Taking Sides: William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" vs. Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining"

to get back on topic: i voet for the exorcist. has been some time since i last saw it but from waht i remember the exorcism scenes had a very surehanded cold and bleak strung-out-on-lsd-at-4-in-the-mornign feel to it that i havent seen in any other film realy. shining looks nice and all but it tries too hard and is not scary.

If you give a damn, I suggest renting The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen which fills in your "gaps".

Also - considering the spirits all encompassing power (managing to transform into Jason Miller's mother in a terrible bit of sudden, choppy editing) then it does do a pretty good job of staying tied to a bed and washed away by fake holy water.

You're such a literalist.

And Captain Howdy is the Devil, by the way (how you missed that is beyond fathoming).

But as far as big-budget hollywood horror films go, The Shining and The Exorcist are about as good as it gets. C-man also forgets that those films have socio-cultural as well. The Exorcist is from a time when religion had faded largely from public conciousness, and when church attendance was lower than it had been before. The religious themes and the priest's struggle with faith in the film reflect this. In some ways I think the Shining might be Kubrick's oblique comment on TV and media saturated culture. There's a lot of references to movies and television in the film ("here's Johnny," "i know all about cannibalism, i saw it on tv" "my wife is quite the horror movie fan"). Notice also that the horror scenes are very subjective and hallucinatory, the line between fantasy and real supernatural events blurred (especially the bartender scene). danny torrance may truly be psychic, but who's to say that he isn't seeing his father's drunken hallucinations and his mother's horror movie- inspired ones?

(BTW that dog-man in the Shining is a remant from the book version. In the novel the man is the ghost of the hotel owner's lover. He's wearing a dog costume because the party in the ballroom is a costume party. In the movie they left out all that and the inclusion of the dog-man is made inexplicable, which i think actually makes it creepier than the novel.)

Oh SO OTM. That one particular scene more than scared the bejesus out of me -- I suppose just because of the sheer incongruity of it all. I always thought Wendy must be thinking: "WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!?" when she gazes down that hall. Still, in terms of single images that STILL give me the fear, nothing compares to.....

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:17XuHEhL5SgJ:http://www.qtf.info/captainhowdy/wallpaper/EXORCIST_Howdy_800x600.jpg

http://www.texaschainsawmassacre.net/DannyLloyd.jpg

The Exorcist may be an even more extreme example of this syndrome -- all of its performances, considered without the central, extreme horror that powers the movie, are ham-fests. Watch it a scene at a time, or twice in a row, and it's laughable. Oh! the tortured mother and oh! the tortured priest and oh! the other *really* tortured priest... if it weren't so scary, it would be the most lampooned movie in history.

But it's not; neither of them are. Both of them depend so purely on an indefinable psychological element -- call it "horror," call it "style," call it whatever you like -- that they both work in spite of their clear drawbacks.

I pick The Exorcist as the scarier of the two because it preys more on my religious upbringing. I know people who are far more scared by The Shining, and I can't explain why any more than they can. "Scared" is a really complex and person emotion.

Muahahahahaha!

On the surface though, it seems to me that (haunted hotel aside, the end result is the same) someone being holed up in the wintertime and getting cabin fever, going completely insane and trying to kill his/her family is more likely to happen than actually being possessed by the devil. But I've never been religious so Kenan's probably right about that one. I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Kermode alludes to several signifiers in the film that make use of the islamic call-to-prayer popping up at seamingly incongruous points in the film (most prominently in the very beginning scene, at the Iraqi archaelogical dig, and at the very tail end of the film), allegedly meant to imply the universality/cross-faith struggle between 'good' and 'evil'.....y'know, if ya buy that sorta stuff. But would someone of a different faith be as affected? Probably by the imagery and horror aspects of the film (a demonic little girl stabbing a bloody crucifix into her vagina while speaking in a scary voice is pretty jarring, regardless of your particular faith, I'd reckon), but possibly not by the much-debated moral/ethical/theological message of the film.

The Exorcist was partially based on an (alledgedly) true case from the forties surrounding the "posession" of an adolescent boy.

Hmmm... that's an excellent thought, and it makes me rethink my question. The horror of The Exorcist is rooted in religion, for sure. The Catholic Church endorsed the movie when it came out, and encouraged people to see it to witness the horrors the devil can bring. Sadistic? Of course. Catholic? Sincerely. But good and evil does cut across cultures, doesn't it?

-- latebloomer (posercore24...), July 17th, 2004.

The MT.Ranier case.
-- Alex in NYC (vassife...), July 17th, 2004."

indeed:

ihttp://www.rameysrealm.com/exorcist.htm

That's certainly the implication. After all, the demon Pazuzu (seen in the form of a grinning, priapic stone idol in the beginning scene) is in Iraq and is of Sumarian origin, I believe (side note: I wonder if that location is still there? Or was it bombed into infernal smithereenies?)

http://www.qtf.info/captainhowdy/wallpaper/EXORCIST_pazuzu800x600.jpg

Anyhoo... be extra sure to put your headohnes in for this site.

http://theexorcist.warnerbros.com/cmp/thefilm-fr.html

Even so. Isn't a cabin fever scenario still more likely to happen, or am I being obtuse?

blah blah. Obviously I know the hotel was haunted etc. Did the ghosts pose as much of a threat (or any at all) compared to the Jack Nicholson character once he lost it? People going crazy and killing people happens ALL THE TIME. I'm not just talking in the context of The Shining, here. Possession, well maybe it happened sometime in the 40's...humor me here, I'm only being half serious!

Don't mean to be splitting hairs, but just for calrification Cthulu is a demon from H.P. Lovecraft's fiction.

When the Exorcist was re-released the scene in the Iraqi desert was incredible on the big screen.

excuse me, "Elder God", not "demon". now i am splitting hairs.

Yeah, I wonder why Kubrick added that (it wasn't in the book). I'm also a little curious why a couple years later Stephen King used that as the plot device for Pet Sematary. Hmmm....

and yeah, the Indian burial ground - some scholarly Kubrick-fanboy types have actually used this one line to argue that the whole movie is a parable about the extermination of Native Americans.

(that's in regards to the bunny clips)

some scholarly Kubrick-fanboy types have actually used this one line to argue that the whole movie is a parable about the extermination of Native Americans.

I've heard that too....often referencing the color of several red rooms as evidence.

and, if so, we're arguing a point against itself. Both films seem to be about a kind of possession, no? To me though, the type of possession(if you want to call it that) that makes a man want to kill his family for no reason
(and this is something that has actually happened in my family IRL, not to be a downer here, but my great-aunt and cousin were murdered four years ago by another relative who was talking to thin air (ghosts? imaginary friends? Who knows?) and suddenly snapped and stabbed them both and then according to witnesses proceeded to tell the thin air "There! I've finally done it!", no joke, he's currently in a mental institution.)
is much more common than this literal "she's possessed by the devil, better call a priest" type thing. It's closer to home for most people, I'd say. That's kind of what I'm driving at.

Then again.. that exorcism was supposedly based on a real event...

but now you've made me feel bad for arguing.

The Exorcist is just silly. As I mentioned, unless you really, honestly believe the devil can lie strapped to a bed with holy water keeping it down then the film is farce.

agree with all that

I maintain that the fear engine of The Shining is that of a self-destructive failure both indulging in his own spiral and all too ready to blame his own family.

Although, even in saying that I recognize I’m positioning it as the flagship elevated horror

isnt it equally as easy to say similar about familial failure guilt but perhaps destruction is through proxy in the exorcist tho

I had a big fear of demonic possession when I was a kid. The posters for The Children of the Damned to me represented a movie so evil that kept me awake at night (I never did see it)

I watched The Exorcist with a first-term college friend in 1973 who was visiting me for Christmas. It was right around the time I was giving up my faith in religion. It was scary at first and then kind of hokey, but I thoroughly enjoyed it

The Shining was much colder, more mysterious and more frightening to me, with Danny's psychic visions of the past seeming like a foreshadowing of Jack's eventual madness

isnt it equally as easy to say similar about familial failure guilt but perhaps destruction is through proxy in the exorcist tho

Saw The Shining on my 12th birthday in 1980. It was terrifying and I remember that at the time the only other film that had frightened me as much was The Elephant Man with John Hurt. Which is odd, I guess. I don't think it was only Nicholson that scared me about The Shining, it was also the little twin girls and the general idea that the hotel was a haunted freak show.

I caught The Exorcist a few years later but I could more easily write that off as a Catholic paranoiac fantasy, and thus not as deeply disturbing.

The twins were, in my experience, the most terrifying part of The Shining. The first time I saw it, the flashes of their murdered bodies really chilled me.

I don't think the idea of possession is limited to Catholics, tho.

Maybe not, but it didn't have anything to do with anything I was familiar with growing up

You have to be religious for that to be scary, is what I'm getting at

I wasn't particularly religious as a kid, certainly wasn't raised with anything approaching religious regularity, but the idea terrified me. I think I accepted the idea of malevolent beings and, probably more relevant, the idea of loss of control of oneself.

First time, soon after release, at a drive-in in the States: me, my mom, my cousin, and my aunt. My cousin Glen and I were 12. I'm quite sure our moms weren't quite prepared for what we saw.

You have to be religious for that to be scary, is what I'm getting at

― Josefa, Saturday, October 7, 2023 8:19 PM bookmarkflaglink

I brought a Pazuzu action figure to my showing and pretty much am Team Satan and I find it terrifying as hell

Thing is horror films don't have to be relatable to be scary if the film is framed right

yeah its simply not a true statement imo

maybe if you go in ready to demonstrate yr atheism cool and make a point of not getting into the movie but otherwise its as scary as any other horror concept

xps im curious as to the parts of the shining that arent explicitly supernatural by the end of the movie tbh

I think you will probably find The Exorcist scary if you believe in God or know anything about exorcisms - but the possession is the thing, right? The loss of bodily autonomy is a big theme in horror, that it happens to an innocent child is another, that it’s fully gloves off in the approach is another.

I grew up hearing about exorcisms and how scary they allegedly were so it certainly struck that chord for me. But it’s a scary fucking film outside that!

For an exorcism film which is anti-church (iirc just utterly corrupt and inept) this might be the one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_(2006_film)

Not sure why that link doesn't work but a Google should bring it up

It's amazing in general that both The Exorcist and Taxi Driver have dodged the movement of history and continue to be shown on TV.

Wait, you think the movement of history has gone in the direction of LESS tolerance towards profanity on TV??

I saw Scorsese speak last weekend and he chuckled about how the first TV edits of Taxi Driver in the 70's were like 40 minutes long.

The idea of children being involved. Those films could not be made by a major studio now.

I would say that classic movies can get ushered into the present with plenty of "you could never get away with that today" allowances but, as Left's posts consistently remind, that moment may also be passing. (Caught a Letterboxd review of Sunrise that more or less burned it to the ground at the very idea that Janet Gaynor went back to George O'Brien.)

and Margo marries Bill and foregoes her stardom.

Well if there was any testimony from either of the actresses in those two films that they felt uncomfortable I'd understand that they could become out of vogue but as things stand I think you're imagining more pearl clutching in the world than there actually is.

Likewise while it's by no means an uncommon ocurrence for younger movie fans to come across the gender politics of old timey classics and be horrified (and tbh there's lots to be horrified by!), thd vast majority of reviews of Sunrise on LB, regardless of age group, are still five star raves.

I do prefer my college days in the late '90s, where we all agreed that Singin' in the Rain's Don and Cosmo were definitely sharing a bed on the regular

The idea of children being involved. Those films could not be made by a major studio now.

Isn't there a new Exorcist spinoff either coming out or released already that features two adolescent girls?

yes and it sucks apparently

Poltergeist was way more terrifying to me as a child than the Exorcist or the Shining, because it was set in a house exactly like mine

also at age ten I'd read a ton of Daniel Cohen books about the supernatural and knew next to nothing about Christianity, let alone Catholicism

I love in Poltergeist how they're watching a football game that is moving at what appears to be 0.05 speed

that cuz they’re stoned all the time, remember coach rolling that j

Just rewatched Poltergeist and, yes, the scene of Steven and Diane rolling joints in bed and doing Donald Duck voices as foreplay is a small miracle of a scene