The Exorcist

While Dr. Klein examines Regan, she suddenly sits up and spits in his face. Afterward, in his office, Klein and Chris talk about what has happened to the young girl. They cannot find a medical explanation for Regan’s behavior, which now includes forgetting things, including a phone call from her father during which “she just called [Howard] a ‘cocksucker’ and hung up the phone” (67). Klein is dumbfounded but intrigued when he learns that Regan can now speak to Captain Howdy without the need for the Ouija board. He recommends another series of tests, beginning immediately. 

Regan needs sedation for an EEG, but when a nurse approaches with the needle, Regan screams obscenities. Klein is surprised to find that he double the sedative for it to have any effect on Regan. Much to his consternation, however, the test results reveal nothing, so Klein suggests epilepsy as a possible diagnosis. In the past, people thought epilepsy was demonic possession. He recommends a series of x-rays and changes Regan’s prescription from Ritalin to Librium. He also recommends that Chris keep a close eye on Regan, especially around windows. 

After the x-rays, Chris and Regan return home. Sleepy and unresponsive, Regan goes immediately to bed. Chris securely shuts the large window in Regan’s room. Chris talks to her agent about her directing job. She must start soon, since any delays might cost her the job. Chris asks her agent to stall as long as he can. Mary Jo left Chris a book, A Study of Devil Worship and Related Occult Phenomena; Chris asks Sharon to read the book for her. Chris goes to bed and, by the next morning, the book has vanished.

Dr. Klein and a neurologist examine Regan’s x-rays, but find nothing to explain the girl’s condition. Chris calls Dr. Klein, desperate, and asks him to come right away. Accompanied by the neurologist, Klein visits the house, where Regan is “flailing her arms as her body seemed to fling itself up horizontally into the air above her bed and then slammed down savagely onto the mattress” (76). A terrified Chris asks Klein to explain what is happening. Regan complains that someone is burning her; her legs rapidly cross and uncross as she mutters incomprehensible words in a guttural tone. As Klein tries to examine Regan, she knocks him across the room. A coarse and powerful voice comes from Regan, announcing, “the sow is mine” (76) and warning others to keep away. Lifting up her nightgown, Regan screams obscenities while masturbating. She makes animal noises and begs for help. Klein readies an injection while the neurologist tries to hold Regan still. She screams in pain, her body arching into impossible shapes. Just as they grab her, she becomes limp, wets the bed, and falls asleep. They inject her while discussing the medical possibilities of what they have just seen. 

Chris and Sharon comfort one another, as Chris can hardly contain her anger and frustration at the doctors. The neurologist, Dr. David, recommends a Lumbar tap. Chris recounts to Klein what preceded her phone call: Regan had run screaming to her mother, terrified that Captain Howdy was chasing her, pinching her, and punching her. As Regan collapsed into spasms, she cried out that Captain Howdy was trying to hurt her. Klein offers Chris a tranquilizer to help her through the difficult story. Chris saw hate in her daughter’s eyes, as though she was someone else. David leaves for another appointment. Klein performs the Lumbar tap, extracting Regan’s spinal fluid, and recommends a sedative if Regan wakes up in the night—Sharon knows how to administer the injection. Chris accompanies Klein to the hospital in order to run the tests. At the hospital, however, the tests reveal little. He admits that it may be time to call a psychiatrist.

At home, Chris finds Regan asleep in her bed and the window wide open. A strong smell of urine permeates the room. Sharon reveals that Burke stayed with Regan while Sharon visited the drug store—she now regrets trusting Burke to stay at home and teaches Chris how to administer an injection. Karl arrives home late. Then, close to midnight, the second unit director telephones with bad news: Burke is dead. Drunk, he fell down the long flight of stairs beneath Regan’s window. Distraught, Chris stays up late reminiscing with Sharon. At just after five o’clock in the morning, Sharon fetches more ice from the kitchen. As she returns, Chris sees Regan behind Sharon, “gliding spiderlike, rapidly […] her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet […] her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent” (84). Regan licks at Sharon’s ankle. Sharon screams. Chris calls the doctor.

Chris waits in the hall while Klein and “a noted neuropsychiatrist” (85) examine Regan, who screams and writhes. She bites and fights back when they attempt to tranquilize her. When she is sedated, Regan begs for her mother and complains that Captain Howdy is causing pain all over her body. The neuropsychiatrist tries to hypnotize Regan, darkening the room and ignoring attacks by objects in the room. Watching a swinging silver bauble, Regan slips into a trance and says that there is sometimes a different person inside her. 

The psychiatrist begins to speak directly to the person inside Regan, whose breath turns suddenly foul while the muscles in her face pull in horrific directions. Inside Regan is Nowonmai, a man who speaks in a foreign language. He hates Regan and wishes to punish her, harm her, and kill her. If Regan dies, Nowonmai will not die with her, he claims. Regan grabs the psychiatrist’s scrotum in a vice-like grip, cackling as he struggles to free himself. Chris rushes to turn on the lights, while Regan makes animal noises and the doctor writhes in agony. The bed shakes, Regan’s eyes roll up into their sockets, and, suddenly, she collapses. The doctors untangle themselves, check her pulse, and then leave the room. 

After a long period of silence, Chris denies knowing the language Regan spoke and denies being religious. The psychiatrist mentions schizophrenia, split personality disorders, and hysteria, but is reluctant to give a diagnosis but does not believe that Regan is faking her condition. Perhaps guilt from her parents’ divorce has caused an issue, but this would oversimplify a terribly complicated issue. He proposes a period of examination in a clinic in Dayton. As the doctors make arrangements, Chris thinks about Burke. 

Karl announces that a Detective William F. Kinderman from the police homicide division has called at the house: He is conducting a routine investigation into Burke’s death. The detective interviews Chris, complaining that the world seems to be having a massive nervous breakdown. As they talk in the kitchen, Karl cleans the oven. Kinderman watches him while he talks about Chris’s movies. Chris admits that Burke visited the house and was alone with Regan, but she does not know the exactly what occurred. Chris feels the mood shift to an interrogation, as Kinderman takes the names of Sharon, Willie, and Karl. Chris mentions in passing that Burke had a temper. Kinderman examines Regan’s bird sculpture and leaves. 

As he gets into a squad car, he looks back at the house and sees something moving in Regan’s window. He scrapes flecks of paint taken from Regan’s bird statue from under his fingernail into an envelope. Later, going over “fragments of baffling data” (99) from the pathologist’s report from Burke’s death, Kinderman checks Karl’s alibi. It checks out, but Karl has a criminal record: He was found guilty of stealing narcotics from a previous employer, a doctor who had suddenly dropped all the charges without explanation. Two months later, Chris hired Karl and Willie. Kinderman turns to reports about the desecrations at the churches, and reads a book about black masses. He visits the morgue, examining Burke’s body again: the head is “completely turned around, facing backward” (101).

Karras jogs around the campus in an attempt to process his grief. As he completes another lap, he sees a man watching him from the same park bench where he has left his possessions. Karras approaches and meets Kinderman. Kinderman is interested in the desecrations—they might be connected to Burke’s murder. Kinderman reveals the brutal nature of Burke’s death to Karras, who mentions that “supposedly demons broke the necks of witches that way […] a trademark of demonic assassins” (105)—Karras once wrote a psychiatric paper on witches. Whoever desecrated the churches and killed Burke could possibly be a disgruntled priest, but Karras knows of no one who fits the description. As Karras walks Kinderman back to his car, the detective admits that he suspects that a cult or a coven of witches may be involved. Karras initially dismisses the idea, but says that in parts of Europe, black masses still happen. They swap stories of desecration, sex, murder, and Satanic rituals. 

Kinderman offers Karras a ride and they drive toward Karras’s apartment. As Karras exits the car, Kinderman asks for the desecrated altar card. Karras fetches it, explaining its “individual” form of Latin (111). Later, Kinderman analyses the paint from Regan’s bird sculpture. It matches the paint found on the desecrated statue in the church. An hour later, across the city, Karl exits a rat-infested tenement house, walks three blocks, and then leans against a lamppost and weeps.

Chris has turned down the offer to direct the film. After two weeks in the clinic, Chris brings Regan home, refusing the doctors’ advice to put Regan in an asylum. Regan’s condition remains undiagnosed, though it now features “a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena” (114): Regan’s outbursts are often religious in nature. She is now fed through a tube and heavily sedated. The windows in her bedroom are locked and shuttered, while all mirrors have been removed. Karl fixes restraining straps to Regan’s bed. Chris discovers a crucifix hidden under Regan’s pillow. When no one admits to placing it there, Chris shouts and sobs. One day, she finds Karl administering an ice pack to Regan’s head and is touched by his rare display of emotion. One doctor suggested a radical treatment—an exorcism: If Regan is convinced that she is possessed, then a ritual might convince her otherwise. Such ceremonies sometimes work as a placebo. 

Chris reads the book Mary Jo sent her, which has appeared on a shelf in the library. Possession, she learns, is common to all periods of history and all parts of the world, in one form or another. Accounts of possession share many similarities with Regan’s condition. 

Kinderman arrives and, after rambling, asks Sharon questions about the night Burke died. Before arriving at the MacNeil house, Burke had visited a bar; he decided to leave the house on foot—uncommon behaviors for him. Kinderman suggests that Burke might have fallen from the window in Regan’s bedroom and mentions the ritualistic nature of the murder. Chris is shocked, but neither she nor Sharon can think of anyone else who might have been in the house that night. Kinderman is baffled; he asks Chris to ask Regan if Burke entered her room that night. At the door, Kinderman requests an autograph, so Chris signs one of his cards. He asks whether he might talk to Karl. When Chris fetches the elderly Swiss man, Kinderman reads him his rights and then questions him on his whereabouts the night of the murder, tricking Karl into revealing that his alibi is a fiction. Karl offers no comment. Kinderman pleads with Karl for the truth, but Karl insists that he was at the cinema. 

Chris continues reading the book. Willie returns with the groceries, and admits that she found the occult book under Regan’s bed. Chris has a sudden memory of the window in Regan’s bedroom being open on the night of Burke’s murder. She notices that “a narrow strip [has] been surgically shaved” from the book. There are sounds of commotion from Regan’s room: Regan is screaming and Karl is shouting. Running upstairs, Chris hears Regan pleading with someone and the sound of something heavy crashing into the floor. Chris bursts into her daughter’s bedroom to find Karl sprawled unconscious on the floor while Regan masturbates with the crucifix. Blood covers the sheets as Chris stares, frozen in horror. Finally, she throws herself at the bed but Regan grabs her by the hair. Growling in a demonic voice, Regan thrusts her mother’s face into her bloody crotch, and then knocks her to the other side of the room. Regan’s head spins around until it is facing backwards. She asks Chris whether she knows what her daughter did. Chris screams until she faints.