It is now my intention to, thankfully, conclude The Shadow Among Us, Episode 3, In Plain Sight. Returning to the Crucifix scene…and this was…

…hey! You two belong in part 2! Where was I? Oh, yes! Returning to the…

…if everyone would butt out, I might get a word in edgewise. Yes! The Crucifix scene…and this was…and is…one of the few scenes in the movie that is make or break for all of my ramblings through so many essays. The Crucifix scene begins moments after the detective left. And this is key…the ruckus coming from Regan’s room starts just as we hear the Noises in the Attic for the last time. It isn’t the last time we feel the Cosmic Pull Of Chris’s Attic…during the exorcism, the lights begin to flicker…the only thing that seems out of place to Merrin. The bathroom door will be kicked shut with such force that it cracks down the middle. In close connection to this is the sudden appearance of a large crack in the ceiling of Regan’s bedroom. I would suggest again, as I have before, that Sharon was using the commotion of the exorcism to take advantage of what might have been her last shot at finding what she was looking for.   

Detective Kindermann has just left, and Chris is upset. This is because she now knows the truth about what happened to Burke Dennings. I will return to that at a later point when I will provide my contextualization. But her belief that she, essentially, knows what happened to Burke is about to be confirmed…in a very strange way, and this scene is one of Chris’s greatest acts of Substitution of Facts. In a previous essay, I addressed the question of the Sliding Chair Trick, followed by the Regan’s Oak Dresser Trick. I proposed that what’s really happening is this…Regan attempted to kill her mother. She ran over and shoved the chair in front of the door to stop Sharon from interfering. She then moved the dresser away from the wall just enough to get behind it, and she attempted to push it over. What Chris did was to Write Regan Out Of the Action. In short, Chris makes Regan…disappear. It is very easy to miss the fact that as these two things play out, we do not see Regan…not until the dresser fails to fall over, and Chris sees her sitting on the bed. It seems rather strange that a Supposed Demon who could perform these tricks…well…what about Karras’s second meeting with Stinker? She attempted to correct a mistake she made during the first meeting. What is that? She claimed to be the Devil and Karras had his doubts. Regan blundered in a couple of ways. First, as Karras noted, the Devil isn’t a demon, and the claim was akin to saying you’re…

It’s funny how the French Revolution worked so hard to get rid of royalty and nobility only to end up with an emperor. Yes, Regan overshot on that one. But here is the bigger blunder…she tried to get Karras to let her out of the straps. Karras suggested that if she were Devil, she should be more than able to free herself. A too vulgar display power was a very lame response. But this was the bigger problem…the apparent total helplessness of one of the most powerful spirit-beings in the universe. Following this blunder, she attempted to correct it. This would involve a vulgar display of power. Now, if she is demon-possessed, and I’m wrong in my view that what happened in the Crucifix scene was, in fact, Regan’s demon performing the Sliding Chair Trick and Regan’s Dresser Trick by remote control…if I’m wrong, then it would seem very strange that she couldn’t simply perform such a trick as making the bed levitate…or make the door open and shut…or supernaturally cause the windows to fly open. So many possibilities! But Regan was Regan, and in the scenes with Karras, she is strapped to the bed.

So the only thing she can muster is to make the door in her little desk pop open. Apparently, if you hit the wall just right, the drawer opens. But, this is another blunder. Karras closes the drawer and tells her to do it again. He will be watching closely this time…you can be sure. Doesn’t matter, I would think…go ahead, perform another vulgar display of power, the refusal to perform such a feat during the first meeting is what has forced her to do the Regan’s Desk Drawer Trick. But she refuses, knowing that Karras will see what happens, and laugh about how powerful she must be to do this! Why refuse? In time, she says menacingly…in time. As though she will do this at some later time and change the universe. She, in fact, fails to do the Little Desk Drawer Trick at a later time. In attempting to correct a previous blunder, she makes an even bigger one. So it is in the Crucifix scene where Regan’s violence escalates beyond anything seen before, and where Chris’s hysteria intensifies to the highest level it does in the film. First hearing Regan talking in Burke’s voice, and then seeing the impossible…

It can be no coincidence that these two things are seen and heard by Chris just after speaking with the detective. She learns about Burke’s condition, i.e. its most notable feature, and she puts 2 and 2 together and actually manages to get…4.  Or, if you’re golfing in Greenland when is 20 degrees below zero…

Whatever. I’d think she’d get 23. But she hit the metaphorical nail on the head…and believing she knows what really happened…sees and hears what she thinks she sees and hears.

As I said, we hear the Noises in the Attic immediately followed by shouting from Regan’s room. And mom rushes upstairs to experience the worst mother-daughter moment in history. Now there are two voices…a very deep voice that screams…do it…do it, you bitch. We also hear Regan’s voice. Now if the two voices overlap…then I’m in trouble. But I have listened to this many times, and I do not believe the voices overlap. They do, however, alternate….and that is important. In discussing the Sow is Mine scene, one must remember that this alternating of voices occurs…a high pitched voice, and a deeper, more menacing one...both are clearly audible. However, in that scene, the Two-Voices-From-One-Girl-Trick is the result of forcing air through the vocal chords following their tight contraction during an epileptic event. Is that the case here? I don’t think so. In the Sow is Mine scene, Regan is speaking to others. In the Crucifix scene, she’s arguing with herself. One voice, a spooky one, spurs her on, while the other one screams in Regan’s voice…one we recognize. I think that there is a different explanation for this.

We know that we have very shocking events, albeit Chris interrupts this.

…as the detective leaves, we hear the Noises in the Attic for the last time. And Sharon moving around the attic has awakened Regan…which is never good and always seems to begin, as is quite common, an epileptic event. I will step back and put this into context.

Regan has been discharged from the Berringer Clinic. As I noted previously, that was a very important event, since the only reason to do so was the fact that Regan’s problems are not spiritual, theological, philosophical, occult-related, or even…psychological, although there is a psychological element present. The Berringer Clinic does not treat epilepsy, which has to be done on a maintenance basis, and Regan should get back to a normal life as soon as possible.

Chris finds the crucifix between the pillow and the mattress. Someone put it there, and so Chris quizzes the adults in the house, all who honestly stated that they had nothing to do with it. No one in the house has betrayed any particular religious fervor, and this is not a typical crucifix in that it isn’t the kind worn around the neck…i.e. it’s much larger. It is highly unlikely that even a religious person in the house, assuming he or she is Catholic and not Protestant, would have a crucifix of this size laying around. So whoever was responsible for its presence would have obtained it from a non-typical source…a church, a priest, a religious supply store, etc. However, there was only one person Chris didn’t ask. Now the crucifix will mysteriously end up back in Regan’s room, being used for a shocking purpose. Regan’s Floating Crucifix Trick? So, the demon left Regan’s body, floating downstairs…assuming demons float…maybe he flew downstairs…a big risk because if he is seen, the jig is up…got the crucifix, and returned to Regan’s room? That is a ludicrous reconstruction of events. This is mine…I start with the Berringer Clinic…

…Regan has cut her face. Some people suffering from epilepsy, and it should be remembered that this shot is preceded by Regan experiencing convulsions…

…she is also in restraints for this very reason. I thought, listening very carefully, I would hear Regan singing the national anthem of Greenland…in Greenlandic!  Or at least…Danish…which is what I gave Darla for breakfast this morning. Alas! I heard only howling and growling. The last time we saw Regan before the Berringer Clinic is in the hypnosis scene where Regan has no marks on her face. She was no doubt hospitalized as a result of her attack on the hypnotist, itself being the culmination of a Directed Aggression series of events. That means that she cut herself while at Berringer. With what? One possibility is that, when she wasn’t in restraints, she took a crucifix down from the wall in her room and cut herself. She was able to hide this crucifix in her things, and don’t forget her rather amazing ability to walk around with a slave-ring in her hands without it being noticed. When she was brought home, so too was the crucifix. And she was able to slip it between the pillow and the mattress.

But what about the most shocking part of the movie…the bloody crucifix and…Regan’s disturbing declaration. This is one of the few scenes in the movie where the novel is helpful. Chris is distorting the facts of what is happening throughout the scene. She does not distort what Regan is saying. She is distorting what Regan is doing. In the novel, Regan is not stabbing herself with such violence that she has all but chopped her vagina to bits. That is clear from the fact that if Regan had been doing this, she would have injured herself very badly. She would have to go to a hospital for care. When doctors see the extent of the trauma to the vagina of a 12 year old girl…you know what they will think. Regan may well lie about it, and if you believed that Regan killed Burke Dennings in cold blood, what is to stop her from lying about it, possibly even accusing her mother? Murders don’t balk at lying. Or is that…murderesses? And the doctors would have to talk to the police about it. We know from the nasal cannula, IV drip, and other nursing stuff in Regan’s room that a private nurse was coming in to care for Regan. The nurse would find the trauma and call the police. If there was no hospital or private nurse, then infection and permanent damage would result. The best understanding is what the novel says Regan was doing…she was masturbating with the crucifix, not stabbing her vagina with it. The crucifix in the film is a metal one, so she would have injured herself somewhat, and there would have been some blood. But nothing that couldn’t be handled at home…the nurse not being told about something that would heal. Chris couldn’t contextualize Regan masturbating with the cross as she can in the novel, and turned it into something far more diabolical, and we find ourselves seeing the event through Chris’s eyes. One symptom of epilepsy, albeit a rarer one, is known by different names…Genital Manipulation or Genital Manifestation, whereby the person engages in what is considered inappropriate sexual behavior when not done in privacy…and as such, can be very embarrassing for parents, depending upon when it happens and where...in church would definitely be embarrassing! Regan, with the crucifix lying next to her in the bed, is awoken by the Noises in the Attic…triggering an epileptic event involving genital manipulation in the form of masturbating with the crucifix. If Regan had not done something like that before, and had an intact hymen, there would have been blood, and I feel it same to assume that this was the first time she had done this. After all…the invention of the internet is still a few years off. The very words Regan shouts imply simulated intercourse, but is not consistent with violent and repeated stabbing. And so we meet Epileptic Regan yet again. I would add that like the Ouija board, so too with masturbation…she doesn’t really know how it works. The blood on her face and nightdress is cast-off, but the quantity is exaggerated in Chris’s mind. Regan has been inserting the crucifix, and then pulling it all the way out and raising it above her face, rather than moving it in and out, creating the amount of cast-off that is really happening in the Artificial Reality.

But what about the two voices? One is Regan, and the other is…Regan. As we know from the two scenes featuring Karras and Regan, and then the exorcism, Regan is able to speak in a rather deep, menacing voice…and if we believe the demon-possession angle...that is what the audience expects to hear. I do not believe that the explanation for the two alternating voices is my explanation for the same thing in the Sow is Mine scene. There is another symptom that occurs with epilepsy…Momentary Psychosis…a psychotic state that lasts a very short period of time, sometimes, at most, as long as an hour, but usually much less than that. I don’t know just how advisable the word…psychosis…really is…but it is certainly a bizarre state of mind that features a break from reality and then something strange is bound to happen. And waking suddenly is known to set off epileptic events. So Regan has her Momentary Psychotic Break, and when Chris steps up to her to take the crucifix away from her, she gets a Regan-Style-Clobbering. Regan, remembering that her mother had just betrayed her, and being in a wild frame of mind…decides to kill Chris. However, the dresser is too heavy for her to push over. So she runs back to her bed and picks up the crucifix…her crucifix…again.

This scene…the very beginning of it…also provides evidence of a theory I have discussed before…Regan’s yucky teeth are something Chris, and through her…Karras…see. They are, in fact, never as such in the Artificial Reality. But I would also argue that the horrible facial cuts are not nearly as bad as Chris and Karras see them to be. Regan’s face at the Berringer Clinic…

…As I said before, I believe that Regan made these cuts with the crucifix she found in the room…possibly hanging on the wall. She has no such marks before the Berringer clinic. Now, once Chris takes Regan home after her discharge, she does something rather fascinating, and seeing how it immediately precedes Chris finding the crucifix, Chris is giving viewers a clue about the cuts and the crucifix, albeit one that you can’t see simply watching the movie.

And…

What Chris is doing is tracing the relatively minor cuts on Regan’s face with her finger. She is now acutely aware of them, and they are becoming a fixture in her mind, and then become part of Chris’s conception of the Other One Inside Regan…who Chris, at the beginning of the film, already believed, as Karras will all the way to the end of the movie, is a Split Personality. Chris will then exaggerate the appearance of these cuts in her mind, and subsequently will describe them to Karras.

The blood on the face is cast-off…greatly exaggerated in its quantity by Chris…caused by sliding the crucifix into the vagina and pulling it out. She may also be doing this to see the male figure on the crucifix. A protestant cross, always absent the figure of Christ, would not have worked in this regard. It’s important to realize that the blood is not from additional cuts, although the real cuts are hidden by it, and the pattern of the cast-off will be suggestive of the pattern of the facial wounds going forward.

Chris sees Regan’s head spin around and hears Regan talking in Burke’s voice. But the gore on Regan’s face has been greatly exaggerated in Chris’s mind. Still, a head spin can’t be done by just anyone or so I’ve…wait a minute…

…well, I’ve heard she’s been practicing…go Maggie! Still, it’s not as good as…

…the original, as it were. Now it is a little known fact that Linda Blair didn’t actually do the head-spin trick. And I don’t mean just in the Artificial Reality. It was actually done by her twin sister! Meet…

…the Diabolical Duo! However, the appearance of the blood on Regan’s face in the Crucifix scene does have a Sleight of Facial Wound effect on Chris…meaning that she turned the cast-off patterns into her contextualization of the facial wounds on Regan’s face that she traced with her fingers at the beginning of the scene. The wounds then become grossly distorted…

It is also worth noting that in this shot, the wound on the left side of Regan’s chin looks far worse than it does in any other scene.

A shot from the exorcism…

It might prove useful to take a side-by-side look at the facial wounds…

Ok, the graphics aren’t as good as they could be, but Adrasta made them for me, and she’s only allowed out of her strait-jacket an hour a day, so she had to hurry. Column 1 takes us from the Berringer Clinic to the Crucifix scene. Column 2 is Karras’s first visit, while column 3 is Karras’s second visit. In the next image, I have created a fourth column, including numbers 10 -12. The first two images are from the exorcism, while number 12 shows Regan’s face at the very end of the movie. I then placed the newly created column number 4 next to column number 3…

That may, or not, be useful. However, there is one more column that I need to add…a very interesting column…a Super Duper Column…

This is a very short scene, and its chronological place in the story is made clear from the image at the bottom of the column…that is Father Merrin’s cab about to pull up in front of Chris’s house. It’s not as easy to notice that in the image at the top of the column, you can just see the neck of her nightdress, indicating that it is the nightdress she wears during the exorcism. Now this scene is very important. Firstly…she is, as I noted earlier, mumbling to herself. But you can’t hear her…you can only see her lips moving. And superimposed over the top of that is the very weird sound that Karras hears during his first, second, and third meeting with Regan. She can’t mumble and make that sound at the same time, thereby indicating that the weird sound Karras hears…is in his head. But this is a fascinating question…where is she in this short scene? Surely she’s in her bedroom…her freezing cold Ice Box of a bedroom. Yet, her breath doesn’t condense in the air…

…not true of Merrin after just having step in the room for two seconds. And of course…in…

…yes, that one! It’s pitch black where she is. And that means we don’t know for SURE where she’s at in my Super-Duper Column. Nonetheless, let’s see if we can determine where she is…

…the Most Iconic Of All Iconic shots. That is Merrin and, having exited the cab, and carrying a priest bag that is mysteriously lacking exorcism stuff, he heads to Chris’s front door. I’ve done enough analysis of the architecture of this house to allow one and all to know exactly where I’m going. The two windows on the second floor…they are, second from the right…the hallway window. To the left of that window…is one of the three (+2 walled over) windows in Regan’s bedroom. It is not the Portal-To-Certain-Death-Window...that is on the side of the house, parallel to the bathroom window. And so this means that the light is on in Regan’s bedroom, yet in the immediately preceding shot, as shown in my Sooper-Dooper Column, where she is in a dark room not cold enough to cause her breath to condense, and she is lying in total darkness…and, at the risk of being redundant, not mention saying the same over and over, clearly with the lights off. Ergot…in my Super-Duper Column, Regan cannot be in her own bedroom. But I think it is clear where she is…

By Jove! I think I’ve got it! Yes…I just got my Windowologist certification. So you see, I just can’t leave windows alone…at this point. Of course, you see the yellow errors…I mean, arrows. Sorry about that, Marybelle is not the best speler. So I wonder which room is which…the pitch-black bedroom indicated by the errors. Stop it! Is it Chris’s bedroom?

The night of Burke Denning’s murder. Chris has angrily been looking for Sharon, who is actually much closer than Chris realizes…but she is certainly not upstairs. Chris has entered Regan’s room, closed the window, pulled the covers over Stinker, and now resumes her angry search for the Attic Noiser. This a behind-Chris’s-behind shot…don’t take that the wrong way, and the angle indicates that Regan was only pretending to be asleep. As soon as Chris left the room, Regan sat up and watched mom’s behind get smaller and smaller as she heads down the hall. Oh! So that’s the secret!

Chris, walking away from Regan’s room, will momentarily disappear from sight. If she kept going straight, she would walk into the wall with the painting…and that would hurt. But if she turned a little to the left, she would walk right into her own bedroom…and if she kept her current trajectory, she would walk right into the fireplace…and that would hurt. But she doesn’t do either…she hangs a right, and…

Freeze! This is a public service announcement… always use your turn signal when you make a right turn! You didn’t know my sister is a cop! How else do you think I don’t have to pay my traffic tickets? Where was I before Angelicus snuck into my essay and caught Movie Star Mom committing a traffic violation? Oh, yes…a subject that I rarely speak about…architecturism…

…the house in broad daylight. Look at the left side of the house, which is really a façade built by the guys who made the film. Or is it…the film who made the guys? I’ll have to ask Darla. The left side…the façade…is Regan’s room.

There it is! The hall window and Regan’s room on the left side, both with lights a’blazing in the left side of the shot. But the lights in the room on the right side of the shot are…off, it is completely pitch black. Whose room is that? Let’s take our right turn again…remembering to use our turn signal…

Sharon!

Yes, the second-story bedroom visible on the right side of the house is Sharon’s room. Or perhaps I should say…was Sharon’s room. We know that Toots came down with pneumonia because she had been sleeping in a very cold bedroom. She was clearly there in the daytime when Karras came over to play…don’t take that the wrong way. But I showed the picture that clearly shows that as soon as Karras leaves, Detective Kindermann sees the shadow of someone up and walking around. That is obviously Regan, with Chris having let her out of her restraints so she can go to her…new bedroom. One that is warm…Sharon’s room. And that means that Sharon was no longer staying at the house…Chris was clearly paying to have Sharon crash somewhere else so that Regan could use her room, and since the lights are off in the bedroom…

Cool graphics! Way to go, Marybelle! After all, she’s a pretty good graphicser! And that means that Chris and Regan have used Regan’s first bedroom, and all the trappings in it, to trick Karras, although, it seems as if Regan might be in her room during the nice warm daytime…but not at night.  Don’t leave yet! There is still so much more in my Super-Duper Column…who is it that is looking down at Regan from above…from on high? True, Karras is at the house before Merrin arrives. But an elaborate hoax has been perpetrated at Karras’s expense. He knows nothing about Regan living in the room that used to be Sharon’s. And! There have been three scenes featuring Yucky Regan…Karras’s first visit, Karras’s second visit, and his third visit. What we have never seen is Chris present in the same room as Regan…we must accept that Regan’s face with the horrible facial wounds is seen through the eyes of Karras…Chris described those wounds to him, but what he saw was the construct in his mind. But what about Chris? She created a Monster-Living-In-Regan…The Thing Upstairs That Is Not Her Daughter…not a moth or Moth Man himself, so we don’t need to put Kiddo on Mebaral…but rather…the second personality in her Contextualization of Regan as suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, which doesn’t exist…and never did. Sybil put one over on her therapist, and the Three Faces of Eve was a terrible movie…if you want to get laid…go get laid! And if your husband can’t get it done…you’ll have to figure out something else. But I will show a new image…a work of art worthy of hanging in the hall of Chris’s house that she might just walk into if she doesn’t take a right turn…using her turn signal, of course. It features my Super-Duper Column with less-than-perfect-Adrasta-graphics…

So I have put my Super-Duper Column in between numbers 7-9 on the one hand, and numbers 10-12 on the other hand. And what is very clear is that although the facial wounds are still exaggerated, they are nothing like the facial wounds seen in Karras’s second visit, shown in the column to the left of the Super-Duper Column, and the two shots from the exorcism scene in the column on the right of the Super-Duper Column. So the person looking down from above…from on high…looking down at Toots…is Chris, and despite the fact that we can’t see her, we are finally seeing Tragic Regan through Chris’s eyes, and not Karras’s eyes. However, that will change during the exorcism, when the makers of the film pull an absolutely brilliant trick. But Chris looks at Regan’s facial wounds, they are still exaggerated…having traced them with her finger after bringing Regan home from the Berringer Clinic…who couldn’t keep a kid suffering from epilepsy on the Psych Ward…after all, they had to make room for me! But I’m all better now…or so Dr. Darla tells me. But clearly, no matter how much Chris might trace those cuts…and turn them into something much worse, Karras took what Chris gave him and ran with it.

Now I’ll have to say that I got very dejected after I realized something…but then it got all better. What does Merrin see when he looks at Kiddo? Merrin is untainted by the story spun by Chris…surely he sees the Real Regan. And there are only a couple of instances when Merrin is in the room with Regan and is, to coin an expression…Karras-less. All the weird stuff we see…the bed shaking…the bed floating up from the floor…the head-spin…the apparation of Mr. Yucky Face…are all seen through the eyes of Karras, and the guys who made the movie took the step to show us Karras watching as all the Strange Goings-On strangely go on. There is only one thing that caused Merrin to skip a beat…

…the lights flicker…and we know that the lights flicker when the Attic Noiser is rummaging around in the attic looking for Regan’s Treasure Horde. No one can see what Karras sees and then stop to wonder about the lights flickering.

Regan has just vomited, not the spit-up we’ve seen before, and the greenish color suggests liver bile, and she had just gone through the kind of muscle contractions and writhing that everyone who has vomited with an empty stomach knows only too well. Regan’s head is pointed toward the Good Father. And some of the yuck has gotten on Merrin’s stole…at least she didn’t try to strangle him with it! So…

Father Karras takes the stole and glasses into the bathroom to wash them off. That leaves Merrin in the room alone with Toots.

But Merrin’s head suddenly begins to throb, and so we don’t see what he sees and then…

…Karras reappears, denying us the opportunity to see what Merrin sees. As long as Karras is in the room, we see Regan through his eyes…not Merrin’s. Merrin leaves to take a very fateful, overdose pill. Karras, hallucinating as always, sees his mother sitting on the bed. When Merrin returns, Karras is yelling…you’re not my mother! And that is true, although Mrs. Karras will appear in person in just a few minutes. But…

Merrin, realizing that Karras is now a liability rather than an asset…orders him out of the room. Finally! We will get to see what Merrin sees!

Karras is now gone!

And behold the girl!

So now I’m in trouble! Karras is gone, and this is what Merrin sees. So much for all my work! Now I must accept that a demon makes facial cuts much worse than they are. All I have done is for naught. Perhaps. Darla has pointed out something very important…

Time to kneel and start the ritual again. Sure, but before we get going, let’s do one more thing…

…so we look up…staring straight ahead for a few moments. But there is something else to do…

…we’ll turn our head as we look toward the door. Then…

…we give a sympathetic nod to…Chris, and then we’ll begin again. There can be no doubt about it! After the two priests went out and sat down on the stairs to take a Theological Breather, Chris entered the room. She straightened it up…removing the broken lamp, fixing the broken closed door, and removing the space heater. She released Kiddo from the restraints and had her sit up, she put a clean blue robe on her. Karras entered the room, while Regan was still sitting up, walking around to the bathroom. Chris…still in the room…has Regan lie down, puts the restraints back, puts a clean pillow on the bed, and throws a clean blue blanket over her daughter. Merrin enters, Karras is freaking out…Merrin tells Karras to leave. Merrin closes the door, with Chris still in the room…probably in the far corner to the right of the bedroom door. Merrin looks up at her and gives her a reassuring, sympathetic look. And so it is that Darla saved her annoying step-mom from the depths of despair. When Merrin looked down at Regan, and saw what we know Karras and Chris see when they look at her, Merrin doesn’t see what we think he sees! No! Chris is in the room, and we are seeing Regan through her eyes…not his! However, I will admit…It took me 2 years and 1 annoying step-daughter to finally figure that out…Chris was in the room. Ah, yes! But Chris’s presence in the room is problematic, to say the least. Why?

A Behind-Merrin shot. Someone has walked up behind the Good Father. And we know he will be dead in a matter of moments. Regan killed him! Regan is in her restraints, although…

…the person standing behind Merrin will undo the restraints, and Karras will find Merrin dead on the floor, and Stinker sitting up on the bed pondering weighty things. Notice too that the holy water bottle on the little table has the tan colored top, which is the one Merrin brought…

And…

But in between these shots the bottle changes…

…now it has a black top, which is not Merrin’s holy water bottle. Merrin realizes that he doesn’t have his holy water bottle, so he tells Karras to get holy water, and Karras will run over to the little table and get the Switcheroo Holy Water Bottle. The shot also clearly proves what I said earlier about levitation. Look where Merrin AND Karras are looking…down at the bed. The problem? Well, not with the holy water bottle…I’ll get to that in another essay. But is Chris still in the room in this…

…shot? It’s possible, although very unlikely. We know that Chris was over at the door, and the indication based on Merrin’s sympathetic nod is that Chris left the room, went downstairs, and sat in the study. Notice the angle…it is not a simple behind-Merrin-shot. It is at a slight angle. It is, or so I now believe, a view from just inside Regan’s bathroom door…if you are sneakily peeking out. And notice this…

Stepping back a few moments…Merrin kicked Karras out of the room. Chris is in the room. Merrin looks at Regan, but Chris is also looking at Kiddo. Between that shot and the sympathetic nod to Chris…as she leaves the room…is the shot above. This suggests that someone is peeking out from just inside the bathroom door. I feel safe to declare that it must be…Karras, who knows that you can pass through the little bathroom at the end of the hall into Regan’s bathroom. So after being kicked out, he seems to head downstairs. But he doubles back, enters the little bathroom, passes into Regan’s bathroom, stands just inside the door leading from the bathroom into the bedroom, watching the action and waiting for Chris to leave. And that leads to just one conclusion about what ultimately befell Merrin. What? Well…hold on! That’s for a different essay!

But Regan?Regan? What can be said about her? Lots of things…but in the context of this in particular, what can be said about her? She suffers from epilepsy. The guys who made the film did something fascinating, and were amazingly successful. What is that? They threw the manifestations, behaviors, and symptoms of epilepsy right in front of you….in plain sight They punched your face with them over and over again. But you were too busy being misled by the possession-thing to contextualize the obvious malady from which Regan suffered. Did epilepsy make her try to kill her mother? No. Did epilepsy make her ACT as if she were demon-possessed? No. Both of those things rest with Regan being “wrongly” in her right mind. And as far as the demon-thing goes, that was orchestrated by someone else…The Fixer of Broken Closets…The Remover of Space Heaters…The Bringer of Blue Blankets…yes, that person. Now on this point…Chris coming in and making alterations to the scene…there is something else. She did so something Sooper-Dooper Sneaky. I will, in another essay, discuss the strange special effects in…the movie? No! The movie has them, to be sure. I mean the special effects in the Artificial Reality. And I think something strange…that someone in the house has engineered special effects to impress Merrin. So here is a teaser…

Don’t look where your eye wants to go. Look at the boring wall behind Merrin. It looks pretty boring.

Still boring.

Boring-er…except for the space-heater, which Chris will remove.

Still pretty darn boring…maybe not?

Now with Karras in the bathroom, and Merrin being the only priest in the room, he will suddenly experience a tremendous pounding in his head, a strong wind in the room, and this…

The closet doors begin to open and slam shut…seemingly on their own. I will discuss this in a different essay. But I think that this was a trick. I noticed this…

That tear in the wallpaper wasn’t there before! But following Chris’s changes to the bedroom, blue blanket, blue robe, clean fitted sheet, removal of the space-heater, the removal of the broken lamp and towels on the floor to the right side of Regan’s bed…she has done something else. Notice that the tear is square in shape…it was pre-cut, and something had been behind it. And now, Chris has pealed it away, and removed what was behind it. And there was another one…

There it is…look at the wall on the right. Yes! I’ll bet that the two wallpaper cut-aways are approximately of the same height from the floor. I wonder what it is that Chris removed from behind the wallpaper at these two spots when she completely altered the scene in the run up to Merrin’s death.

But the matter at hand? Alas, there was no levitation…so I have spoiled that too. And Regan’s face did not look as horrible as we think it did…we must stop seeing things through the eyes of Chris and Karras if we are to see anything resembling the truth within the Artificial Reality.

The beginning and the end. It seems as though the wound on the chin is completely healed. I believe that the wounds on Regan’s face never looked any different than they did in the picture on the left, which is consistent with the healing seen in the picture on the right. She is also no longer chewing her lips, probably because her epilepsy is under control and she is on the right pharmaceutical protocol. I wonder if Oswei Temkin saw The Exorcist. I wonder if the Moonstruck Boy did. Well, he died millennia ago. Owsei didn’t die until 2002, after living a good long life. I bet that if he did see the movie, he would recognize Regan’s Malady. It is important to note that the symptoms seen throughout the movie cut across the different forms of epilepsy. That means that the makers of the film didn’t try to represent Regan as suffering from a particular type of epilepsy. Instead, they threw out all manner of symptoms…bombarded us with them…in the hopes that we would recognize what was hiding in plain sight…feel the black-eye that we get from a Big I’ll Punch Your Face. The doctor and the Temporal Lobe Lesion Wizard didn’t find a lesion. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there…no one is perfect. And it doesn’t take a lesion for epilepsy to be the culprit. Temporal lobe seizures are the most common form of epilepsy, accounting for about 60% of cases. That leaves 40% that aren’t. And there are different types of seizures. So again, I don’t think the makers of the film were constructing a Regan-With-A-Specific-Type-Of-Epilepsy…they were probably amazed how no one picked up on what was hovering in plain sight…levitating five feet above the bed like only Clara Germana Cele could do!  But it doesn’t take very much to divert people’s attention away from the obvious and common to the hidden and impossible. Fear is always the best way to do that…and the story in The Exorcist generates fear in most of its viewers. Of course, fear is so dangerous because it distorts all elements of your perception of reality…twists them around and pulls on them until they break…and then it creates its own elements. It will control what you see…what you hear…what you think. Within moments your mind will fall into the pattern of Substitution of Facts…Confusion of Intent. The person who controls what people feel is the one who is in control. And fear is the best way to do that. Sometimes reality is the thing that people fear the most…so a good Sleight of Fears…and you mindlessly run around from one Fake Terror to another. It’s amazingly easy to alter people’s reality…stir up a little fear…and that’s all there is to it. Still, as The Exorcist demonstrates clearly…religious fears work the best. First you shock…then you offend. And then you’re off to the Artificial Reality Races. Except, you look left when you should look right…you look up when you should look down…you look behind when you should look straight ahead. Never look where they want you to look! Look in the corners instead. If you believe in Satan…well, that’s too bad. Try believing in The Satan, and then you’ll come closer to the truth. Demons exist? Where are they? Show me! If they do exist…I’d like to meet one…not to do some nonsensical thing like sell my soul to Someone Who Doesn’t Exist. I’d like to ask him if he was one of Regan MacNeil’s  dunder-headed goofball demons. I’ll bet he’d spend less time trying to possess me, and more time trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do. Then I’d mention the names…Michael…Metatron…and watch him race back through my metaphorical Ouija board with his metaphorical tail between his metaphorical legs. Hey, Mr. Demon…give us time!