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October 03
Yesterday after church a few folks got to talking about Halloween and scary movies. The Excorcist came up. I went to see The Exorcist with my dad when it first came out at a theatre on Main Street in ColumbiaSC. I saw a lot of movies with my dad that I shouldn’t have seen, but going to movies was one of the few things we did together, so I look back fondly back upon our movie going days. I think I was 16 when I saw The Exorcist. That means I saw it 32 years ago (when I was 16) and have not seen it since. I remember it pretty well. I doubt I’ll ever see it again, though I might.
I remember it as an excellent movie, as movies go. It was an important movie in my life, and for my spiritual journey an important piece of the puzzle. I was beginning to express interest in spiritual things and had by that time read a couple of CS Lewis books. But the spiritual dark side remained a hypothetical entity to me.
The Exorcist cured me of that. OK, the head spinning around and the green pea hurling were Hollywood gimmicks (after all, it WAS a movie), but for me, at that time in my life, that movie communicated truth, and a truth I wanted no part of. I won’t say it scared me in the sense that a scary movie might scare me. It wasn’t that. It scared me in the sense that my spiritual imagination was opened up to the truth and reality of the Dark Side, and that scared me. I had in my life as a child and pre teen played with Ouija Boards, and (I hate to admit) a lot of the kids in our neighborhood had even had séances. We had tried to conjure up dead people, and all sorts of stupid silly stuff that can be I think very spiritually dangerous. I am not going to go so far as to say that we succeeded, but I will say that some very strange things happened during those times.
Somehow I saw the connection between all that and the demonic realm displayed in The Exorcist, and it scared me. I vowed that I would never again go to movies that opened up my spirit to the demonic reality, so I missed Damien and The Omen and many of the movies that followed.
More significantly, for reasons I cannot fully explain, The Exorcist leant credibility to my first serious readings of the Bible. It was a part of the process that ended up in my becoming a Christian!
I also respected the movie’s treatment of the Catholic exorcists, and the actual spiritual work of the exorcists themselves. I still believe that the Catholics know better than anyone about that whole deal, and I would entrust a potentially demon possessed person to a Catholic exorcist before Pentecostal “demon behind every tree” kind of a dude any day. Nothing personal there, just my opinion.
In my first many years as a Christian, working and ministering the streets of Columbia, I came across many very strange goings on, not unlike what was depicted in the movie, though with no head spinning – including voice changes just like in the movie, things that would make your hair stand on end. I’ve had to face that and pray and stand against that, even not knowing for sure what I was dealing with. I don’t know for sure in retrospect if it was demon possession or some sort of multiple personality thing (like Sybil), but I’ve been too close to things too weird to dismiss outright.
I don’t think the people who made The Exorcist really intended that the movie would be used as a piece of the puzzle in bringing a person along to the Christian faith. But God is cool that way.
I wouldn’t recommend The Exorcist because of the potential of it having the opposite effect, creating an unhealthy interest in the Dark Side, and opening up a sensitive spirit to things better left alone.
And despite the appropriate fear the movie put into me, I still like green pea soup! Yummm.
Joel Gillespie
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