Opinion Express View: After The Exorcist
William Friedkin’s classic film showed how thin the line that separates ‘genre’ from ‘art’ really is
By the time Friedkin made The Exorcist, horror had been reduced to scare fare, a guilty pleasure meant to fill seats in cinema halls, and not to set artistic standards. If horror today is considered a respectable genre in cinema, at least some of the credit must go to William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, who died this week at the age of 87. Based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty, the film marked a turning point in the development of the genre, becoming the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
Never mind that it lost to The Sting, a caper film starring two of the day’s biggest stars, Robert Redford and Paul Newman. In cinema history, the 1973 film about the demonic possession of a young girl has proved to be more of a milestone, marking the moment that horror — long dismissed by critics as delivering cheap thrills and laughable jump scares — began to be taken seriously.
Horror’s poor reputation might seem odd, considering the universal love for stories about things that go bump in the night, a popularity that predates the invention of movies. In fact, among the earliest films made are classics such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu. It is possible that the overreliance on blood and gore, in place of the imaginative camerawork and storytelling of the early years, is what led to the fall in horror’s standing in subsequent decades.
By the time Friedkin made The Exorcist, horror had been reduced to scare fare, a guilty pleasure meant to fill seats in cinema halls, and not to set artistic standards.
Not that Friedkin had set out to make horror respectable again. He said in later interviews that he was moved by the “powerful, emotional, disturbing” story, and had never thought of his film as “a classic horror film”. The film’s success — as well as that of The French Connection, his Oscar-winning 1971 film which set the template for the thriller genre — showed how thin, even unnecessary, the line that separates “genre” from “art” really is.
Share
