It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  All this madness was in the air when that trailer started to work its weird magic as I sat there innocently waiting for Woody Allen to make merry in the Classic Hendon. The trailer started innocuously, unannounced, with a view of a darkened street and car headlights moving slowly toward the camera. A strange noise hung in the foggy air, a noise which it transpires was made by soundman Ron Nagle and composer Jack Nitzsche running their fingers over the tops of wine glasses, a popular party trick put to skin-crawlingly eerie use. I vaguely recognised the street but had no idea why. As the headlights moved closer the vehicle was revealed to be a black and red cab which swung round to the left and stopped, its rear passenger door opening to let a man step out into the night, battered valise in his left hand, hat on head, his increasingly familiar silhouette illuminated by an unearthly light shining from the first-floor window of a colonial-style house. The effect was like watching an explosion in reverse – seeing a group of disparately shattered elements being drawn inexorably together, reconfiguring themselves into something horribly recognisable …

  And then the voice began; quiet, low-toned, serious.

  ‘Something almost beyond comprehension is happening to a young girl on this street, in this house …’

  I didn’t like the sound of this at all.

  ‘ …and a man has been sent to help her. This man is …’

  Oh jeepers.

  ‘…The Exorcist.’

  At which point the picture froze into that iconic image that had been emblazoned on posters in Tube stations and bus stops all over the country – the black and yellow image of Max von Sydow standing outside the house on Prospect Street in Washington DC where the scariest thing ever was playing five times a day to shrieking, incandescent audiences.

  I was absolutely terrified – afeared for my very life.

  Of course, the trailer, like the poster, contained nothing that was overtly upsetting or shocking, merely the sight of an old man getting out of a car on a foggy urban street. How scary could that be? But somehow the utter absence of anything even remotely frightening merely made it all a million times more frightening. While traditional horror posters and ads would usually feature blood-curdling screams and terrified faces aplenty, the marketing campaign for The Exorcist seemed to imply that what was going on ‘on this street, in this house’ was so far beyond the bounds of acceptable screen terror that even to hint at its existence would be overstepping the mark. It was as if the film-makers were suggesting that the sight of this old bloke standing outside a house was the only thing they could show us without blowing our collective fuses. And in my case they were right.

  I went home that night with a head full of hideous visions of demonic possession – I even remember waking up and checking to make sure that if I turned my head it wouldn’t go all the way around like I had heard happened to the girl in the movie! Nor was I alone in this kind of madness. In the weeks and months after the opening of The Exorcist the entire country went on a bananas possession jag, with all manner of strange and antisocial behaviour being explained away with the phrase ‘The Devil Made Me Do It!’ In the wake of a story in the Daily Telegraph headlined ‘Man jailed after Exorcist attack’ the film’s dangerous reputation was increased by a widely reported claim that sixteen-year-old John Power had died after seeing The Exorcist (it transpired that he had suffered an unrelated epileptic attack, but hey – print the myth). In October 1975, a full eighteen months after the initial furore, seventeen-year-old Nicholas Bell claimed in York Crown Court that his killing of a nine-year-old girl had been driven by the Devil who had entered him after a screening of The Exorcist (Bell later admitted that ‘he made up the story about being possessed by the Devil in the hope that the police would let him go’). My favourite piece of cuckoo courtroom baloney came in the case of a woman accused of stealing a jacket and trousers from Top Shop who admitted the crime but claimed that she had become ‘psychologically disturbed’ after a viewing of The Exorcist – a viewing not by her, but by her teenage daughter, a sort of trauma by proxy which had turned her into a demonic shoplifter. Brilliant!

  Of course the film-makers exploited such insane publicity to the hilt. Stories of a demonic curse had long haunted the production of The Exorcist with supposedly supernatural occurrences ranging from the death of actor Jack MacGowran (whose character Burke Dennings dies in the film – spooky …) to the burning down of the house-interior set one Sunday morning. The film’s writer William Peter Blatty would regularly dismiss such rumours as ‘utter foolishness’ but when I made a documentary about The Exorcist for the BBC in 1998, Ellen Burstyn was still babbling happily about the deaths of nine people being somehow connected to the movie. Director William Friedkin also told me that he personally knew of a case in England in which a friend of one of the Royal princes, no less, had seen the movie and then run into the nearest church where he immolated himself upon the altar. I have never been able to find any record of such a case (and believe me, I have looked) and must conclude that it is just another of the bizarre urban myths which surrounded this most headline-friendly frightener.

  As for me, it would be a full five years before I finally got to see The Exorcist, on a late-night double bill with Ken Russell’s fiery classic The Devils. I remember sitting in my favoured aisle seat in the Phoenix in 1979, waiting for the movie to start, my entire body crackling with anxious electricity; I was so wired up I thought I might actually spontaneously combust. As the quiet opening credits began I remember looking around the cinema at the other punters in an attempt to reassure myself that we were all collectively going to be OK.’Look, there’s an old woman over there,’ the voice in my head said calmly.’She’s probably quite frail and she doesn’t look like she’s bothered. You’ll be fine …’

  That first viewing passed in an almost orgasmic whirl of fear, and remains one of the most genuinely transcendent experiences of my life. Rarely have I been more aware of being alive and in the moment than in the two hours that it took the movie to run through the projector that night. People talk endlessly about the damaging effects of horror movies but too little is heard about the life-affirming power of being scared out of your mind – and, in those very rare cases, out of your body. You ask me if I think there is more to this world than the grim ‘realities’ of ageing, disease and death, of mourning and loss, and I will refer you to that first viewing of The Exorcist during which my imagination took flight, my soul did somersaults, and the physical world melted away into nothingness around me. I don’t think that there is a spiritual element to human life, I know it because I have experienced it first-hand, and I have horror movies to thank for that blessing.

  Since then, I have seen The Exorcist about two hundred times (I stopped counting after the first hundred) and I can honestly say that there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about it, even if only for a moment. I know that sounds mad, and I fully appreciate just how boring I have become on the subject of ‘that film’, and how little sense my obsession with it makes to anyone else. I have written books about it (three editions of a ‘BFI Modern Classic’ which my friend Alan Jones has dubbed ‘everything you never wanted to know about The Exorcist but were scared Mark was going to tell you anyway’), made radio and television documentaries about it (The Ghosts of Prospect Street and The Fear of God, the latter of which now adorns DVD copies of the film) and even been vaguely instrumental in prompting the creation of an extended cut released in 2000 subtitled ‘The Version You’ve Never Seen’, of which director William Friedkin said ‘You’d better like it, because it’s kinda your fault it happened.’

  And, of course, I’ve stood outside that house on Prospect Street, stepping into the shadow of Max von Sydow, putting myself into the picture that haunted my childhood and which will surely follow me to my grave. Worse still, I have forced my entire family to make the pilgrimage to Georgetown just to parade up and down the precipitous steps which plummet from Prospect Street to M Street and which feature so prominently in the film –
first my long-suffering wife Linda, then more recently my kids and my mother, who haven’t even seen The Exorcist. Friedkin was once quoted as saying that on his gravestone would be engraved the words ‘The guy who made The Exorcist’. He meant it self-deprecatingly but at least he actually made the damn movie, of which he should be proud. On my gravestone it’ll just say ‘The guy who bored his family and friends to death with The Exorcist’.

  Of course The Exorcist is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my obsession with horror movies. Writing in the Guardian, the journalist and broadcaster Mark Lawson once asked ‘Did someone jump out of a cupboard and frighten [Kermode] at an impressionable age?’ I can recall no such event (and nor can any other self-respecting horror fan I know) but from a very early age horror movies struck a chord deep within me. As a kid I remember sneaking downstairs after my parents had gone to bed to watch ‘The Monday X Film’ on ITV. To avoid detection I had to have the sound turned right down, but even without words the silent shapes and shadows of those old chillers made perfect sense to me. It was, indeed, my first real experience of discovering something that was uniquely mine, something that existed outside the domain of my parents’ control and authority. And, of course, it was forbidden, secretive, taboo – and therefore irresistible.

  When I think back to those furtive nights in front of the cathode ray, the titles that stand out are old Hammer flicks like The Quatermass Xperiment (aka The Creeping Unknown) and The Curse of Frankenstein, alongside the Vincent Price frightener The Fly which became my ‘favourite movie of all time’ for about a week. I clearly remember walking to school one windy morning and reciting the entire plot of The Fly to a goggle-eyed friend who got so creeped out by my animated description of insect heads transplanted onto human bodies (and vice versa) that he literally started to cry. And I vividly recall returning home one afternoon to find that my father had left specific instructions with my mother ‘not to let the kids watch Village of the Damned’ which was playing on BBC1 that evening. The next day was hell on earth for me because it seemed that every other kid at school had stayed up to watch this tale of alien children taking over a small English village, and no one could talk of anything else. There were even kids who had brought in the book (John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos) just to relive some of the more terrifying moments in the playground. I was mortified – it was (to quote the underrated farting kids’ fantasy flic Thunderpants) ‘the worst day of my life – ever!’

  It is surely no coincidence that I spent many subsequent years obsessing about Village of the Damned, tracking down articles about the film in old movie magazines, reading everything John Wyndham had ever written, from The Kraken Wakes to Chocky to Jizzle and more, and even surreptitiously attempting to persuade my parents to ‘take us for a nice day out at Letchmore Heath’ where I knew that many of the key scenes of Village had been filmed. When I came to write my PhD thesis about modern English and American horror fiction fifteen years later, I would devote a lengthy section to The Midwich Cuckoos and its place within the canon of ‘paedophobic’ literature. To this day, the very thought of Village of the Damned gives me an illicit tickle. Significantly I can’t remember where I finally first saw it – only where I first didn’t see it.

  If there is a moral behind all this it is surely that attempting to repress something will only cause it to resurface elsewhere, bigger, stronger, and nastier. I am living proof of the inherent failure of censorship – if you tell me that I can’t watch something, then my desire to see it immediately will be equal and opposite to the force of your refusal. You know, like that law you learned about in physics lessons; let’s call it ‘Newton’s Law of Motion (Pictures)’. I’m honestly certain that if my father had never told my mother to tell me that I couldn’t watch Village of the Damned I would have forgotten about it long ago. As it is, at the age of forty-six I still feel an irresistible urge to slam my old VHS copy of the movie into the machine right now – just because I can.

  This electrifying awareness of the forbidden was clearly hard-wired into my psyche at an early age and frankly it has never gone away. Nor would I want it to. I have had fantastic times watching things I was told not to watch, and I pity those who have never known the delicious pleasure of good honest visual guilt. Look at Lars von Trier, whose recent movie Antichrist has been (wrongly) dubbed ‘the most shocking movie ever’. Von Trier reportedly grew up in a fantastically liberal Danish household in which rules were frowned upon and look what it did for him – he is now a self-confessed neurotic depressive who is ‘afraid of everything in life’ and makes movies about people cutting their genitals off with scissors. As for me, I was told clearly from an early age that certain things were just plain wrong, and I am now a very happy horror-film fan who has derived hours of harmless pleasure from watching people pretend to disembowel each other with chainsaws.

  And I sleep like a baby, since you ask.

  Righto then, there’s no point putting it off any longer. It’s time to deal with the man and the woman and the mysterious piece of lace corsetry in Krakatoa: East of Java. Or maybe not in Krakatoa: East of Java. Let’s see.

  I’ve popped into HMV and bought a copy of the film on DVD – a snip at £5. Astonishing that such a valuable piece of my childhood can be purchased so easily, and so cheaply. Nothing seems to have value any more.

  I slip the DVD into my laptop so that I can watch it while I write – another modern miracle. The film starts with a split-screen montage of a volcano exploding, and a hot-air balloon skittering through the skies which, as we have established, is pretty much all I remember about the movie other than that primal scene which probably isn’t even there anyway. After that, the first fifteen minutes are taken up with plodding plot exposition; the loading of the ship, introducing the passengers, establishing their personal needs and quirks – the usual disaster-movie fare. At some point in all of this we meet a vibrantly attired Barbara Werle whom I vaguely recognise from a couple of Elvis movies. I pause Krakatoa and check the Internet Movie Database and there she is, hot from supporting roles in Charro!, Harum Scarum and Tickle Me, the last of which has the honour of being the very worst film The King ever made – which is really saying something. Ms Werle looks great, but she’s blonde and her travelling companion is a clean-shaven Brian Keith, so it’s clearly not going to be them getting their fingers caught in the corsetry. A far more likely pair of canoodling candidates are Maximilian Schell and Diane Baker who take top billing and fit the physical description of the film playing in my head – he is dark, brooding and bearded, she is auburn and mysterious. Yup, the more I look at the pair of them meeting on the gangplank the more I can imagine him being heroically injured and her nursing him back to health with the aid of a piece of string. Or lace. Whatever.

  That is, of course, assuming that the scene is in the film – which it almost certainly isn’t.

  But guess what – it is, and a mere nineteen minutes into the action.

  I wasn’t making it up!

  I am stunned.

  Maybe this book isn’t going to be a bunch of half-remembered falsehoods, fictions and outright lies as predicted.

  I got the people wrong, however. And indeed almost everything else (so probably ‘falsehoods, fictions and lies’ after all). But there’s just enough of an echo of the scene which I described earlier to suggest that the fantasy film playing in my head actually was ‘inspired by real events’.

  Here’s what really happens.

  During that early scene with Barbara Werle, her character Charley meets the manly Maximilian Schell on the gangplank and gives him her card, boasting that she is a popular singer available for ‘Weddings, Social Occasions and Smokers’ – whatever ‘smokers’ were (and even before I knew the answer to that question, they sounded saucy). It is also established that her partner Harry (Brian Keith) is a diving expert of some renown and is embarking upon this voyage in order to earn money through his legendary salvaging skills. She is flirty; he is grumpy; they are both brok
e. And thus, when they retire to their cabin below decks, they begin to bicker. We, meanwhile, find ourselves hiding in the closet (oo-er) in which Ms Werle promptly starts to hang her clothes, the camera peering out in an eerie pre-echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s peeping Tom from Blue Velvet while Harry playfully badmouths Charley’s singing career.

  ‘You were so lousy,’ he says dismissively, throwing himself fully clothed on to his bed, ‘you put your piano player to sleep!’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says with a minxy smile, slamming the closet doors shut.’But I knew how to keep you awake, Harry.’

  And suddenly, this putative disaster movie turns into a musical, replete with non-diegetic orchestral accompaniment as Charley grabs the end of the four-poster bed and starts to sing, swaying suggestively.

  ‘I’m looking for an old-fashioned boy,’ she trills, ‘who’s looking for …’

  The camera angle changes and there it is! There’s the shot I remember; the shot with the man lying prostrate on his back, seemingly disabled (by sleep, or booze, rather than injury), his head to the left of frame, her body in the background, the camera skulking behind the bed, peering out from the skirting board.