Max Von Sydow, who was around 43 at the time of filming and had to be aged up to look like an elderly man. Nevertheless, there are aspects of von Sydow's makeup that betray his youth: His eyes look piercingly young, and his hair is a little too lush—but those problems are rooted in biology and not the fault of the excellent makeup artist. And of course, the horrifying makeup work done on Regan is probably the cause of many people's nightmares: the scars, the lesions, the ever-paling skin, the feral demon eyes, and the ever-present, steaming streams of vomit that Regan either spews in projectile fashion or pushes out of her mouth like thick, nightmarish feces. Every instance of Regan emitting some sort of bodily fluid (or semi-solid) left me wanting to recoil, especially when one of the priests would have a bare hand or a part of the face befouled.
The quality of the acting is also top-notch from everyone, but there are a few moments in which Ellen Burstyn's portrayal of a fraying, angry, helpless, fearful mother can be a little over-the-top. That said, I think Burstyn's overall portrayal of Chris MacNeil is excellent and generally hits all of the right notes, and I'm sure a mother would respond to my above quibble by observing that I don't get Burstyn's acting because I'm not a mother. Sure, true enough. Lee J. Cobb as an aging Detective Kinderman is solid and chameleonic, changing his disposition from obliviously jolly to seemingly starstruck to deadly serious depending on the person he's interacting with. His light-hearted exchanges with Father Karras—in which Karras is hiding the true gravity of the MacNeil situation even while Kinderman, slowly putting two and two together, is shrewdly aware that Karras is doing so—give the film some small spots of much-needed Yiddish levity: demonic possession isn't portrayed in the film as an unserious thing. Jack MacGowran as the drunken, ill-fated director Burke Dennings strikes just the right balance between doting uncle and raging asshole. The other peripheral characters (winsome Sharon, taciturn Karl, and the amiable Dyer) are all portrayed solidly, providing the movie with a feeling that the Georgetown area is populated and dimensional, that Chris's friends, loved ones, and helpers aren't just some Hollywood conjuration that's been shoehorned into the script but rather an organic addition to the ambiance.
Max von Sydow as Father Merrin is, despite his relatively small and parenthetical role in the story's plot, simply incredible; comparing von Sydow then to the old man he eventually became is striking; the young von Sydow convincingly acts like an old priest. Jason Miller as Father Damien Karras, my favorite character and quite possibly the real focus of the film as we witness the trajectory of his own troubled soul, is well cast and fits the look of the character on the pages of Blatty's novel—a burly, boxer-like, haunted-looking, sad-eyed priest who both runs laps on GU's campus and smokes a ton of cigarettes. Karras has chosen a road of compassion as his life's work, but he feels guilty for not having been there to help his old, solitary mother when she needed his help. Miller ably manages to evoke Karras's gravitas and priestly authority as well as his doubtful scientific skepticism, which is at war with his desire to believe. But like Chris, he eventually comes to understand that the feral force inside Regan can't be given a merely scientific response with pills and shots and hypnosis and scans. He reaches this conclusion despite being a priest with some limited knowledge of the history of exorcisms from his psychological work, thus coming at Regan's problem from a completely different perspective. In the end, in the face of such primal, bestial rage, Karras faces the force inside Regan by having arrived at the same moral crossroads Chris has. And he grimly chooses to fight for Regan despite never having truly met the girl.
Lastly, there's Linda Blair, the young actress who portrays 12-year-old Regan, and who was about 13 when she filmed her part (for various harrowing scenes, Blair was replaced by a number of doubles). My usual complaint about child actors is that they're mostly unrefined and have a very self-conscious, stilted, "I'm acting now" quality about them. Seeing a good, unself-conscious child actor is, even now, something of a rarity. But the casting director for The Exorcist must have been lucky or blessed because Blair, as the demon-wracked daughter, pulls off a miracle of physical and psychological performance. In later years, Blair would say she had little to no understanding of certain scenes, especially with how they were filmed at clever angles and with special props merely to imply this or that bit of nastiness (like Regan masturbating with a crucifix or forcing her mother's face into her bloody crotch). The makeup team, with its excellently horrible work, probably also did a lot to help convince us viewers of Regan's ongoing, hellish trauma. The makeup enhanced the acting. Linda Blair, for her part, and despite however little she understood about the ugly, adult realities of her character, certainly delivered the performance of a lifetime. Despite the supposed "curse" that followed the filmmakers around for years (Ellen Burstyn claims nine people died of a variety of causes), Blair herself seems remarkably happy these days, and well adjusted.
Something should be said about the movie's cinematography, sound, and lighting. Friedkin, despite playing a bit fast and loose with campus/neighborhood geography, generally gets the essentials right about what sits where in Georgetown, although some shots inside the campus's Dahlgren Chapel end up feeling as if they were supposed to be shots of an off-campus church that had been desecrated. Overall, though, the film showcases plenty of shots recognizable to those who know the neighborhood, and I found myself weirdly transported back to an era of the campus I'd never known—the 70s—every time I saw interior or exterior shots of Gaston Hall, the Healey Building, or Lauinger Library. I went to GU from 1987 to 1991, doing an academic year abroad in Switzerland during the momentous 1989-1990 academic year, which was when the Berlin Wall came down, Tiananmen Square was still reeling from its aftermath, and the Ceaușescus (Monsieur et Madame) were put up against a wall and shot, freeing Romania from a decades-long tyranny. One of the more famous Georgetown rituals—aside from stealing the hands off the giant clock on Healey Tower—is for the Jesuit faculty to show The Exorcist to willing members of the incoming freshman class. I recalled sitting comfortably, and feeling very adult, in an upper tier of one of Gaston's auditoriums, screaming and laughing along with my classmates. The group experience of that movie is very different from watching it alone in the dark. That digression aside, Friedkin, as a visual stylist, saves his best work for things like building interiors, especially Regan's bedroom, which becomes the main theater of combat inside Chris's rental house. In terms of sound, there are some moments that, nowadays, feel a bit dated, but Regan's unearthly, croaking voice (sometimes, it's multiple voices, but mostly it's hardcore voice actress Mercedes McCambridge) still feels creepy and phlegm-clogged. Her breathing is eerie, too, predating the menacing wheeze of Darth Vader by four years. Georgetown is given life through city and traffic sounds, and the music and singing for the opening scenes in Iraq possess a foreign barrenness and aridity that nevertheless contain a sort of weird, premonitory beauty. As for lighting: We all remember the iconic image of Father Merrin arriving at the MacNeil residence on a rainy night, an eerie shaft of light silhouetting the priest as he makes ready to contend with an enemy he's faced before.
I mentioned earlier that the movie remains remarkably faithful to Blatty's novel. Whole sections of book dialogue are repeated verbatim in the film, as are many of the book's major story beats. The movie also preserves many of the book's larger themes, but I think it misses the most essential one—something I'll discuss below when I turn my attention to the novel. Blatty, the novel's author, was also the movie's screenwriter, perhaps not trusting anyone else to adapt his story the way he wanted it adapted. Going from book to movie is a tricky business, though, and it's often hard to navigate those rocky shoals with perfect finesse. Still, I'd say Blatty did a fine job of preserving much of the book's essence—its basic themes and conflicts.
In fact, Blatty won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, one of several Oscars for which The Exorcist had been nominated (the others were Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Art Direction Cinematography, Film Direction, Film Editing, Sound). The movie also won for Best Sound. It was the top-grossing movie of 1973 and received mixed reviews from critics of the time. It also got, among other awards, the Golden Globe for Best Picture. Director Friedkin fervently hoped to receive a papal condemnation of the film, which would have made it all the more popular. The Vatican, in truth, turned out to be subtly supportive of what it saw as the film's underlying message, an optimistic one about faith and God's existence. There were, however, some predictable theological quibbles about ritual details, priestly motives, and religious principles. No one in Hollywood ever gets those things right, and frankly, you can't please everyone even if your production is letter-perfect. Some nitpicker will find a flaw somewhere. Embrace imperfection... at least to a degree.
While parts of The Exorcist might seem laughable or out of step today, the movie as a whole still retains resonance, and there's a reason why it has remained culturally significant for so long. I've heard from atheist acquaintances that the movie scares them not at all because they see the entire premise as ridiculous. It's probably like how I view most horror these days: Most horror just makes me laugh partly because all of the familiar tropes have been so overdone, and we all know what's waiting or lurking around the corner, under the bed, inside the body cavity, or in the dark. Usually, when a horror character is about to meet his or her much-deserved demise, I'm ready to be delighted. But because The Exorcist hit me so early in life, it will always be, on some level, a pretty horrible film. And I mean horrible in a good way.
While I briefly contended, above, that Father Merrin is the exorcist of the story's title, it's quite possible that the label could apply more aptly to Father Karras. The Bible isn't very specific on how Jesus and his disciples were able to cast out demons and devils, and Father Karras's eventual method involves something much more primal and atavistic than following a dated, staid, calcified ritual to the letter. Karras must ultimately dispense with the Roman Ritual and accept the malign force into himself—a joining that the demon suggests will happen very early in the story, close to when they first meet. In many ways, the story of The Exorcist follows the very old dramatic template of what author Stephen R. Donaldson, channeling Stephen Karpman (who was writing more about transactional analysis than about story), has referred to as the Hero/Rescuer, the Villain/Persecutor, and the Victim—the three corners of the so-called drama triangle (again: more psychology than narrative). The movie implies this, but it's more obvious in the book: Karras can only invite the demonic force into himself when his faith has returned. I will discuss this more in the next section as we tackle the novel.
2. The novel The Exorcist (1971)
Having summed up the basic plot in the previous section, I will spend more time here noting where the movie and the book differ, then focus more directly on William Peter Blatty's book—its themes and the deep, fundamental detail that I think the movie swings at but ultimately misses. The novel came out in 1971 and was based on a real-life 1949 exorcism of a 14-year-old Maryland boy given the pseudonym of Roland Doe. Blatty did extensive research on both the specific case and on Jesuits in general, but he was a student at Georgetown at the time of the Maryland exorcism. Blatty also modeled Father Lankester Merrin on the real-life priest-philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw material reality as part of a grand process of evolution toward what he called an Omega Point.
The major story beats in the novel are the same as what we see in the movie: We begin in Iraq, with old Father Merrin having a premonition that he must go back to the States. We then meet actress Chris MacNeil and her young daughter Regan, Swiss husband-wife housekeepers Karl and Willie, and Chris's twenty-something secretary Sharon. We also make the acquaintance of the charmingly nasty film director Burke Dennings, who adores Chris and Regan but hates Karl. Chris already knows Father Dyer, but she asks him about Father Karras. The story builds up in the same way: Regan discovers a Ouija board and befriends the "imaginary" Captain Howdy; Black Mass-style desecrations happen at a local church, and Detective Kinderman gets involved. Regan's condition worsens to the point where Chris seeks out the help of Father Karras; despite not being a believer, she's tried everything medically available and is now desperately convinced that exorcism is the only plausible solution to Regan's problem. Karras, meanwhile, is wrestling with his own crisis of faith, no longer feeling in tune with the sacred and experiencing a spiritual numbness. Regan's case intrigues him, especially once he visits Regan and starts dialoguing with the entity or entities inside her, but at every turn, Father Karras is presented with evidence that Regan might not be possessed at all but in the grip of a deep and mysterious mental illness. For Karras, proof of the existence of the Devil would be proof of the existence of God, but his scientific training makes it hard for him to believe that what he is seeing in Regan is in fact spiritual. Eventually, though, enough evidence accumulates for Karras to consult with higher Church authorities and to ask permission to perform an exorcism. Karras is told that the ritual's leader will be Father Merrin, back from Iraq, and Karras will both assist and act as the on-site psychiatrist. Merrin dies during the exorcism, Karras become enraged and shouts for the demon to come into him, then something happens that we hear but don't see: Karras shouts "No!", and there's the sound of breaking glass. When Regan's bedroom door is flung open, Regan has come back to herself, Merrin's body lies on the floor, and Karras has apparently crashed through the window and tumbled down the stairs to his death. Father Dyer, Karras's close friend, gives Karras the last rites, and Karras dies with a look of exalted triumph on his face.
But the novel weaves a much richer tapestry that includes many scenes not found in the movie. For example, the movie entirely drops a major subplot in the book about the life of Karl the beleaguered housekeeper: While Karl's wife Willie thinks their daughter, an addict, is long dead, Karl knows his daughter lives in ramshackle DC housing with her addict boyfriend, and he visits her regularly to give her money, all while miserably begging her to get help for her addiction at a clinic. Detective Kinderman, who suspects that only Karl could be strong enough to have killed Burke Dennings by wrenching his head around, follows Karl on his visits to his daughter and discovers the truth. This truth, though, doesn't bring Kinderman any closer to solving the riddles of Burke Dennings's murder and the church desecrations. The book also shows Kinderman and Karras moving toward friendship even though Kinderman knows that Karras is hiding something. Another major element dropped from the plot is when Father Karras, exhausted and plunging into sleep, has an encounter in his room with Father Lucas, who calls himself both a priest and a counselor, and who claims to want to help Damien but leaves him with a caution to "Watch out for Sharon!" I interpreted this hallucination as an oblique warning from God, but the majority online view seems to be that Father Lucas was an instantiation of the demon. The novel's beginning says that the demon Pazuzu is the personification of the southwest wind, and while he's in Iraq, Father Merrin is disturbed by a wind from the southwest.
The movie leaves out some important details about Regan and the demon. Captain Howdy, her imaginary friend, probably got his name from Regan's father Howard, who is divorced or separated from Chris. Regan is also depicted in the book as not only vomiting frequently but also pushing out diarrhea, one of many sources of foul odor. Both of these problems oblige Karl and Willie to change the possessed Regan's bedding quite often. In the book, the demon evokes Burke Dennings in much more detail. The demon claims Dennings is with the demon(s), along with Damien's mother. The demon also taunts Karl in front of Willie, revealing Karl's secret that the couple's daughter is still alive, much to Willie's distress. And while the movie contains the line "The sow is mine!", describing the demon's jealous ownership of Regan, the book is peppered with demonic references to Regan as "the piglet," as in, "I will not let the piglet sleep." This is a direct biblical evocation of the story of Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac, a demon-wracked man living among graves whose fantastic strength, while possessed, allowed him to break the chains that bound him. The story ends with Jesus casting the demons out ("I am legion, for we are many"); they enter a herd of swine, which hurls itself collectively into the sea, much as Karras, at the end of the story, hurls himself out of the window to break his own possession while he still retains some control of his body.
The movie also strips out a great deal of theological speculation and discussion. Karras reads some of Merrin's work and learns of his Teilhardian, almost panentheistic belief in the evolution of matter toward spirit as all of creation strives toward its creator. Merrin and Karras talk about the nature and purpose of possession, with Merrin affirming that possession is less about the cruel deprivation of an individual's will and more about afflicting those around the possessed. Merrin also expresses a belief found in some of the quieter passages of CS Lewis's writings: the idea that even evil must, in the end, serve some ultimately good purpose that is hidden from us.
But one of the biggest differences between the book and the movie is the book's ambiguity about whether Regan really is possessed or merely in the grip of severe mental illness. The movie, meanwhile, makes it perfectly clear that Regan is possessed, but the movie also contains scenes that are designed to make us doubt Regan's possession, such as when the demon fails to say Karras's mother's maiden name or to carry on a long conversation in Latin or French. The demon also gets fooled by ordinary water that Karras has lied is holy water. But in the end, the movie tilts toward surety: Regan is definitely possessed.
The fundamental difference, though, between the book and the movie is that, while the book is more ambiguous about whether Regan is actually possessed, it is utterly clear about whether Karras has regained his faith before his death. Karras, upon receiving the demonic presence into himself, now has confirmation that the deus absconditus who has eluded him for so long is, in fact, real. This is the gleam of triumph that Father Dyer, administering the last rites, sees in Karras's dying eyes. Many involved with the movie's production have said that the film isn't fundamentally a horror movie so much as it's a movie about faith. Maybe so, but the point is far clearer in the novel.
While the movie is a fairly faithful distillation of the book (largely thanks to Blatty's having adapted his own book into a screenplay), it leaves out a host of details that would have greatly enriched the story. The movie also subtly or unsubtly shifts the book's emphasis slightly away from Karras's crisis of faith and doesn't end with Karras's final moment of triumph. I can understand why the movie made the changes it did (plenty of other little details were changed as well, and there are dozens of websites with articles comparing and contrasting the myriad novel/movie differences), but a major sticking point for me is the movie's slight move away from the centrality of the issue of Karras's faith.
My suggestion would be to see the movie, in all of its 70s-era quaintness, then to read the novel, which will provide a much richer experience. Movies excel in the area of visual storytelling; books excel at narrative and character interiority. Both versions of Blatty's story are excellent, each in their own way, but ultimately, the novel proves to be the more satisfying of the two versions.
