by Sady Doyle
This movie struck people as not just frightening, but actively evil. When something hits a nerve, it’s important to figure out which nerve it’s hitting.
One answer lies in Ebert’s “indescribable obscenities,” by which he probably meant one very specific, very infamous scene. In it, we see the possessed girl, Regan, masturbate with a crucifix—either she somehow injures her vagina in the process or else she’s on her period; either way, there’s a close-up of a twelve-year-old’s blood-drenched genitalia in this movie—then get caught by her mother, and then attempt to rape her mother by pressing her face into the aforementioned blood-drenched genitalia. This whole chain of events takes up a few seconds of screen time, and is somehow not the grossest thing in the movie. (For my money, the bit where Regan manages to vomit into somebody else’s mouth is the real lunch ruiner.) It is, however, a sequence that revolves pretty much entirely around bad things that can happen to and/or because of the human vagina. We don’t tend to see a lot of vaginas in mainstream cinema, and the ones we do see stand out.
For all its talk of God and the unseen world, The Exorcist is intensely, obsessively concerned with bodies—specifically the adolescent, female body of Regan, the locus of evil wherein all the film’s supernatural activity takes place. Though we get a few shots of furniture flying around the room—a story about a monstrous tween wouldn’t feel right without them—the movie’s scares come almost entirely from her physical transformation. Piss, puke, phlegm, blood (vomited), blood (vaginal), and, of course, pus (for when all that blood scabs over); pretty much every fluid or semifluid substance the body can produce is featured at some point, and it’s all coming from her. The only thing missing is diarrhea, and in William Peter Blatty’s original novel, we are in fact assured that Regan is wearing a diaper.
We are meant to be utterly revolted by this girl. And why wouldn’t we be? Her mother is. “She had noticed a sudden and dramatic change in her daughter’s behavior and disposition,” Blatty writes. “Insomnia. Quarrelsome. Fits of temper. Kicked things. Threw things. Screamed. Wouldn’t eat. In addition, her energy seemed abnormal. She was constantly moving, touching, turning; tapping; running and jumping about. Doing poorly with schoolwork…. Eccentric attention-getting tactics.”26
It gets worse: Her smooth baby skin erupts and scabs over into a weeping, discolored mess. She has outbursts of temper, insults and resists authority figures, makes displays of sheer pointless defiance wherein she flouts the authority of God and man alike. She talks obsessively about sex, mostly to shock people. One minute she curses and shrieks and hates everyone, and the next minute she’s a little girl who wants her mommy. Her voice deepens. She masturbates. She bleeds from her vagina.
In other words, Regan becomes a teenager. Which, given that she’s twelve years old, is exactly what you’d expect to happen, with or without the blessing of Mother Church. “Your mother sucks cock in hell” isn’t exactly “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret,” but it’s in the same neighborhood—and it’s probably truer to how tween girls talk. The demon inhabiting Regan isn’t just something that happens to her during puberty. Her demon is puberty. At its core, The Exorcist is arguing that female sexual and reproductive maturity is sinful, and that God condemns little girls who grow up.
This is the ideological force driving all those stories about toxic period blood and PMS-induced hauntings. In a culture where we’re trained to protect children and loathe women, the border zone between the two states is the subject of intense superstition and terror. Puberty marks not only a girl’s first steps toward adult sexuality, but the beginning of her reproductive capacity—the life-giving potency signaled by menstrual blood. Her blood is terrible because her power is threatening; her fertility is something patriarchy must demonize and control in order to secure its own existence. Thus, puberty, as a place where daughters begin to turn into mothers, becomes a supernatural event in which a person turns into a monster.
When her body changes, Regan becomes someone else; someone sexual, whose desire is a dark visitor, corrupting her and hollowing her out from within. The presence of sex is a poison, destroying everything lovable or good about her: Regan’s first sexual experience hits the markers for masturbation, lesbianism, sadism, masochism, rape, and incest in thirty seconds and a single “lick me.” To become a woman is to become the worst thing on Earth, the enemy of all that is pure or holy.
In The Exorcist, the priests are able to put the demon back in its box, restoring Regan to childhood. In life, the transformation is irrevocable. Every woman is a girl who fell from grace, a monster who once was human. Puberty marks the point where girls stop being people and start being women, where it becomes important to ensure their submission to male power. If that means training girls to hate themselves, or to see their own sexuality as the most horrifying thing imaginable, so be it. What could go wrong?
Lost Souls
That Anneliese Michel believed herself to be possessed is not in question. She believed it the way she believed in God, with total, self-annihilating certainty. The problem was that her family agreed with her, and that they let her kill herself as a result. Anneliese, who was born in Bavaria in 1952, was raised in a version of Catholicism so severe it was nearly medieval. In one 1976 poll, 89 percent of Germans said “no” when asked if there was a Devil.27 Yet when Anneliese started experiencing blackouts and convulsions at age sixteen, “the Devil” struck her parents as a plausible explanation.
The Michels didn’t reject science out of hand. Anneliese was diagnosed with epilepsy as early as 1969, and took medication until the end of her life, though her family claimed it never worked. As her hallucinations and mood swings became more severe than epilepsy alone could explain, she was placed on antipsychotics, though the state of psychiatric medication in the ’70s was primitive, and those medications never seemed to work, either. (It didn’t help that she may have stopped taking them.) It was in 1973, just before Anneliese was supposed to leave for college, that things took a dangerous turn. She was already seeing demonic faces and hearing voices that told her she belonged in hell. That fall, she told a neurologist that “the devil is in me, I am all empty inside.”28
It was the sort of thing their family took very seriously. And so, instead of looking for ways to convince their daughter she wasn’t possessed, the Michels started looking for signs that she was. It was Anna Michel, Anneliese’s mother, who reported seeing Anneliese standing motionless before a statue of the Virgin Mary; “her face was like a terrible mask, full of hatred,” with “black, jet black” eyes.29 She also claimed her daughter sometimes had “paws” like an animal, instead of human hands.30 Both things could easily have been attributed to her epilepsy—dilated pupils are often a sign of a seizure in progress, and her classmates had noticed that Anneliese’s hands contracted into a claw-like shape when she seized—but Anna went looking for the Devil, and the Devil is what she saw.
The Michels petitioned their church for an exorcism twice, and were refused both times; there wasn’t enough evidence that Anneliese was possessed, rather than ill. Exorcism still played a role in the Catholic belief system in the mid-’60s, but it was something of an embarrassment—likely on its way to being phased out, along with Latin masses and other unpleasant reminders of the Dark Ages. Even true believers agreed it should be done very, very rarely.
The Exorcist, for those keeping track, came out on December 26, 1973. By the mid-1970s, the number of Catholic exorcisms performed worldwide had risen from a handful into the thousands. And in 1975, the Church gave Anneliese her exorcists.
By that time, she lived in the kind of ugliness that is hard to comprehend. She genuflected until both her knees broke from the strain. She ate insects, chewed the head off of a dead bird, drank her own urine. She bit her family; she bit herself. At one point, she crawled under a table and started barking like a dog. This initially sounds goofy, not frightening. Then you realize she did it without sto
pping for two straight days.
The Church sent Fathers Ernst Alt and Arnold Renz to perform the ritual. And when the first exorcism didn’t work, they agreed to do it again. And again, and again; all told, Alt and Renz put Anneliese through the full rite of exorcism sixty-seven times in nine months, without any improvement. In fact, the more the priests exorcised Anneliese, the worse she got. Still, she clung to the ritual. No matter how harrowing it was, it must also have been a validating experience. For several hours each week, everyone she knew gathered around her and told her she wasn’t sick, she wasn’t wrong, she wasn’t imagining things, she wasn’t doing any of this on purpose. She really was being plagued by demons.
But even as Anneliese’s life degenerated into a constant round of failed exorcisms, there were elements of her possession that didn’t add up. The Church teaches that demons must be coaxed into revealing themselves; they don’t want to get kicked out of the victim’s body, so they hide, especially when a priest comes around. Yet Anneliese’s demons began chatting up the priests immediately—mostly about how disastrously permissive modern German Catholics were, which was not an unexpected topic of conversation in the Michel home. (“Rotated altars,” it turned out, were Protestant, and offended the Lord: “The Catholics, stupid as they are, copied it from them…. [Catholics] have the true doctrine there and they follow the others like a whore!”31 This was after the demons weighed in on priests attending secular universities and the ethics of first-trimester abortion, both of which the Lord was similarly against.) Also, Anneliese’s demons were not always demonic. Lucifer was in there, and he surely counted—but Adolf Hitler and the Roman emperor Nero, who also showed up, were less supernatural entities than they were bad people. (Anneliese’s choice of demons reflected intimate conflicts as much as cosmic ones: Even the other demons reviled Hitler, but Anneliese’s father had fought for the Nazis and used to entertain the children with stories about his military service.) The demons repeatedly referred to Anneliese as “snotnose,” which was the name her bullies had taunted her with in school.
The biggest tell is so obvious most people miss it: website after website has posted the recordings of Anneliese’s exorcism, warning listeners about the bone-chilling, guttural, inhuman voice that they’re about to hear. They seldom mention that this unearthly voice is a spot-on impression of The Exorcist’s Mercedes McCambridge as the voice of Pazuzu.
Still, in the exorcism boom of the mid-1970s, and in a case as theatrical as Anneliese’s, it made a certain amount of sense for the priests to just roll with it. Which is why, when Anneliese announced that the Virgin Mary had told her to stop taking her medication so that she could die a martyr, everyone just rolled with that, too.
She starved to death. Correction: Her parents let her starve herself to death, in her own home. So did her priests, who continued performing the exorcisms even as it became clear that Anneliese intended to die. By the end of her life, she weighed sixty-eight pounds. Photographs show her with two black eyes, broken teeth, cuts and sores on her face. In one photo, Anna holds her daughter in a headlock as she screams. In another, Anneliese’s pupils subtly point in two different directions, in the unfocused, agonized glare of the dying.
In the trial that followed, Alt and Renz were convicted of negligent homicide and sentenced to three years’ probation; Anna and Josef Michel, despite receiving the same guilty verdict, were deemed to have suffered enough.
“I know that we did the right thing because I saw the sign of Christ in her hands,” Anna told The Telegraph in 2005. “She was bearing stigmata and that was a sign from God that we should exorcise the demons. She died to save other lost souls, to atone for their sins.”32
“Mother,” Anneliese said as she died, “I’m afraid.”33
Demon Daughters, Dead Girls
I wish I could tell you that this was the only story of its kind.
Since The Exorcist initiated that first boom, the demand for Catholic exorcisms has never died down. The Catholic Church is scrambling to put a qualified exorcist in every diocese, to meet increasing demand; in 2014, Father Francesco Bamonte of the International Association of Exorcists told The Independent that “the few exorcists that we have in the dioceses are often not able to handle the enormous number of requests for help.”34
Those requests are almost certainly not coming from male congregants. Prior to The Exorcist, demonic affliction may have been gender-neutral. The case Blatty based his book on, the famous Roland Doe exorcism, centered on a prepubescent boy. But ever since 1973, our fictional image of a possessed person has remained constant: a teenage girl or a very young woman writhing and twitching in hysterical arches. And, as per a 2014 investigation, of all the Catholics asking to be exorcized, “75 percent are women—a very large majority of whom are victims of sexual abuse.”35
As with poor, haunted Esther Cox, sexual violence and spiritual violence seem to go hand in hand; women still believe their trauma is a sign of spiritual pollution. But in a culture that tells women that merely feeling our own anger will summon the forces of hell, what else would they believe?
Just as we still look for supernatural evil instead of human abusers, we still insist on seeing demonic influence where there are only girls in pain. In 2016, Linda Chaniotis wrote for The Guardian that “I reportedly screamed from the age of three months to three years old,” and that she had refused to let anyone but her mother touch her. In response, “my parents decided that when I was about two, I had been cursed by a witch, and that I was demon possessed.”36 She was exorcized repeatedly and unsuccessfully; she learned to run and hide the moment she felt her “demon” starting to emerge, so that her parents wouldn’t be angry. It wasn’t until she was thirty years old that her doctor told her she was epileptic, and that she had been hiding the seizures her whole life.
But she lived. Anneliese did not. Maricica Irina Cornici—a twenty-three-year-old Romanian nun who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after she began giggling uncontrollably during Mass—did not. Her fellow nuns gagged her and chained her to a cross for three days, so that a priest could perform an exorcism; she died just after the chains came off. It’s because of incidents like these that mental health organizations routinely lobby the Church to ban or at least modify the practice of exorcism. And to be fair, the Church has tried to install safeguards. In 1999, for example, the rite of exorcism was updated to mandate a preliminary consultation with “experts in medical and psychiatric science who have a sense of spiritual reality.”37 In theory, exorcisms can only proceed in cases where a doctor has ruled out mental illness. In practice, Cornici was killed in 2005, long after those guidelines were put into effect.
Besides, when people can’t get their priests to perform exorcisms, they do it themselves. Seventeen-year-old Charity Martin was killed in 1998 because she was “depressed and had lost her willpower,” which her mother construed to mean that she was “consumed by a demon”; in an attempt to drive it out, she taped a plastic bag over her daughter’s head and let her suffocate.38 Five-year-old Amy Burney of Staten Island, New York, threw too many tantrums. To exorcize the demons responsible, her mother and grandmother forced her to swallow a potion made primarily of vinegar and ammonia, taped her mouth shut, and, when it became clear that she was dead, threw her body out with the garbage.
You could happily go your whole life without hearing that last story. But maybe you should hear it anyway. Maybe you should have to. There is deep brutality in how we fear our girls.
Incorruptible
The body of Anneliese Michel was exhumed, at her parents’ request, in February 1978. The Michels had received a letter from a Carmelite nun who’d had a vision, telling them that Anneliese’s body had not decomposed in the grave. Incorruptibility of the flesh is a sign of sainthood; if Anneliese were untouched, that would prove that she was a martyr. Not coincidentally, given the fact that the Michels were about to go on trial for killing their daughter, it would also
exonerate them, proving that whatever verdict the secular world might hand down, they really had done the right thing.
Hundreds of spectators came to see the unearthing of the demon girl; even then, Anneliese drew crowds. Yet Anna and Josef Michel, along with Anneliese’s priests, were kept outside of the cemetery. No one wanted them looking directly at the girl’s body. This wasn’t done to spare their feelings; given the nature of the charges, no one could be sure what the Michels would claim to see.
What everyone else saw was rot. The official finding was that Anneliese’s body showed deterioration consistent with two years of burial. The nun had been wrong; Anneliese’s corpse was no more miraculous than any other girl’s.
But in another sense, Anneliese did prove strangely resistant to decay. The questions posed by her lone, young, female body—who was inside it; what was wrong with it; what, if anything, would have fixed it—refuse to be forgotten, or to fade. Today, Anneliese is a legend. Paranormal enthusiasts trade clips of her exorcism tapes; devout Catholics visit her grave, honoring her as a saint. Her deathbed photos are featured in the short-lived TV reboot of The Exorcist—Anneliese, finally absorbed back into the story that changed and ended her life—and BuzzFeed and Cracked put up posts about her case, hoping to spook their readers.
