The Exorcist
Let's get something out of the way first: The Exorcist is not a woke movie. It is the opposite of a woke movie.…
Full analysis belowThe Exorcist is not a woke trap under any interpretation of VVWS v1.1. The margin is +25 TRAD and the verdict is STRONGLY TRADITIONAL. The film's sole woke-adjacent signal, an absent father and secular single-mother household, is a narrative precondition for the spiritual vulnerability story rather than an ideological endorsement of that arrangement. The film does not celebrate Chris MacNeil's absent-father household. It places a child in spiritual peril within it and then requires two Catholic priests to save her. The resolution is unambiguous: institutional Christianity, represented by the Church, the priesthood, and the sacrament of exorcism, defeats demonic possession. Faith wins. Science fails. The Church prevails. There is no irony here. No ambiguity about who has power over evil. The Exorcist is one of the most straightforwardly Catholic horror films ever made, and its STRONGLY TRADITIONAL verdict reflects that without reservation.
Our Verdict on The Exorcist
Let's get something out of the way first: The Exorcist is not a woke movie. It is the opposite of a woke movie. It is a film that says the Catholic Church has power over evil, that priests who sacrifice themselves in faith are heroes, that a mother's love combined with institutional Christianity can defeat demonic possession, and that the secular medical establishment is completely useless against the forces of darkness. If you want a film that affirms progressive values, you will not find one here. You will find a film that takes the existence of the Devil seriously.
William Friedkin made The Exorcist in 1973 from William Peter Blatty's adaptation of his own novel, and together they created the highest-grossing R-rated film in history at that point. People fainted in theaters. People vomited. People walked out. People also came back for second viewings, brought their friends, and made the film a cultural event unlike anything before it in American horror.
The story is simple. Chris MacNeil is a Hollywood actress filming in Georgetown with her 12-year-old daughter Regan. Regan begins exhibiting bizarre behavior. Medical science runs out of answers. A psychiatrist suggests exorcism as a placebo, not because he believes in it, but because Regan believes in it. Chris approaches Father Karras, a Jesuit psychiatrist who is losing his own faith following his mother's death. What follows is the confrontation between the demon Pazuzu and two Catholic priests.
The film's theology is unambiguous. Medical science, represented by the best Georgetown University Hospital has to offer, is shown the door. Psychiatry, represented by Karras's own specialty, is irrelevant. Institutional Christianity, represented by the Church's oldest and most rigorous ritual, is what works. The doctors are shown as helpless. The priests are shown as powerful. The exorcism actually functions. That is a strong statement about the respective merits of secular modernity and institutional faith, and Friedkin delivers it without irony.
Max von Sydow's Father Merrin arrives at the Georgetown brownstone with the air of a man walking back into a fight he already survived once. He knows this demon. The Northern Iraq prologue establishes that Merrin encountered Pazuzu before, in an archaeological dig, and that encounter left marks. He climbs the steps anyway. He walks into Regan's room anyway. The image of von Sydow standing under the streetlamp, briefcase in hand, light haloing him in the dark, is one of the great images in American cinema precisely because it means something specific: an old soldier of God, answering the call one more time.
Jason Miller's Father Karras is the film's real protagonist. His arc is the one the film is tracking. Karras has intellectualized his faith to the point of losing it. He treats the body but is uncertain about the soul. His mother died alone in a state hospital and he wasn't there, and that guilt is consuming him. The demon targets this. The demon knows what Karras doubts. The possession sequences are horrifying in their specifics, but they're structured as a theological argument: the demon's entire strategy is to make Karras stop believing. He speaks in the voice of Karras's dead mother. He attacks the very things Karras loves. And Karras holds on.
The ending is the film's theological statement at full volume. Karras commands the demon to enter him, sacrificing himself as the vessel. Then he throws himself out the window, refusing to let the demon use his body, choosing death over possession. He dies at the bottom of the stairs with Father Dyer giving him last rites. He recovers his faith in the moment of his death. That is not a nihilistic ending. That is a martyrdom.
Ellen Burstyn deserves more credit than she typically receives in discussions of this film. The Exorcist is remembered for its spectacular sequences but the film's emotional engine is Burstyn's performance as a mother being destroyed alongside her daughter. She is not a passive sufferer. She fights for Regan through every medical option available before coming to the Church. When she finally accepts that this is beyond medicine, it's not weakness. It's the logical conclusion of everything else having failed.
Linda Blair was 14 when she filmed The Exorcist. What she did, and what was done to her physically in terms of the rigging, the makeup, and the demands of the role, is something that would not happen to a child actor today. The performance is shattering not despite Blair's age but because of it. The contrast between the child she clearly is and what the demon is doing through her is the source of the film's deepest horror. No amount of special effects can replicate that.
For VirtueVigil readers, this is not a complicated film to score. The Exorcist argues that evil is real, that faith defeats it, that priests who sacrifice themselves for the innocent are heroes, and that the Catholic Church's oldest rituals have genuine power. The woke-adjacent signal, Chris's single-parent household and absent father, is a narrative setup that enables the spiritual vulnerability the story requires. The film is not celebrating it. A child in a household without faith and without a father is spiritually exposed. The demon finds that exposure. The Church closes it. That is a traditional moral framework delivered in the most viscerally effective way Hollywood has ever managed.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-parent / absent-father household as backdrop | 2 | High | Low | 0.7 |
| Secular elite (Hollywood actress) forced to humble herself before religious authority | 2 | Low | Low | 1.4 |
| Institutional religion depicted with procedural fallibility (initial skepticism of priests) | 1 | Low | Low | 0.7 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 2.8 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Christian faith and the Catholic Church as the only effective counter to supernatural evil | 5 | High | High | 6.3 |
| Priestly sacrifice as the highest heroic act | 5 | High | High | 6.3 |
| Evil as objective supernatural reality | 5 | High | High | 6.3 |
| Maternal love as the force that will not yield | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Faith recovered through crisis and sacrifice | 4 | High | Moderate | 2.8 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 26.7 | |||
Score Margin: +24 TRAD
Director: William Friedkin
TRADITIONAL. Friedkin spent most of his career making films about authority, crime, and moral order. The French Connection (1971), which won him his Oscar for Best Director, is a film that glorifies a brutal, rule-breaking cop because the cop is right. Popeye Doyle is not ideologically comfortable for a progressive audience. He is rough, obsessive, arguably racist, and completely correct about where the heroin is going. Sorcerer (1977) is a brutal existentialist thriller about men without redemption. The Exorcist is his masterpiece, and it is a film that takes the Catholic Church at its word. Demonic possession is real. Exorcism works. The priests are the heroes. Friedkin filmed the exorcism sequences with the seriousness of a man who believed in what he was depicting, and the result is a film that has never been matched for its commitment to the theological stakes. By the end of his career, Friedkin described himself as a fatalist rather than a committed believer, but The Exorcist reflects a filmmaker who understood that the film only works if audiences believe the supernatural framework is real. He made them believe it. The commitment is complete.William Friedkin was born in Chicago in 1935 and died in 2023. He came up through television before breaking into features with The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970). The French Connection (1971) made him one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. The Exorcist (1973) made him something else: the director of the highest-grossing R-rated film in history at the time of its release, the director who put horror on the Oscar stage for the first time, and the director who proved that audiences would willingly subject themselves to genuine spiritual terror if the filmmaking was committed enough. His subsequent career, Sorcerer, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A., Bug, Killer Joe, was uneven but consistently marked by an interest in men under extreme pressure operating outside normal moral frameworks. The Exorcist remains his defining achievement, and it is a film that has arguably done more for popular Catholic imagery than any other work of American cinema.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
The Exorcist rewards revisiting specifically as a film about faith under attack. Karras's crisis is the theological center. He is not a man who stopped believing because he thought about it too hard. He stopped believing because his faith could not absorb his mother's death and his absence from it. That grief curdled into doubt. The demon's strategy, speaking through Regan in the voices of the people Karras loves, attacking his specific wounds, is the film's most sophisticated theological detail. It suggests that evil's primary weapon is not spectacle but personal. It knows your doubts. It knows your failures. It uses them. Karras's recovery of faith is not intellectual. It is volitional. He chooses, in the moment of ultimate crisis, to act as if his faith is real, to take the demon into himself and then refuse to let it live. That choice, made under impossible conditions, is what the film defines as grace. Not certainty. Not the absence of doubt. The willingness to act anyway.
Parental Guidance
Rated R, 17+. The Exorcist contains some of the most disturbing content in mainstream American cinema: demonic possession depicted with complete physical commitment, graphic vomiting, blasphemy, sexual self-harm, and a child's body used as the vehicle for all of it. The psychological distress this film causes in sensitive viewers is real and documented. It is not appropriate for children or sensitive adults. For mature viewers, it is one of the most morally serious horror films ever made: a film that affirms the reality of evil, the power of institutional faith, and the heroism of men who give their lives for the innocent. The disturbing content and the theological substance are not separable. The film is as disturbing as it is because it believes what it is saying is true.
Is The Exorcist Safe for Kids?
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