In the Flesh: The Exorcist III

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist I

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist III is a bit of an oddment in the annals of 80s and 90s franchise horror. The film was conceived of by Blatty himself, and while studio meddling saddled him with a shoehorned exorcism scene and various other last-minute changes, it’s several cuts above the rest of its small corner of the genre. Blatty’s script, for one, is outlandish and offbeat, full of digressive monologues about carp in bathtubs and the nature of evil that would fit neatly into the uncanny soap opera tone of Twin Peaks, which had just premiered several months before the film’s release. George C. Scott takes on the role of detective Kinderman with real aplomb, and his sagging bloodhound features and signature lisp give the tired and oddly cultured cop an oddball gravitas. It’s believable that this is a man who has given up on the world, too smart to put his head down and go along to get along, too stubborn to stop trying to shovel shit against the tide. We meet him as he berates another officer for racist ignorance and for not understanding MacBeth, quintessential futile causes.

In the split role of Patient X/James “the Gemini Killer” Venamun, Jason Miller and Brad Dourif create a deliciously queasy dramatic tension. Caught in the same body, exhausted by the same endless struggle, the two men seem to have fallen together through a hole in reality, their twin negative state giving rise to an unseemly positive, their deaths deferred endlessly at the cost of other lives. Miller radiates a weariness so bone-deep that even his menacing demonic monologues feel like Lear, and his hoarse urgency in the film’s final moments is so real and so heartbreaking it feels almost shameful to witness, as though we’re intruding on a moment of profound vulnerability between old friends in crisis. Editors Todd Ramsay and Peter Lee Thompson pull one of the finest match cuts I’ve ever seen out of thin air to cap it, whipping us away from the climactic gunshot to the shimmering disk of a red sun, at once a lingering icon of sorrow and a harsh, grisly visual euphemism, and also a clear homage to Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cut from a match to the rising sun.

Blatty makes admirable lemonade out of the studio demands he’s forced to contend with. The skin peeling effects during the exorcism sequence are unbelievable, and to his great credit he manages to find some cohesion between the torrent of special effects and the film’s determined, bloody-minded wrestling with the Problem of Evil. The film’s Foley work is echoing and stentorian, its voice mixing giving its demonic entities a sense of sickly old-world grandeur. A scene in which a catatonic patient possessed by one such spirit scuttles across a drop ceiling just over Kinderman’s head utilizes the light, dry scratching of fingernails on foam board to great effect. Perhaps most stunning, though, is Kinderman’s dream of an afterlife equal parts banal, overwhelming, and quietly tragic where Fabio in the form of an angel walks alongside a young murdered Black boy, an absurdist stroke of genius which renders the church’s attempts to circumvent and delay discussion of social injustice at once obviously cruel and craven. The Exorcist III is hardly a perfect film, but in pushing so deeply into the metaphor of Satan using a priest's body to torment his soul and the world around him, it touches something dark and elemental.