The Oldest Trick: The Exorcist (1973)
In ancient Babylon and Assyria, Pazuzu was a demon you feared and invoked in the same breath. He brought famine and disease. He was also carried into birthing rooms and hung at doorways, because his image was powerful enough to drive away Lamashtu, the demoness who killed newborns. One evil set against another. William Friedkin’s 1973 film, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s novel, takes that logic and dismantles it. The Exorcist is a film about a demon who operates through misdirection, feeding medicine, psychiatry, linguistics, and the Church just enough to keep each one looking the wrong way, while saving his most devastating instrument for the one man in the room who is already halfway destroyed.
The demon at the door
The Exorcist opens in Northern Iraq. Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), an elderly priest on an archaeological dig, unearths a small statuette. The figure is Pazuzu: a Mesopotamian demon with a canine face, bird talons, and four wings. In Babylon and Assyria throughout the first millennium BCE, amulets bearing his image were hung at doorways and worn around the necks of pregnant women. His function was not protection in any gentle sense. He was the force set against Lamashtu, the goddess-demoness who preyed on newborns and mothers in labor.
More than sixty bronze Lamashtu plaques have been recovered from ancient Mesopotamian sites, and on many of them Pazuzu stands above the scene, hand extended, forcing Lamashtu back to the underworld. An inscription on a bronze Pazuzu statuette now held in the Louvre reads: “I am Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, king of the evil spirits of the air who emerges violently from the mountains in rage, it is I.” He was hung at doorways. He was carried into birthing rooms. You hung his image at the threshold not because he was kind but because Lamashtu was afraid of him – one evil deployed against another.
William Friedkin’s 1973 film, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name, takes that logic and strips it away entirely. In the film, Pazuzu has no redirectable power, nothing that could be turned back against itself. What remains is the capacity for misdirection, for crossing thresholds uninvited, for wearing a face that isn’t his own. Pazuzu arrives in a child’s bedroom in Georgetown, Washington D.C., and the first thing he does is make sure no one can name him.
The boy in Maryland
Blatty began writing the novel in 1971, but the seed was planted twenty years earlier. In the spring of 1950, while a student at Georgetown University, he heard a professor describe an exorcism case from the previous year: a fourteen-year-old boy in Maryland, identified in press accounts only as Roland Doe, whose family had witnessed furniture moving on its own, objects flying through rooms, and a voice that was not their son’s. Catholic priests conducted a series of exorcisms on the boy across several weeks in Maryland and Missouri. One of the attending priests kept a diary, and Blatty eventually obtained a copy.
For the novel, he changed the child to a twelve-year-old girl, moved the action to Georgetown, and named her Regan MacNeil. The core of what he took from Roland Doe’s case remained: the Ouija board, the violent reactions to sacred objects, the voices. What Blatty built around them was a theological argument: if something undeniably real forces its way into a world that has stopped believing in it, what happens to the people in the room.
The demon he chose came from the same region of the world as Father Merrin’s dig. Blatty was asked at a screening years later why he had settled on Pazuzu above any other figure from the demonological tradition. His answer was: “Because I saw it when I was over there and it scared the hell out of me.” The choice was visceral. What he didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t need to know, was that the figure he found frightening had spent three thousand years being hung at doorways to keep worse things out. The irony wasn’t engineered. It came with the statue.
Captain Howdy
Regan finds a Ouija board in the attic of the Georgetown house. Her parents are divorced, her mother is working long hours on a film production, and the girl is lonely. She begins using the board alone, and makes contact with something she calls Captain Howdy. She tells her mother about him with the ease of a child describing a new friend.
This is where Pazuzu’s strategy begins. The ancient demon, the figure whose grotesque image was placed at doorways to frighten away malevolent forces, enters a child’s room by presenting himself as companionship. The guardian becomes the intruder. He takes the one thing the protective tradition gave him, the ability to make contact, and uses it to cross the threshold in the direction it was designed to prevent.
The fracture he walks through is not supernatural. Regan’s father is never seen in the film. He doesn’t call on her birthday. In one of the film’s quietest and most devastating scenes, Chris is on the phone fighting with an overseas operator, trying to reach him, doing it within earshot of her daughter. Pazuzu finds a child in a house where the father is an absence, the mother is stretched thin, and the only company on offer is a board game played alone in an attic. The horror film convention demands a demonic explanation for what follows. The psychological explanation is already in the room before he arrives.
The progression is gradual. Regan begins waking in the night, complaining her bed is shaking. At a dinner party she urinates on the carpet, seemingly absent. The violence escalates in stages, each one giving the doctors and psychiatrists who examine her a slightly different picture. Captain Howdy is never mentioned again. By the time anyone understands what entered the house, the name has been retired.
Every framework, wrong
The standard account treats The Exorcist as a film about possession, about faith tested by the irrational, about the secular and the sacred colliding in a Georgetown townhouse. Beneath those readings runs a more specific and more disturbing mechanism. Pazuzu, voiced by actress Mercedes McCambridge, operates by feeding each system of interpretation exactly enough to stay wrong.
The doctors who examine Regan run neurological tests, conduct invasive cerebral angiography, find nothing. Regan has levitated. She has spoken Latin and French, languages she never studied, opened a dresser drawer without touching it, and has spoken in voices other than her own. The diagnostic frame fails because it cannot accommodate its own evidence. The psychiatrists see dissociation, an aggressive alter personality. Regan’s mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn) takes this to Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a Jesuit priest who also holds a psychiatry degree from institutions including Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He is trained to hold both frameworks at once, which makes him the most exposed person in the building.
Karras records Regan’s voice on a reel-to-reel tape and brings it to Georgetown’s Institute of Languages and Linguistics. The linguist tells him the recording is plain English spoken in reverse. Nothing supernatural. The Church, when Karras petitions for an exorcism, routes the case through institutional protocol and brings in the older, more experienced Father Merrin. Every expert is handed just enough to stay comfortable in their wrongness.
The film was released in December 1973. From May 17 of that year, the Senate Watergate Committee hearings ran on American television for fifty-one days. The hearings had been convened to investigate the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. the previous year, ordered by operatives working for President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and the subsequent cover-up that reached into the White House itself. CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS all broadcast the proceedings, with PBS replaying them gavel-to-gavel each evening. By the end, 85 percent of American households had watched some portion of them.
The country spent the better part of a year watching its government investigate itself, each body finding the explanation that preserved its own authority, each witness drawing the circle of culpability just short of the next man up. The Exorcist is not an allegory for Watergate, and flattening it into one would lose what makes it genuinely disturbing. The resonance runs deeper than allegory. Friedkin’s film and the hearings share the same cultural air. In 1973, every American institution was publicly failing to name what was in the room. Audiences watching the film already knew how that felt.
The specific wound
Then Pazuzu shifts register. The institutional strategy, the one that kept the doctors and psychiatrists and linguists looking the wrong way, has served its purpose. Now he turns to the individual.
Karras is a Jesuit who took a vow of poverty and was sent by the Society through medical school at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Bellevue. The church paid for everything. His uncle made the calculation out loud, in a hospital corridor: if Karras had stayed a psychiatrist instead of becoming a priest, he would be on Park Avenue. His mother would be living in a penthouse. She was in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue instead, and she died alone in her apartment in New York while Karras was stationed in Washington. The landlord found her two days later. Karras had asked for a transfer to be closer to her, but it came too late.
Pazuzu knows all of this before Karras walks into Regan’s room for the first time. The demon tells him his mother is dead and in hell before Karras has disclosed it. He has already said it flat, in the voice of the possessed child: “You killed your mother! You left her alone to die!”
During the exorcism, Regan turns toward Karras and transforms. She sits upright in her white nightgown and speaks in the voice of his dead mother. “Dimmy, why did you do this to me? Please Dimmy, I’m afraid.” Karras screams back: “You’re not my mother.” Merrin, who has returned to the room, recognizes what is happening and orders Karras out: “Don’t listen. Get out.”
The move is precise. Pazuzu has spent the entire film keeping every observer inside their own interpretive framework. The doctors saw neurology, the psychiatrists saw dissociation, the linguists saw reversed audio. Each framework is self-sealing, it explains away exactly what it cannot absorb. With Karras, the framework is guilt. The demon feeds it the one thing guaranteed to collapse him: his mother’s voice, asking why he abandoned her. The crisis of faith that Karras carries through the film is not really about God. It is about whether he is the man his vow of poverty made him, or the man who left his mother to die alone with a radio on. Pazuzu reaches into that and pulls.
Dimming the lamps
What Pazuzu does to the institutions is not gaslighting. The doctors, the psychiatrists, the linguists, the Church’s bureaucratic process: none of them are made to doubt their own perception. They perceive accurately and reach the wrong conclusion. Pazuzu withholds rather than distorts. He gives each system exactly what keeps it comfortable inside its own framework. That is misdirection. It is a different operation.
The gaslighting is reserved for Karras. One man, one room, a dead woman’s voice deployed against a specific and already open wound. That is the mechanism Patrick Hamilton, an English playwright, gave a name in 1938. His play Gas Light describes a husband who secretly dims the gas lamps in his house and then denies it to his wife until she begins to doubt her own perception of reality. George Cukor filmed the story in 1944 as Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman as the wife and Charles Boyer as the husband, and the title passed into the clinical vocabulary of psychological abuse.
In 2022, Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its word of the year, a signal of how thoroughly the concept had saturated contemporary culture. By then the word had travelled from a 1938 stage play through the psychiatric textbooks and onto everyone’s phone, where TikTok turned it into a genre: millions of short videos cataloguing the signs, comment sections full of people placing their own experience inside the framework, the word applied to politicians, corporations, algorithms, and ex-partners with equal conviction. The film was mapping the same mechanism in 1973. When Pazuzu finally uses it, the target is one man in one room, and the guilt is already there waiting for him.
The literary line runs through Iago, the ensign in Shakespeare’s Othello (circa 1603) who engineers Othello’s destruction by feeding each character a version of events calibrated to their specific weakness, and through Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s con artist and identity thief in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), who survives by making each observer see the story they already need to see. Pazuzu runs both operations simultaneously, on the same target. By the time the Church calls in Merrin, every institution that should have resolved the situation has already failed, and faith arrives as a last resort because reason ran out. Then Pazuzu turns to the one man left standing and reaches for the thing that will finish him.
The one calculation he missed
Karras ends the film by inviting the demon into himself and throwing himself from Regan’s window, tumbling down the stone steps outside. The reading that the film invites is sacrificial, a priest giving his life to free a child. Watched through the frame of coercive manipulation, it means something more specific. Pazuzu has spent the entire film making sure every person in the building stays inside the story they already believe about themselves. He has made each one progressively more trapped inside the story they already carry. What he cannot survive is a man who steps outside every framework at once, who makes a single, irreversible choice before the demon can reframe it.
The ancient Pazuzu was directable. His destructive power could be aimed outward, and set against something worse than himself. Blatty’s Pazuzu has lost even that. He has no counterpart to fight, no Lamashtu to drive back. He has only the people in the room and the particular shape of each one’s wound.
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