Horror Madness is back, with two films in which very different heroes fight the devil.
In one corner stands Francis Lawrence’s comic adaptation Constantine:
And in the other we see William Friedkin’s novel adaptation The Exorcist:
See the introduction and full slate here: http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
There is quite a lot that separates these films, one of which is three decades of cinematic style. Constantine, despite the main character’s origins in the Thatcher-era brain of Alan Moore, is very early 00s in style and affect. One suspects that the recent Matrix films sold somebody on casting Keanu Reeves, and the film has a similar kind of junky world building to that trilogy; they could believably take place in the same world. Similarly, The Exorcist is almost too 70s: for all that it’s horror, it has the kind of stylized realism of many of the political thrillers of the period, like a lost supernatural fourth entry in Pakula’s paranoia trilogy.
Still, the two films have more in common than you might initially think, and they arrived out of similar political climates. The United States in 2005 was in a conservative cultural swing that would soon see a backlash, not to mention a war that had been deliberately imbued with good-vs-evil rhetoric; the time probably seemed right for a hero who reluctantly fought demons. Likewise, a lot of horror of the 70s reflects a rising conservatism born out of reaction against the counter-culture of the 60s. The world seemed chaotic, institutions were breaking down, leaders were failing, and children were rebelling beyond recognition. What better hero to save us than a priest?
There are even, interestingly, remarkably similar opening sequences: in both, characters hunt through detritus and find a religious relic. In both, the relic is signaled to the audience as meaningful but left unexplained until later. This is significant, in both films, because both films are about the backlash of religion against non-belief. Religion has been relegated to the trash by a non-believing society, but it’s still there. It’s waiting to be rediscovered. Both films are about the failures of rationalism; they are about what happens to religion in a non-religious world. The need for it is still there, and crucially, the devil is too. The war between good and evil continues, whether humanity wants to participate in it or not.
Constantine is more cynical about this, or rather it spells its cynicism out more explicitly than does The Exorcist. To John Constantine and company, the factual existence of god and the devil does not imply that either one is on the side of humanity. Those two forces are real, certainly, and their realness must be accepted and worked with and around, but their concerns are their own. Humanity’s only hope is in other humans. The protagonist in this film is familiar kind of disillusioned idealist, one who quips and smokes cigarettes and talks a world weary game but is ultimately looking for a reason to do the right thing. The Exorcist, on the other hand, is less overt in what it believes: it prefers to show rather than tell. Its world weariness comes through in the trash on the streets, the weather beaten faces of the cast (so different from the various beauties inhabiting the world of Constantine), the sounds of traffic, the cluttered and messy apartments and overcrowded hospitals. It never needs to spell out for us how ugly the world has gotten. Like Chris MacNeil says in the novel (in the book she doesn’t need to say it): “the devil does a lot of commercials.” Again, what hope there is comes mainly from other people, who sacrifice for each other at great cost to themselves. God, in both films, is largely absent, acting through agents if he acts at all. Where does that leave us?
Constantine would argue, I think, that it leaves us with quite a lot. Though god is silent in this world, he is benevolent, and acts according to predictable rules. Good people are never condemned forever, and the requirements for salvation are clear. In the meantime, we have us: we have other people, and ourselves. Personal heroism is possible in this world, and so is redemption. The fight continues at the end of the film, but it is presented as a fair fight, one people can win. There’s hope in the fact that though the fight may never end, it won’t ever end for the other side either.
The Exorcist is more circumspect. The demon is beaten, but redemption is elusive and perhaps only achieved through death, which is final. Its conservatism is not only the hegemonic conservatism of its era, but comes straight from William Peter Blatty’s novel. There are heroes, yes: they are priests, and in one case, a cop. They are, of course, men, and not only men but men who are invested members of institutions in which women play no part. Among other things this is a story about women and girls being put in their place, being made to realize that they cannot survive without male protection. It’s significant that Blatty took a story about Jesuits performing an exorcism on a little boy in a traditional nuclear family and turned it into a story of an exorcism of an adolescent daughter of a single mom. The priests are fully alive and flawed human beings, but they are all to a man virtuous, noble, and self-sacrificing; they only stumble to rise still higher in heroism. It’s a film you only could have made before the abuse crisis.
All of this together means that both films are a bit at war with themselves. The Exorcist because it is a conservative script directed by a non-conservative director, one who was incapable of making a film without nuance and ambiguity, and Constantine because it was a film kind of made by committee, never sure how far it wanted to go and what it wanted to say. Which means that any message in either is hard to pin down; they both resist interpretation. This ends up working for both films, because they are both ultimately about confusion; they’re about how to make sense of a frightening, chaotic world where again, god doesn’t talk but the devil does a lot of commercials. Any incoherence can be easily read as part of the point.
The Exorcist has to win this one, though. You simply can’t say enough good about it. Every performance is staggering, every frame is a painting, every artistic choice was the right one. Constantine is an entertaining, and sometimes frightening mess, and my is the cast pretty, but nobody involved is at the top of their game. The Exorcist is Friedkin at his very best, which makes it one of the best films of any genre that’s ever been made.