6. The Inarticulate Body: Demonic Conflicts in The Exorcist

The Exorcist (1971; “E”) by William Peter Blatty, one of horror’s all time greatest bestsellers, starts off with three quotations and three names. The first quotation is from the Bible, from the famous possession narrative in the gospel of Luke (8:27-30). The second is an excerpt from a FBI recording of two Mafia killers laughing and discussing how they had hung their victim on a meat hook and tortured him with electric shocks for three days before the victim died. The third quotation is an account of the communist atrocities towards Christians during the Vietnam war: a priest having eight nails driven into his skull, a praying teacher and his pupils executed in equally cruel and suggestive ways. The three names which follow are Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. The Exorcist can be read as a relentless exploration of evil, and as an argument advocating religious interpretation of it: evil as a supernatural, malevolent power that is actively operating in our world. The first quotation establishes the general framing of the novel as Christian; the evil is situated and discussed in the Christian tradition, having the demonic possession as its central topos. The second connects the ancient theme of evil as the mythical adversary with contemporary evils: the Mafia and Communism (in the third quotation). The extreme cruelty of criminals and Vietnamese soldiers are paralleled and thereby associated with the inhuman evil power that Jesus was confronting in the possessed man. The violence in these epigraphs is shocking; it is beyond what most people would be able to imagine, even if they have become used to reports of war and crime. They force the reader into an emotional reaction, and legitimise the use of the term “evil” in the