2023-08-09 04:00:00
Renowned American director William Friedkin has died. At the age of 87, he passed away the same year as the 50e anniversary of the sensational release of his legendary film, The Exorcist.
I saw this movie only once in my life. In its full uncensored version. It was in the 80s. At the back of the almost empty room of a repertory cinema.
I discovered a horror film of brutal brilliance. The story of a young girl possessed by the devil and her mother in a desperate search for someone to free her from it is explosive.
Filled with both Christian and overtly sexual references, The Exorcist is a masterpiece. Cinematographically and philosophically, it is unforgettable. Besides that, even Roman Polanski’s equally mythical horror film, Rosemary’s Babyit is Master key.
But beware. Only in appearance. In fact, the real horror, the ultimate abomination, bursts in our faces at the very end of Rosemary’s Baby. At the opposite, The Exorcist surprisingly ends on a note of hope for mankind.
Dating from 1968, Polanski’s film tells the story of a young couple very much in love living in New York. In the apartment building where they rented, just next door, lives another older couple.
We gradually discover that this old couple is a member of a satanic sect. Worse still, he is in the direct service of the devil himself, Lucifer. This evil neighbor will secretly recruit Rosemary’s husband.
sell yourself to the devil
To advance his acting career, the latter agrees to “offer” his wife Rosemary to Lucifer. Thinking that she is pregnant by her husband, the true progenitor of her baby, the future messiah of darkness, is the devil himself.
After understanding the horrible fate that awaits her, she will give birth against her own will. No one she told the truth to save her believed her.
In short, we could do doctoral theses on these two films. What sets them apart the most, however, is hidden in their two opposite endings. As it goes back half a century, I allow myself to divulge them.
Friedkin’s film ends with the girl’s successful exorcism. Polanski’s, much darker, ends with the birth of Lucifer’s son and a Rosemary unable to give up her baby.
As the exorcised girl and her mother come back to life thanks to the sacrifice of a benevolent priest, it is hard to imagine the atrocities that the heir to the Prince of Darkness will one day commit when he is an adult…
A major difference
In other words, in The Exorcist, good triumphs over evil. In Rosemary’s Baby, evil – the true, the ultimate, the irrevocable – triumphs over good. A rarity in Western cinematography.
Polanski’s film, however, tells us the truth. Either it happens to see the evil defeating the good. More often than you might think.
Look at history. Evil with a capital M destroys without counting. Wars. Genocide. Rapes. Famines. Etc.
Now look around you. Evil falsely says “ordinary” – or if you prefer, the absence of good – it is there. It is the hypocritical abuse of vulnerable people by loved ones or governments.
It is the poverty that we neither want to see nor relieve. These are children left to suffer in toxic families. It’s child pornography. It is still and always the rapes of women and children.
It is the rejection of differences. It is when we forget that a fairer society is nevertheless possible. At least, if it is clearly required of decision makers. Etc.
Between the end of The Exorcist and the one at Rosemary’s Baby, which is the most prescient? It’s up to us to choose what happens next…
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#evil #triumphs #good..