I met my former husband the night he tried to exorcise a vending machine.
The vending machine in question did not seem particularly demonic. It was an old-style soft drink dispenser that was stocked with 10 ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Tab costing all of a quarter. There were similar machines all over campus, usually in the basement of the cottage-style dorms that Sophia Smith and her successors had deemed appropriate for the young ladies who flocked to Northampton for a solid liberal arts education.
All of them spat out Coke or Tab, nothing more. All included a bottle opener so patrons could pry off the cap without disturbing the juniors and seniors who had church keys suitable for opening bottles of that mysterious substance called "beer." Nothing really distinguished one from another, with the possible exception of the battered specimen that squatted gloomily in a dark, nasty corner of the basement level of Neilson Library, and so few people admitted to using that one that the contents might well have dated from the Nixon administration.
Our Coke machine was nowhere that ill-used, or malevolent. It was painfully ordinary. Its location was a bit questionable, in the poorly lit hallway between the basement smoking room and the doorway to the pile of firewood Buildings & Grounds periodically restocked so that we might study 'round the fireplace in the dead and cold of winter. But the machine itself was like any of its fellows.
How and why my friend came to think our Coke machine was haunted isn't all that clear. If memory serves me right, it involved psychic engrams leftover from a stray cat getting inside the basement and attacking a student around the time Woodrow Wilson was President, but I was so creeped out by the idea of a possessed drink dispenser that my mind may have repressed some of the gory details. All I know is that once she'd convinced the rest of us that something was rotten in the basement of Hopkins, we avoided the Coke machine as much as possible, at least until exam time when the desperate need for caffeine overcame our fear and sent us scuttling downstairs long enough to shove a quarter into the slot, smack the key for our beverage of choice, and snatch it to our heaving bosoms before scuttling back to our rooms.
This state of affairs had continued for the better part of a year by the time I met Wingding. He was visiting friends at UMass who came over every Friday for a D&D run, and since he also played D&D, he decided to tag along. It wouldn't take long for him to roll up a character, and if he didn't like the way the game was going the GM could always either send him back to our party's base camp or kill him off so he wouldn't have to bother.
We didn't get off to a good start. Wingding showed up wearing a cape and claimed to be a vampire, then professed to wish to bite my neck. I was so inexperienced that I had no idea that this was supposed to be flirtatious, and said, "Like hell you will," but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was smart, and had very blue eyes, and after a great deal of debate about which of the enormously bosomed female figures he'd brought with him would suit our characters, he settled down enough that soon we were chatting merrily about our mutual love of fantasy novels and classical music.
By the time the run wound down, I was more than a little smitten with this thin, charismatic stranger. I wasn't in love (yet), but the combination of geekish interests, cultural sophistication, and obvious intelligence was like fresh catnip to a rescue kitty. It was a heady and wonderful feeling, and I'd all but forgotten about the vampire joke much sooner than one might expect.
Then someone mentioned wanting a Coke, and the entire room went quiet.
Almost everyone there had heard about the haunted Coke machine. It was why we'd gotten into the habit of buying a case of soda on Friday afternoons and hauling it up three flights of stairs to our dorm room so no one would have to risk life, limb, and sanity for a bottle of delicious, nutrition-free refreshment. Normally we'd have several bottles left over, most of which would be consumed over the weekend, but thanks to an unusual number of people that week, all of whom seemed unusually thirsty, we'd run out of everything non-alcoholic about an hour earlier.
Getting a soda from the vending machine seemed like a reasonable thing, especially since they were so cheap…and yet not one of us so much as checked our pockets for stray laundry money. After a pregnant pause Wingding asked what was going on. Surely there was somewhere to get a drink on a campus the size of Smith? And if not, why not? Surely such a well-equipped, wealthy school could afford vending machines in its housing?
I think you can see where this is going.
I don't recall who exactly brought up the Coke Machine o' Doom, but someone did. Wingding, who it turned out hadn't slept in a couple of days and was running on a combination of soda, geekishness, and fumes, thought this was hilarious and insisted that something had to be done, that the fine young ladies of Smith could not be held in thrall by something so mundane as a drink dispenser! He had come all the way out from Boston, cape and all, for our amusement, and now he would save the day!
And before anyone could stop him, he had shouted something that might have been "Excelsior!" and charged out the door and down the stairs to the basement over the vocal objections of me, several other members of the D&D run, and the girl who was convinced the damn thing was haunted in the first place.
Of course I went followed – being a student at a fine liberal arts college doesn't exempt one from the usual college stupidity, and seeing what my lizard brain had already identified as a primo lust object offering to exorcise a vending machine more than qualified on all counts – and was met by the sight of Wingding, cape and all, inscribing a pentagram in a heap of sawdust. The girl who had sensed the original bad vibes was pleading with him to stop, at least one other person was watching in bemused silence, and a couple of the UMass students were making sarcastic comments and telling Wingding to cut it out, that they had to get to the bus stop before they were stranded at Smith all night.
Wingding, grinning, ignored them all, raised his hands, and started to incant in Latin. Someone yelled at him to quit spazzing around, that this was stupid, to no avail. The bad vibes girl was all but in tears -
Which is when I finally realized that this had gone from a silly joke to something that was badly upsetting a good friend. I stepped up to his side, pointed at the pentagram, and said in a tone that sounded remarkably like my mother addressing a particularly obstreperous class of football players, "Cut it out. This isn't funny."
He stopped and stared down at me. "Huh?"
The corridor was dark, and it was late. A wisp of cold air filtered in from the door leading to the woodpile.
"I said stop it. This is really weird, and I don't think you should do it." I swallowed. "Besides, there's no such thing as ghosts.”
The basement fell silent. Wingding opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. Finally he gave me a resigned look, shrugged, and rubbed out the pentagram.
“If that's what you want,” he said, and we all trooped back upstairs to clean up the disaster that only a group of college students with hex paper, character sheets, and the remains of several large pizzas and a case of assorted soda can produce.
The Coke machine sat unmoving as we exited, which only makes sense. It was, after all, an inanimate object.
This was, thank God and the angels, my sole personal experience with exorcism. My parents were mainline Protestants, I was a mainline Protestant until I became a Unitarian in college, and never once in my life have I been tempted to convert to a form of Christianity that believes in the reality of demonic possession. Mum emphasized the parts of the Bible that spoke of love, compassion, and respect for others, not damnation and the inherent evil of humanity, and the idea that God is basically love, and the world and everything in it basically good, have shaped my life.
Alas, alack, and well-a-day, not every Christian, or every form of Christianity, agrees that if God loved the world so much as to send Jesus to earth as teacher, advocate, and finally sacrifice, God would refrain from subjecting us to the horrors of possession by the Adversary and his minions. As quaint as it might sound to you, my faithful readers, there are still people who believe that Satan is alive and well and lying in wait to swallow you, yes you, up, body and soul.
Tonight I bring you a book concerning demonic possession and human attempts to overcome it. You will almost certainly recognize at least the title, if not the actual book, and it's doubtful there's an American of a certain age who hasn't at least heard of the smash hit movie that was based on the novel, which was in turn based on an actual case from 1949.…
The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty - As occasionally happens, this is actually not a bad book. It's decently written, entertainingly scary, and still sells briskly to people who enjoy being terrified.
The story is simple: a young girl, Regan, starts exhibiting peculiar behavior that eventually leads her terrified mother to call in the services of a Roman Catholic priest. The priest realizes what the mother had only suspected, that Regan is possessed by an evil spirit and therefore must be exorcised lest she be lost forever to the forces of darkness. This eventually leads to an epic battle between Good and Evil, culminating in the priest and an assistant expelling the demon from Regan, one priest dying of a heart attack, and the second leaping out a window to sacrifice himself when the demon then attempts to possess him. Other elements include the mother's initial skepticism about the possession, the younger priest's crisis of faith, the older priest's history with the demon during a semi-successful exorcism in Africa, and plenty of terrifying set pieces.
Blatty, a successful screen writer and novelist who'd garnered good reviews but few sales, based his most successful novel on rumors he'd heard during his college years at Georgetown about a young boy in Maryland being successfully exorcised in 1949. He researched what was known about the case and used certain elements (a child being possessed, the successful expulsion of the evil spirit, a team of several priests) in his story, but there are significant differences. For one thing, the original case involved a boy, called "Roland Doe," who had allegedly used a Ouija board to attempt to contact his deceased aunt, not a little girl. Further, "Roland" was actually a Lutheran, not a Catholic, and he had already been exorcised by a Lutheran pastor and an Anglican priest before his desperate family turned to the Catholic Church. And despite accounts that it took thirty attempts on the part of a Jesuit priest before "Roland" was finally demon-free, subsequent research has led to claims that he was either mentally ill, suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, or simply a spoiled little brat who was determined to get his own way and really had a down on discipline, his family, and the rotating cast of clergy who attempted to "cure him."
Little of this was known to Blatty when he wrote his novel, and truly, it doesn't much matter. Like so many authors, Blatty used facts as a springboard to fiction, and the result was a chilling, entertaining read for horror lovers and some nice reviews and sales for him.
That doesn't count what happened two years later, when Blatty wrote the screenplay for William Friedkin's film adapation. The Exorcist came out in 1973 to almost unanimous praise, box office that kept in first run for almost six months, and a boatload of Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for the actors, director, and screenwriter. Blatty ended up winning the Academy Award that year, and The Exorcist is widely considered to be one of the two or three greatest horror movies ever filmed.
Given all this, The Exorcist doesn't seem to qualify as a Book So Bad It's Good. So what is it doing in one of these diaries?
Simple: it's not The Exorcist itself that's the problem. It's the effect this book and this film have had on popular culture that are So Bad They're Good.
Consider the following:
- The demonic possession fad that swept through pop culture in its wake - the occult revival of the late 1960s had, with the exception of showmen like the late, great Anton LaVey, been largely devoted to benevolent forms of the supernatural. Rosemary's Baby aside, there was comparatively little attention paid to darker side of the occult. There were some warnings about the threat of Satan from the evangelical Christian community, to be sure, and a couple of high profile crimes that supposedly were connected to witchcraft fueled a mini-panic, but that faded relatively quickly when Charles Manson turned out to be inspired more by the Beatles than Satan.
This all changed after the runaway success of The Exorcist, especially the film. What had been a gentle, slightly wonky but basically harmless interest in astrology, the I Ching, ghosts, and neopaganism suddenly was transformed into all Satan, all the time. Book racks at finer drug stores across this great land were crowded with knock-offs both fictional and non: testimonies about actual exorcisms, reprinted potboilers about "Roland Doe," and many, many, many novels about Satanic possession, Satanic religion, Satanic objects, and even Satanic houses.
Even worse was cinematic junk like Abby, a blatant rip-off of The Exorcist with an all-black cast (despite terrible reviews and a blindingly awful script, it made $4 million at the box office before the legal department at Warner Brothers got a cease and desist order), the hilariously awful Turkish film Seytan, and a documentary called The Late, Great Planet Earth. The latter managed to combine Satanism with Armageddon and very bad theology in a savory stew that was about as nourishing as chunks of off-brand pimento loaf dumped into a crock pot with a couple of cans of baked beans to simmer in a sauce composed mainly of Family Dollar house brand grape jelly. As terrible as the Left Behind books and movies are, they look like masterpieces on the level of Citizen Kane in comparison, and trust me, I don't say that lightly.
- The Linda Blair Oscar nomination flap - The Exorcist opened to rapturous reviews and near unanimous praise for its direction, writing, and especially for its cast. It's not hard to see why; it's hard to imagine a better choice for the titular character than Max von Sydow, and Ellen Burstyn and Jason Miller offered excellent support as the mother of the possessed child Regan and the tormented priest Father Karras, respectively (each received an Oscar nomination for their work) work.
Singled out for particular praise, though, was Linda Blair, the fourteen year old who played Regan, and if some of her performance owed its dash to special effects and animatronics, her effortless ability to switch from innocent little girl to gravel-voiced harridan won her what seemed to be a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her performance. Critics predicted great things for her....
Until the actress who'd actually been the deep, terrifying voice of the demon came forward to request proper credit. Hollywood stalwart Mercedes McCambridge, who'd initially refused screen credit (supposedly for fear of taking away from Blair's performance), changed her mind and complained at the premiere about being overlooked.
If that weren't enough, the demanding (and demonic) nature of the role, which required Blair to spout obscenities, vomit on cue, and indulge in less than savory activities of a blasphemous nature, brought accusations that she'd been exploited by her parents, exploited by William Friedkin, and exploited by the screenplay. That Friedkin considered the role so demanding that he'd considered casting an adult dwarf in the role of Regan instead of an actual child only made the situation worse, and when the Academy nominated another appealing child actress named Tatum O'Neal in the same category as Blair, it became clear that Hollywood was not yet ready to hand a statuette to a teenager whose guttural cry of "Fuck your Jesus!" wasn't even in her own voice.
- Exorcist II: The Heretic - the original Exorcist book and movie made the sort of money that would have lead Scrooge McDuck to doff his clothes and leap head-first into the ginormous pile of cash for a relaxing swim. That meant exactly one thing to Hollywood: a sequel. And though Blatty wasn't involved this time, it cannot be denied that his novel provided certain elements that were used in a sequel that nearly beat Plan 9 From Outer Space in a 1980's poll for Worst Film of All Time.
You think I exaggerate? I challenge you, strong of heart and stronger of stomach, to rent this über-turkey some night and see for yourself just what happens when one combines a ludicrous script involving Regan being re-possessed by an African demon named "Pazuzu," swarms of locusts, Richard Burton earning a nice fat paycheck for chewing the scenery as a priest who shrieks lines like "Kokumo can help me find Pazuzu!", James Earl Jones earning a nice fat paycheck for keeping a straight face playing "Kokumo" (not a town in the Midwest or a crappy song by the Beach Boys), more locusts, Linda Blair proving that Mercedes McCambridge was the best part of her performance in the original film, even more locusts, and not one but two equally implausible endings:
- The original ending: a final exorcism involving the angry Pazuzu raining windstorms and what seems like every locust, cricket, grasshopper, katydid, and similar leaf hopping insect in creation down on the house in Georgetown where Burton and Blair have holed up to let the power of Christ compel them, or something. Burton, in a scene that shows conclusively that he has to count as the greatest squandered talent in Hollywood history, gallantly sacrifices himself for Blair (wild applause), and she's left demon-free. She then dispels the vast quantities of dead locusts, crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, etc., by doing, and I swear on my father's grave I am not making this up, a mystical dance taught to her by "Kokumo" that bears a startling resemblance to a tap routine.
Audiences found this amusing, not terrifying or cathartic (gee, I wonder why?), and the hysterical laughter that the sight of Linda Blair preparing for her part in Roller Boogie produced in every single preview audience led the director to shoot the following at the last minute and great expense:
- A final exorcism pretty much as above, except that this time Pazuzu is defeated without Burton's death (wild boos and hisses), the building is a huge heap of rubble, and Burton and Blair stagger out pretty much intact, seemingly in search of a taxi to take them far, far away.
This version, which wags dubbed Exorcist III, did little to improve either the film's reviews (which continued to be abysmal) or its box office (which was tepid at best and went straight down the crapper once word got out that it was about as scary as Dr. Tongue's House of Pancakes). Alas, nothing could take them far enough away to escape the shame of appearing in this wretched film, and Blair's career, which had been on shaky ground once it became clear that she'd learned very little from her time lip-synching to Mercedes McCambridge, ended up mired in exploitation films. Burton, who was too established to end up in the likes of Chained Heat, still found himself playing more parts like the lead of The Medusa Touch, a cheapie involving telekinesis, than the A-list parts he'd previously been offered.
For all that, there have still been attempts to make yet another sequel to the saga of Regan, Pazuzu, et a. Notable among these is the real Exorcist III (written and directed by Blatty himself, and based on his novel Legion), which skips completely over Exorcist II: The Heretic; Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning, a prequel that was released almost at the same as an alternate version of the same story (Paul Schrader's Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist), both of which tanked at the box office; and yet another Blatty film, The Ninth Configuration, which followed a minor character from The Exorcist, the astronaut Lt. Cuthshaw, in what Blatty considered the truest sequel to his masterwork.
If that weren't enough Exorcist for you, Blatty has also toyed with the idea of turning his original novel into a TV miniseries. And if you still aren't satisfied, there was Possessed, a miniseries starring Timothy Dalton that purports to tell the true story of "Roland Doe"...and The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen, a 2000 release of the original that was re-edited by William Friedkin to include scenes he'd had to omit due to problems with 1973 special effects...and the 2010 Blu-Ray rerelease....
It's enough to make one wonder if it'll take a bit more than holy water to keep Pazuzu from coming returning yet again. Maybe a tactical nuclear strike? Pope Francis waving the relics of St. Peter? An industrial-sized drum of Locust-B-Gone? A crowd of peasants with torches?
Or maybe just film and TV viewers watching something else?
%%%%%
Do you have a copy of The Exorcist in your house? One of the sequels? Maybe a copy of the soundtrack? A locust? Don't be shy...it's Saturday night and you know what that means....
%%%%%
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule