The Exorcist – Blood and Porridge

October 18, 2024October 21, 2024

A. N. Other

© Coronet Books

It’ll be Halloween in a fortnight’s time. I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically. They shouldn’t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn’t British but American. Here’s the latest whinge from Guardian columnist Zoe Williams. It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers. So, if you view Halloween as ‘un-British’, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain. If only…

Anyway, as is my pre-Halloween custom every year, here’s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season. I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The Other by Thomas Tryon.

Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The Other. This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies. It also – along with the similar success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves ‘a nice little earner’. But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom Tryon. And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.

As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958’s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The Glory Guys. I don’t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day, in which he acted alongside John Wayne. However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it’s not surprising that I missed him.

© 20^th Century Fox

© Columbia Pictures

It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast. Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work. Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger’s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson’s hugely bestselling – but now forgotten – novel of the same name from 1950. Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger. According to the director’s Wikipedia entry, “Preminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.” On his own Wikipedia entry, Tryon is quoted as saying of The Cardinal, “To this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger. He was a tyrant who ruled by terror. He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names. He said I was lazy. He said I was a fool. He never cursed me. His insults were far more personal.”

I wonder if it’s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The Other, was a horror one. I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis, lover of Janet Leigh’s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The Psycho-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon’s novel.

The Other centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell… and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles’s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited. We get an idea of the meanness of Holland’s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell’s pet rats. Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a ‘Sunshine Biscuit box’ as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath. But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong ’un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.

Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland’s father Vining Perry. He died “while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage… Father started down with a basket… he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head…” As we learn more about Holland’s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining’s death was really an accident.

The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there’s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on. To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction – it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.

What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there’s a lot of other stuff. You get back-stories – most notably Ada’s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia – and sub-plots, including one about a ‘game’ that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes. Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era – from the popular radio-comedy show Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Irish tenor John McCormack, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.

You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories. Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: “On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.” The Perrys’ barn, meanwhile, is “venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road. Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed. This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.” At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb evoked the South.

I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today – when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots – would it ever escape from the slush pile? Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now… and not just because it’s set in 1935.

But that’s not meant as a criticism. The Other was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I’d found it a rewarding book. And it was a surprisingly downbeat one – the chills and nastiness, when they come, are chilling and nasty. You needn’t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book’s characters. Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.

From centipedepress.com

August 31, 2023July 29, 2024

The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection. This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream film industry had previously thought impossible. Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later). Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius. Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s. That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV. My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice. The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland. The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in. Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances. I was at college and staying in a hall of residence. The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon. As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR. Definitely not a big-screen experience. Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all. For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988. They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.” Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999. At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25^th anniversary.

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy. I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing. Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay. That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty. Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted. He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb. And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre. The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too. And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising. This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men. I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film. Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M. The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex. In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community. Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component. It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller. Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt. This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad. She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of. Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods. (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.) The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend. About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.” The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk. It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it. However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant. His movie had to have a killer tree!

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21^st century. This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts. First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing. For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’ Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name. This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy. A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it. An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe. “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick. Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy. When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to. I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee. The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films. I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops. He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges. He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom. He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice. Truly a man of many achievements.