Deadlights: Growing Up Is Hard to Do

As a society so much of our collective anxiety focuses on the next generation. This anxiety takes many forms, ranging from agita about media habits (“Times are bad," said Cicero somewhere around 50 B.C. "Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”) to deeper fears of our own adult mortality, of being supplanted by younger people whose lives we don't fully understand. Horror, unsurprisingly, has a great deal to say about the ways in which adults fear and resent children. William Friedkin's The Exorcist revolves in large part around the fear we feel at seeing children adopt adult mannerisms.

Regan, a young girl possessed by an ancient demon, is the focal point of the film's anxiety about childhood and the passage from it into adulthood. Her possession is in fact strongly reminiscent of puberty as her skin erupts with sores and she begins to talk back viciously to her mother and to both perform and discuss sexual acts with a rancid kind of earthiness. She very literally becomes another person, a stranger to her parent and an enemy to the establishment in the persons of the two priests who attempt to free her from her possessor.

In the end the film's priests are only able to end Regan's torment through self-destruction. Father Karas forces the demon into himself and then jumps from a high window to his death, symbolically abandoning the threshold of adult so that Regan can cross it herself without resistance. There is beauty in that sacrifice but also a harsh lesson about our inability to accept the passage of time. Just as Karas struggles to cope with his aging mother's dementia and the idea that she can no longer care for him as her child, both he and Regan's mother fight against Regan's sudden escape from the strictures of their adult control.

Horror like The Exorcist is a vital tool for self-examination of cultural anxieties which too often go unacknowledged. In its shocking depictions of adolescent sexuality it uncovers deep, foundational fears of apocalypse and ruination, of seeing the world you've come to know collapse into a terrifying new shape even as your ability to touch and influence it wanes. Perhaps most importantly it touches on the realization that these fears live within us, that they're disconnected from reality, and that we can let them wash over us without defining our lives through resistance to change and maturation.