Highboy to Hell
Highboy to Hell
When you're in a horror movie and furniture is the only reliable narrator
There’s nothing I enjoy during Spooky Season more than a Great Horror Movie of the 1960s and ‘70s. The Exorcist meets all the criteria: it features a tough heroine who looks fierce in a turtleneck (the great Ellen Burstyn, in this case); its story unfolds against the backdrop of stylish interiors; professional intrigue distracts the main characters from Obvious Satanism; and finally, a true demonic emergency bends the skepticism of the protagonists to its breaking point.
The scariest thing about being in a horror movie, it seems to me, is the fate of not being believed. To describe what’s happening, you have to resign yourself to sounding unhinged, and especially if you’re a woman, you relinquish all your credibility in doing so. Like the other films in this genre (Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen are the other two standouts, in my opinion) the main character is a mother. All three mothers are sophisticated, resourced, and scared. Something is wrong with their child—not just wrong but impossible, yet true—and no one believes it.
A highboy dresser that weighs a ton is an early signpost in Rosemary’s Baby that something is afoot in the suspiciously affordable Dakota apartment that eventually becomes chez Woodhouse. It first appears strangely situated in front of a linen closet for reasons unknown, and it’s later revealed that it was put there by the previous tenant because she had disavowed her neighbors’ coven. (Who among us, etc.) Much of the action in The Exorcist takes place inside a Georgetown row-house kitted out in peak 1970s Colonial Revival style by set design team Bill Malley and Jerry Wunderlich. This is a style which—it must be said given the context—is powerfully evocative of Protestant decorating in this era, which is to say moneyed, understated, established, and not shiny. In one especially terrifying scene, a reproduction highboy and wing chair collude to attack Chris MacNeil, the movie star and mom whose daughter is in the early stages of demonic possession.
Objects play two important the roles in The Exorcist. First, archaeologists (including the Exorcist himself, Father Merrin) unleash something terrible while noodling around a dig site in an area identified on screen as Northern Iraq. They discover an apotropaic statuette—described by “evil against evil” by one of Merrin’s Iraqi colleagues—which was crafted to ward off a demon. So summoned, the demon gets right to work, using objects to make himself known, at first rather subtly. Things, and not people (until the priests arrive) are the only reliable narrators in The Exorcist. In the downstairs laundry room, Regan apparently attracts the demon by playing with a Ouija board she found there. This is made clear from the way the planchette (that’s the Ouija board pointer, who knew) zips out of her mother’s hands when Regan sits down to play with her. Chris and Regan seem blithely unaware of this, but the audience has no doubt.
Regan soon starts complaining that she can’t sleep because her “bed is shaking,” and Chris chalks it up to childhood nightmares, inviting Regan curl up beside her. But Regan’s increasingly bizarre behavior start to demand a real explanation, and every affectless doctor Chris interacts with remains convinced that more tests are needed to make a diagnosis, recommending that she “avoid the temptation to turn to psychiatry.” At first Chris shares their assumption the problem must somehow be medical, but then she finally experiences the enchanted furniture for herself—telling one of Regan’s doctors “the bed was shaking with me on it,” and after that, she truly believes something supernatural could be happening. Father Karras, the younger of the two priests who eventually perform the rite of exorcism that saves Regan, is every bit as skeptical as Chris when they first discuss the situation. He’s recently confided to a colleague that he’s losing his faith, and having been trained as a psychiatrist, he looks to clinical evidence rather than divine explanations when solving a mystery.
Everyone in The Exorcist, even the priests—with the exception of Father Merrin—is skeptical until they can’t be. At first no one believes Regan (the bed can’t really be shaking) and then no one believes Chris (“frontal lobe,” etc.) They only come around to the truth because they see something that both defies belief and is self-evidently true. The demon is the horror show, no doubt, but the prospect of living through a near-death experience and not being believed until it’s almost too late is scarier still. What’s anyone got to lose by believing women, anyway?