So it is time to return to the Shadow Among Us…and that means...Regan. Given the usual subject matter on this website, the title does seem out of character. Have no fear! It is very apropos…and it fits the context too. Regan gets into everything. And that is despite the fact that movie is really about…the Good Father. For him, Regan was collateral damage…and the possession of the girl was simply a means to get Merrin and Lamashtu into Regan’s Bedroom…don’t take that the wrong way. And I will add a slight deviation…a clarification, as it were. Lamashtu may be the actual Lamashtu. I was about to say…the real Lamashtu, but as we all know, demons aren’t real. But Lamashtu can also be conceived of in a metaphorical…a symbolic sense…that which Merrin believed orchestrated the attempts to murder him. Merrin always expected the conflict, which began in Iraq, to be settled back home. I’ve noted that the Roman Rite of Exorcism requires the priest conducting the exorcism to make strenuous efforts to get the name of the offending spirit-entity. We never see Merrin do that. And although one might simply assume that after Merrin got Karras, and then Chris, Carl, and Sharon out of the house…he went upstairs and quizzed Kiddo about just who it was that troubled her so. However, that assumes something not in evidence…and it is my belief that Merrin saw no need to do this because he already knew who it was. Why bug Regan about it if he already knew? Of course, if you did quiz a possessed kid as to who was possessing her, the demon might say…I won’t tell you, priest…so that you can’t exorcise me. However, the ritual is not demon-specific…there’s not a section to use against Baalzebub, and a section to use against Baphomet…or Legion…or Baal-Hammon…or…Hadad…or any other spirit-entity…Lamashtu and Pazuzu included. Whoever it was…it was the same ole’ ritual. And as I have noted before, Regan blundered when Regan called herself the Devil, who is not a demon and is far too busy with more important matters…perhaps he is awaiting a cabinet position in Washington…I’m sure he’ll get an offer soon. Following this mistake, it was wisely decided that no names be given. Of course, in other cases, the possessed person saw no need to not throw out various names. Anna Eklund threw out a bunch of names, including Judas Iscariot who, whatever you think of him, was just a dead guy…who betrayed the Living Christ or was simply set up to take the fall for another guy…but he wasn’t a demon. She also threw out two key names who I think, or so I have argued on this website, were the real cause of Anna’s torment…her father Jacob and her aunt Mina. They weren’t demons either, so Anna was claiming…apart from throwing out the names Satan and Lucifer, something akin to my interpretation of The Exorcist…in its novel manifestation, being haunted by ghosts. And how do people know that Satan isn’t a name! If he were involved in a case of possession, he would call himself…The Satan, and I have yet to find a possession case where anyone involved seems to know that fact. In the case of the novel…Regan’s brother Jamie, and in Anna’s case…Jacob and Mina…they are haunted family ghosts. I think the main reason for endeavoring to get a name was simple…the presumption should be that the person needing the exorcism was either faking for some reason, or was mentally disturbed. In Episode 5 of the Terror of Demons essay, I noted that such a person would be taking a tremendous chance if a name would be thrown out. I suggested that Molech was never a name, but rather was a changing of the name Melek (king) into an insult by giving the Hebrew consonants the same vowels as the word…bosheth…shame, shameful thing. If true, throwing out the name of Molech would, assuming the priests involved were worth their pepper…I mean…salt, be a big mistake showing that the whole thing was phony. The same would be true if the name…Baalzebub…were used, seeing how the real name of the deity was Baal, and that “vermin” was added by redactors in order to disgrace the Baal…Hadad of Ekron. Throwing out the name Baalzebub would be a serious blunder, although it is the one name for a demon that most people will recognize. Baalzebub is the name used in the gospels, but it is a corruption of the name…Baalzebul, a mistake that Fly Guy would not make when identifying himself. If Chris or Regan had seen the name Baalzebul in the context of King Ahaziah’s injury after falling through a lattice on the roof of his palace, then neither would probably realize that the Hebrew word…zebul…flies…vermin…filth…was tossed in by redactors in order to insult Hadad the Lordly One. As tempting as it would be to start throwing names around in order to seal the possession deal, anyone knowledgeable about such entities could quickly quiz Regan and find out that she knows nothing about the name she might give to the priests. That Chris resisted this urge is, in my opinion, due to advice she was receiving from another priest in the movie…one who liked beer and had been present in Chris’s study shortly before Karras arrived to make his Tape Backwards. But, as I said, it would be dependent upon the knowledge possessed…sorry…by the priests involved. Clerics are generally clergy…specializing in Systematic Theology, and thus often lacking this level of knowledge…though some, like Merrin, are archaeologists…a job giving ample opportunity to make the acquaintance of some very strange spirit-entities. We are specifically told, hearing the conversation between Detective Kindermann and Karras, that the latter was knowledgeable on the subject of witchcraft and possession…and Karras rightly concluded that when Regan claimed to be the Devil, it was an absurd claim to make. In fact, in psychological terms, it is a psychotic Delusion of Grandeur…believing oneself to so incredibly important to the universe that the second most powerful Being since the beginning of time was interested in you.
In the famous case of the supposedly possessed nuns at the Louviers Convent in 1647, one of the sisters…Madeleine Bavent, made a couple of mistakes. First she claimed that she was, after being found to have been a Naughty Nun and pregnant, possessed by Mathurin Picard…the father of her child…and Father Thomas Boulle…the vicar of Louviers. Of course, those would be strange names for demons, but she alleged sexual activities associated with them. Some gals just aren’t cut out to be nuns, ultimately ending up being Naughty Nuns. And so it wasn’t her fault that she enjoyed a good act of coupling, or that she was pregnant. Sure. And Picard was dead…so again…we end up with a ghost story. But Madeleine turned up the Metaphorical Spinal Tap Amplifiers to Volume 11. She claimed that she had married the Devil. But that couldn’t be true since The Satan was, as the comic book…Son of Satan…reveals, already married to…
…Victoria Wingate…a house-wife with a short, sassy hair-style, and a good cook to boot. Claiming to be possessed by priests with whom she may have had a triste is a mistake, to be sure. But she made another one…when she married the already-married-family-man Satan, she knew him as Dagon. A blunder indeed. Who was Dagon? He was a deity worshiped by the Philistines…
A very amusing story is told about Dagon in the Old Testament. When the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant, they put it in the Temple of Dagon. But! The big statue of Dagon would…
…fall over in front of it, making it look as though the Philistine Fish Guy was doing obeisance before the Magic Box of Israel’s God. Dagon is really, as I’ve discussed elsewhere on this website, a Fishman Apkallu…the most ancient form of the Apkallus, relative to their different manifestations. Of course, the story is simply a legend. So! Dagon isn’t, wasn’t, and will never be…a demon. Besides…the Magic Box broke Dagon’s statue! And it would take a whole lot of Biblical knowledge to look at Sister Victoria Wingate…I mean…Sister Madeleine…and say…hah! Gotcha! You’re full of demonic baloney…a key ingredient in Darla’s favorite sandwich. Still, Madeleine should be told that it is commendable that she’s been reading the Bible. Eventually, an imprisoned Sampson, an Israelite Strong Man and Nazarite…not Nazarene…personally destroyed Dagon’s temple. So much for Dagon! A broken statue and a broken temple! What a wimp! Madeleine’s study of scripture could use a little improvement. So using the name Dagon was clearly a blunder that, or so it would seem, no one recognized as a blunder…unless you read the Book of Judges…as Sister Madeleine did, without paying too much attention…apparently. But it’s a start.
However, it was soon to be that Sister Madeleine wasn’t the only Naughty Nun in the nunnery. Other nuns came down with Possession Flu, suggesting that something nefarious had been going on under the apparently not-so-watchful eye of the Mother Superior…who, for this reason, would appear to be an Inferior Mother Superior. But one sister did something rather clever. She too would give a name of the spirit-being who possessed her…and it wasn’t the name of a possible, more human, conjugal partner. Sister Barbara gave the name…Ancitif. Who is this guy? Well, he doesn’t appear in the Old Testament…or the New Testament. In fact, Ancitif is simply a made-up name…made up by Sister St. Clever who realized that a demon should be involved, but by making up an otherwise unattested name, she avoided the mistake of claiming that the statue-less and temple-less Philistine Fish God was responsible…though he may have been chasing mermaids around in the sea…and also managed to not throw out…Baalzebub or Molech…probably knowing who exactly these guys were, and that they weren’t demons. The case is interesting in another regard…vomit. In the case of Anna Ecklund, she was said to produce vomit in such quantities that Regan MacNeil would be left in the dust in a Possessed Girl vs. Possessed Girl Vomit Contest. The little book…Be Gone, Satan…catalogues what Anna’s vomit looked like, including…tobacco leaves. Of course, if you chew tobacco, and accidentally swallow it, the tobacco will come back up pretty quickly. But Anna Eklund has nothing on the Naughty Nuns of Louviers. They vomited too…but forget tobacco leaves and split-pea soup…that’s child’s play. Witnesses…lying witnesses who found the whole thing immensely entertaining, said the Naughty Nuns vomited things such as toads, snakes, maggots, iron, stones, pins, needles, nails, etc. I imagine that toads, snakes and maggots…oh my! would taste pretty yucky coming up! And if the nuns were merely looking to get high, they should have settled for licking the psychoactive toads, rather than swallowing them…which will certainly give one a queasy stomach…it does me. In the Salem Witchcraft Hoax, some believed that the crazy little girls may have eaten bread contaminated with ergot…which means…Lysergic Acid…the precursor to LSD. It is, of course, hard to see why demons would waste their time doing a weird sort of Metaphorical Carnival Nail-Swallowing act for the curious public. And although it put me on pins and needles, not to mention maggots and turtles (I added turtles to the list myself), you would think that you couldn’t survive vomiting up nails. They also engaged in…
…exposing themselves in a lewd or sexual manner. And thus the sisters of Louviers invented…Stripper Nuns!
…shake it sister!
And in modern pornography, nuns would become a mainstay. It would appear that Louviers Parties offered more than nuns exposing themselves in a lewd or sexual manner…no wild party is complete without…dope! In this case…
…Deadly Nightshade. Who knew that a nun could be so fun? And I cannot resist showing, yet again…
…nuns picking penises from penis trees. Here, Metaphorical Sister Madeline has a basket full of penises, and I’m sure that she’s making effort to get at least one for every nun in Louviers.
Oh, she isn’t the only Penis Picker in the convent! And some phalluses arrive at nunneries by special delivery…
You could…
…just say no like this boring nun. But your admirer might not take no for an answer…
Other nuns have less scruples…
Hey guys! Look what I brought back from Louviers!
Sisters Agatha, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Madeline. You could deliver phalluses to nuns, or do it the other way around! A wheelbarrow full of nuns is more fun than a barrel of monkeys…or so I’ve been told.
And some nuns could be rather kinky…
Still, there were some very unpleasant fetishes that Metaphorically Symbolic Louviers Nuns would have nothing to do with…
…just say no! Who do you think she is…Tlazy? I’ll ride in the wheelbarrow…but a nun has to have limits. Well, they don’t always say no…
Oh, shit! If Sister Elizabeth says no…go ask Sister Margaret!
See, guys…begging does work! More Naughty Nuns being naughty…
And who knows what’s…
…going on in this picture of a bizarre Basilisk Nun. Surely Ancitif is behind all of these Naughty Goings-on! In a previous essay, I noted that only in the context of the Temptation of Christ does Medieval Christian Art portray the Devil as a woman…well, as far as I know… let me know if I am mistaken on that point. I also showed an image of the Devil disguised as a monk, although he didn’t disguise his bird-feet. And so I find this interesting…
…the Devil disguised as a nun! And no! I do not have a foot fetish…don’t listen to Darla! It would also seem as though Higher-Ups attended Wild Naughty Nun Parties as well, including…
…the bishop, who is supplying the music. I wonder if he knows…Heaven to Stairway! And who knew that Sister Madeleine was a good…
…baseball pitcher! Of course, at Louviers, you were guaranteed a homerun!
In the Loudun Exorcisms of 1634, which also involved…nuns…an attempt was made to figure out who was causing all the problems. So…it was time to throw out names…for example, an anonymous priest…which really isn’t a name, and my favorite…an entity named…Zabulon. Of course, Zebulon was the name of one of the sons of the Old Testament patriarch named…Jacob. And Zebulon was one of the 13 tribes of Israel. The name Zabulon is a blunder, and an “anonymous priest” suggests a spur of the moment…I-don’t-know-who-to-say-is-doing-this! In Loudon, the man held responsible was believed to have been sexually involved with a woman named Philippa, but a group of Ursuline nuns were also said to be involved. And Karras’s desperate attempt to find enough evidence to go to the bishop with…knowledge of foreign languages…was an out-and-out failure, although, in the case of…
…Elizabeth de Ranfaing, the demon was able to speak French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Italian…two of which are Biblical Languages (Greek and Hebrew), and one is the Catholic church’s ecclesiastical language (Latin). And la plume de ma tante! Bon jour, Elizabeth de Ranfaing! The demon was so proficient in Latin that when the exorcist made a grammatical mistake when reciting the ritual…the demon graciously corrected the error!
Money, money, sin and misery!
Those were the words that Elizabeth Knapp of Groton, Massachusetts would yell out during her supposed possession in 1672. She made Regan’s mistake…she was possessed by the Devil…or so she claimed…with other spirit-beings hanging around as well. And it would seem that a certain theme appeared in possession cases…she finally admitted to having sex with the Devil…meaning that the Puritan gal had been naughty with someone else.
In the case of…
…Clara Germana Cele, the language thing was taken to an extreme…not only Polish, German, French, and Norwegian, the demon could speak all other languages. And many Catholic school children will find Clara appealing in so far as she would play…I’ll Punch Your Face with nuns. Clara, like Anna Ecklund who would be later, and Regan MacNeil later still, could levitate, although the girl did try to kill the exorcist by choking him with his own stole! Don’t give Kiddo any ideas about how to handle Father Merrin! I will return to levitation shortly. But levitation can take different forms. In the case of Anna Ecklund…
…she could jump straight up in the air, and hover in the corner. A sort of…Demonic Helicopter. The imagery associated with Clara Germana Cele, the shot I showed above, whether it is really her or not, if it is true, then the makers of The Exorcist saw images associated with Clara. If the shot is post-1973, then there is a clear dependence on the film…
But in the case of Clara, she made horrible noises, described by a nun as…
…a veritable herd of wild beasts orchestrated by Satan…which formed a hellish choir.
A hellish choir? I wonder if Clara sang in all languages known to man! Or beast. It’s too bad that Regan couldn’t sing the Norwegian national anthem…backwards! And here is a case that strikes closer to Chris MacNeil’s home…
…Anneliese Michel. The case involved a young woman who was mentally ill, and, get ready for it…was diagnosed with…temporal lobe epilepsy! Dopey Doctor and the Temporal Lobe Lesion Wizard searched hard to find the lesion in Regan’s brain…and didn’t…which proves absolutely nothing. Regan was put on Thorazine, the picking up of the prescription was the alibi that Sharon would use to explain why she wasn’t at the house watching Regan when Burke Dennings took his Helluva Fall. Anneliese showed the classic signs of severe schizophrenia, and living in Bavaria, West Germany…she was not put on Thorazine, but rather, was put on Aolept…an anti-psychotic drug banned in the United States, and not easy to pronounce. She was also given the drug Tegretol, another drug used for epilepsy and Schizophrenia. And the case became another I’ll-Punch-Your-Face rendition, dedicated to the Catholic Church, seeing how the case came out. Eventually, she was subjected to a year-long exorcism that ended with her death in July of 1976. It wasn’t Satan, demons, Baphomet, Lamashtu or any other spirit-being-offender that killed her. What killed her was…murder…
…starvation, extreme dehydration, two broken knees, and pneumonia. She weighed 68 pounds by the time of her death. The two priests involved, along with her parents, were convicted of negligent homicide. The bishop who approved all of this, was Josef Stangl…
…who ordered the whole thing…here comes a surprise…be kept secret. Why ever would you do that? The combination of temporal lobe epilepsy and anti-psychotic medication readily brings Regan to mind. And if one takes a look at Chris MacNeil’s mental visualization of the Diabolical-Side-Of-Her-Daughter…
…something that only Chris and Karras ever saw…definitely links to the destruction of Anneliese Michel. Setting aside the question of the teeth, which I have shown change dramatically between…
…that’s what a second mortgage looks like in the mouth of your kid, by the way…and Regan’s awful teeth, which bounce back and forth in the same short scenes…see…The Shadow Among Us, Episode 1, Shimmer, published on this website. One of the most notable things about Mr. Yucky Face is the dark circles around the eyes. So tell me if this looks familiar…
…the dark circles around the eyes are very prevalent in the pictures of Anneliese Michel. Now I will state that I believe that this element of the appearance of Mr. Yucky Face forms the basis of the Anneliese Michel case. And it is simply true that the existence of sunken eyes surrounded by dark skin is one of the signs of dehydration. And again…
…notice the eyes.
I would note something else about Anneliese Michel…the priests who killed her provided the names of the demons afflicting her…Lucifer…I get that one, but also…Cain, Judas Iscariot (dependent on the case of Anna Eklund), Hitler, the Emperor Nero, and, most bizarrely…Valentin Fleischmann. And now it is time to play…one of these things is not like the other…yes! Here’s the list:
1. Lucifer
2. Cain
3. Judas Iscariot
4. Nero
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Valentin Fleischmann
It is obvious that there is a problem here. None, obviously, are demons. The use of the name…Lucifer…here is understandable, although, as I have argued elsewhere on this website that Lucifer or…Phosphorus…or…Helel-ben-Shohar…the Shining One, Son of the Dawn, was not a demon, but rather, a human ruler who, ca. 5000 BC, was responsible for the building of the Great Artificial Sun at Giza. Later, it was wrongly believed to be a tomb or temple. So that rules out Lucifer. It would appear that Anneliese threw out the names of very bad human beings, not demons…Cain murdered Abel…Judas supposedly betrayed Christ, and Hitler and Nero are usually at the top of everyone’s list of the most horrible rulers of all time. For a girl who grew up in Germany, Hitler would readily come to mind. But who killed more people in the end…Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin? Apparently, she never threw out the name of Stalin…and she knew the name of Nero, but not the name of Caligula…one of everyone’s Go-To-Guys on this subject. Had she chosen Caligula, she would have made a Helluva Blunder. Caligula is actually a nickname…Little Boots, which Roman troops gave him because his mother dressed him in a Little Roman Soldier Suit…with little boots to boot. But he hated the nickname…and you used it around him at your undeniable peril. His name was…Gaius. So! If it had been Gaius who troubled Anneliese Michel, he would never have called himself by a nickname he hated. Nero’s main claim to infamy is burning down his own city, accompanied by music, and carrying out the first persecution of Christians. However, the persecutions under the emperors Decius and Diocletian…the latter egged on by Galerius, who fed his enemies to his pet bear, and his mother Romula…eclipsed what happened under Nero, but Anneliese didn’t have that level of knowledge of Roman history. But she didn’t need to have this knowledge! Someone else did. So now it is time to finish our game of…one of these things is not like the other…yes! Here’s the list again:
1. Lucifer
2. Cain
3. Judas Iscariot
4. Nero
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Valentin Fleischmann
Who is Valentin Fleischmann? He was a defrocked Frankish Catholic priest in the 16th century. He was also excommunicated. His crime…he was an alcoholic. He was subsequently accused of assault and murder. He was also connected with Bavaria, which is where Anneliese lived, and so did…
…Adolf Hitler, whose Berghof was located in the Bavarian Alps. And isn’t it strange that the information about these Not-Demons came from the two Clerical Clowns who participated in this nonsense? Only a priest could come up with a demon named Valentin Fleischmann…a defrocked priest and alcoholic. How in the world could a list with names that will live on forever in infamy include an absolute nobody that only a Kooky Priest could have come up with? It is ridiculous in the extreme. Ask a priest…who is the worst guy in the Bible? Answer…Judas Iscariot. The list of names given above shows just what nonsense this demon-possession story is.
And it is clear that this leads to two parallels between Regan MacNeil and Anneliese Michel…
…Karras’s first meeting with Regan reveals two interesting things. The first is the nasal cannula…used to deliver air to someone who is having trouble breathing properly…an oxygen deficiency issue. And as Karras enters the bedroom, we can hear labored breathing…that said, it would appear that the noises we hear Regan making…really…Chris and Karras hear Regan making, something I will touch on later in this essay, or not being made by her at all…certainly not …a veritable herd of wild beasts orchestrated by Satan…which formed a hellish choir! A demonic version of Toidy Toid and Toid! The nasal cannula will not be seen again in the movie. So, something prompted the need for the nasal cannula, and then the prompter…the prompting thing…disappeared. There can be no doubt what was wrong with Regan at this point…we know that her room gets very cold at night…only at night…not during the day. Interesting…isn’t it…that the demon is making the room cold, but is only able to do so on a cold night? In a previous essay, I showed the back of the house…the back of the front of a Metaphorical French Maid…and the two, strange windows in what would be the back of the front of the bathroom wall in Regan’s room…
But we know that there were no such visible windows there inside the bathroom…
I attributed that to the house being comprised of two parts…the older part of the house…the one with Regan’s room, and that the bathroom…which is a very large bathroom…was actually a second bedroom at one time. The house is odd in that the large windows in the shot of the back of the house are the windows in Chris’s room. However, if one looks directly from Regan’s room into Chris’s room…
…you don’t see the windows…you see the fireplace. To see the windows, you have to walk into Chris’s bedroom…don’t take that the wrong way…and then turn left…
…see! And that is why you can see the windows in Chris’s room as being on the same side of the house as the two mysterious windows in what would be the back wall of Regan’s bathroom.
As Chris pursues the Noises in the Attic around…the attic, she passes not one…but two…dressmaker’s dummies.
In the previous shot, the two dummies are lined up parallel to each other…with precision. I believe that Regan, going up into the attic as she does in the novel, in the course of which she found the Ouija board…which she has no idea how to use…and having nothing to do with Orange Bag-piper’s Box…lined them up this way while messing around. The second shot shows one of the dummies that sits adjacent to the John Dewar & Sons box, which is wearing…
…a French Maid’s Apron…back when they were worn in contexts other than sexual fantasies and porn movies. Oh, come on guys, knock it off! What, I’m the one who showed the pictures? Oh. Never mind. Yes, there was a time when they were even worn by…maids…French or...Norwegian. Normally, the apron covers the front of the back. Except when it is turned around, which I think Regan did for fun…the back of the front is now covered, but the front of the back is exposed! And that’s even funnier! The existence of TWO dress-maker’s dummies would indicate that the old part of the house consisted of a tailor or dress-maker’s shop on the ground floor, and two bedrooms up above…a common enough arrangement in the past. The front of the old house is…
…is now the back of the house. The old part of the house existed PRIOR to Prospect Street, and what was the front of the back is now the back of the front...albeit, without a French Maid’s Apron. The attic also betrays a second floor, and Chris’s journey around the attic shows that both halves of the house are not of the same height…
That is the view of the floor as Chris looks down at it. At this point, I should add.
Passing the dress-maker’s dummies, which I believe are in the part of the attic over Regan’s room, accessed by a hatch in her closet, Chris is about to disappear from view, giving us a final glance as if she were telling us to pay close attention. She then disappears, only to reappear…
With the same camera angle, she re-appears, now walking through the part of attic that is lower in height than the other.. We see only her head and the upper part of her body.
This is a shot showing the floor and a mouse trap, but here the floor is at the position of her upper body as she looks at it. This means that there are two levels to the attic over the house, and as you walk around, you start on the upper level, and then, as you complete your Attic Stroll, you walk down, and then back up.
More of Chris becomes visible as, having walked through the lower portion of the attic, she walks back up it, becoming more and more visible as she reaches the top. There is another interesting element here. The first shot of the floor with the mouse trap shows older construction…and the floor is clean. But in the second, one can see shoddy workmanship and a bunch of crumbling insulation. The latter is due to the addition of windows in Regan’s part of the house when the second bedroom was turned into a bathroom. Originally, and we’re going back into olden days when there were no air conditioners, the windows in the back of the house would have aligned with…
…the two windows to the left of the house. These windows are the window in the hall (second from the left), and the window in Regan’s room (far left)…but neither are the Portal to Certain Death.
The window behind Chris is the far left upper floor window in the shot of the house shown above.
The Most Iconic Shots of Iconic Shots! It’s readily apparent now..the two windows to the left of the scene are the two windows shown in the image above. One is the hall window, and the other is the window in Regan’s room, but neither are the window overlooking the Stone Stairs.
That window is…
…this window…which overlooks the Stone Stairs. I think that the old part of the house had two bedrooms, both of which are now Regan’s room. The second bedroom was turned into a large bathroom, and that meant building a wall across the second bedroom that covered the two windows seen in the back of the house. But that meant that the airflow created when open windows that are across from one another are opened…now that two on the same side were walled over, was impeded. So two more windows were added…the Window Leading to Certain Death, and…
…to the left…the new bathroom window. Air flow would result if the window at the front is opened and the other two, newer windows were opened. Those windows were added later, and so the workmanship was inferior to the older workmanship visible in the attic. This is the reason why Regan’s room got so cold at night…there was a space between the current wall and the wall on the back of the house. This meant that cold air could flow into that space creating the Ice Box Effect. This is supported by the fact that the coldness in Regan’s room was not felt outside the room, in the same way you could stand next to an old Ice Box and not feel the cold inside it. The wind in Regan’s room is the result of open windows creating cross-currents, and the opening of the hatch to allow access to the attic…and if the attic windows, which are only over Regan’s room, are open.
Why this long digression and nut-shelling of a previous essay? That’s simple!
The reason for the nasal cannula…the reason for the labored breathing is…Regan had been sleeping in a cold room and contracted…pneumonia. And pneumonia was one of the things that supposedly killed Anneliese Michel. Regan would lose the nasal cannula for the rest of the film. Why? She recovered. But the room is still frigid…isn’t it? Yes, it is! The difference being that after becoming sick…she was no longer sleeping in her bedroom…she was only in that room during the day. Can I prove that? I think so…but I’m biased. The above shot of Cute-As-Button-Regan is from, of course, Karras’s first, though unfortunate, visit. What no one seemed to know was that Detective Kindermann was doing stake-out duty out on the street…
…and, finally, Karras left, carrying a tape with him. He crosses the street, and then…
…Kindermann looks up at Regan’s room. There really shouldn’t be much to see, given the fact that the curtains are drawn. But it turns out that there is something very much to see…
…that’s a shadow, if I’m not mistaken. Whose shadow? In the novel, I believe the shadow seen passing by the window is, in fact, Jamie. But not here, oh no! Here, it is clearly…Regan. Karras has left, the show is over, and given how cold the room gets at night, and the fact that Toots came down with pneumonia that way…we can’t let her sleep in that room anymore. So as soon as Karras leaves, Chris goes upstairs and sets Kiddo free from her restraints. She gets out of bed to find a warmer place to sleep. And watching the house, Kindermann sees her shadow as she moves around before heading downstairs to a warm sleeper-sofa…being warm and cozy is a must! Especially if we don’t want her to get sick again. Hold it right there! Darla says I’m wrong about that! And when she told me her opinion…wow! Boy was I wrong…and…somebody was right…I don’t want it go to a certain someone’s head. Last time I told her that she MAY have been right, it…
…caused a little surprise.
Don’t let it go to your head…Kiddo. Annoying Step-mom is always right!
Besides, Darla is grounded until she tells the police where she buried Mrs. Johnson. And I haven’t seen her father since he ran to the store to get milk. That was a year ago, so he must be taking his time. Now Chris is not the kind of mother who would let her only daughter, even though she tried to crush her to death with the big oak dresser, sleep on a sleeper-sofa. And I have learned from Darla just where Regan was sleeping after the Crucifix scene. This Sleight-of-Rooms illusion was created by Chris and Regan and fed to Karras, and consequently Regan is in that room for the exorcism. By the time of the second visit, the nasal cannula was lost. but…
…something is missing…
…Regan no longer has the nasal cannula, but now she has an IV drip.
She has this throughout the exorcism, until it is broken when things get a little rough. Why? Because of dehydration…possibly due to vomiting. And dehydration is one of the things that killed Anneliese. Now, I must say one more thing about vomit, although my vomitology days are behind me.
…Compazine. The most common use of Compazine is…to treat naesau. But it is closely related to…Thorazine, and so the latter should provide Kiddo with some relief from her naseua…but it doesn’t. The last time Thorazine is mentionned is the Spider-Walk scene, when Regan’s face was still intact, and there were no hints of vomiting. However, if we exclude the Extreme Vomiting seen during Karras’s first meeting with Regan, and one shot during the exorcism scene…vomit is only hinted at. Looking at what is on the chest, and the spitting of green yucky stuff in Merrin’s face, it would seem as though she was, after Karras’s first visit, merely…spitting up. So the Thorazine could have made a difference. Would Compazine have been better? Hey..Toots! The only Compazine we have is the suppository variety…what? You’ll skip it? I guess we’ll stick with Thorazine.
It is worth taking a look at something that makes it clear what we’re dealing with. That is a plain as the nose on Regan’s face…
Ok, the nose isn’t so important. What is important is that her lips are starting to look not-so-good.
And…
It’s very hard to make clear from a screen-shot, but what is most important here is that she is biting her lips.
The bottom lip is beginning to look a little raw.
The awful condition of Regan’s lips becomes very apparent once she was hospitalized. And this feature will continue up through the exorcism…
And…
Then it gets worse…
It gets even worse still…
Now in a way very similar to Regan’s teeth…the dark around her eyes also seems to come and go…
This condition of the lips is, of course, not a sign of demonic-possession, but gnawing the lips, along with biting the tongue, can be a real problem for people suffering from epilepsy. As far as the dark around the eyes, the most stunning example is…
Now step back to a time before the exorcism, at some point before Merrin’s arrival, and notice Regan’s face…
The dark circles around the eyes are not present. The whites of her eyes are clear. The skin barely has a blue tinge to it. The cuts are present, but nothing like what we see…through the eyes of Chris and Karras…at other times in the movie, where her face almost looks as if it were falling off. Notice too that she’s mumbling to herself. There doesn’t appear to be vomit around her mouth. And she is shrouded in black, and that means we can’t say exactly what room she is in. However, I think that in this shot, she is not in her bedroom. And this shot is absolutely crucial in what we see and don’t see. The Awful-Looking Regan only looks as bad as she does when Chris and Karras are looking at her.
There are other parallels. In Annilese’s case, the bishop was initially reluctant to agree to an exorcism, then relented and allowed TWO priests to perform the exorcism…equivalents to Karras and Merrin. It is also true that when priests were consulted, they were sceptical about the demon-possession angle, and recommended that Annilese continue to be treated for her clear case of psychosis linked to temporal lobe epilepsy, which she may not have been receiving medication for any longer. Also in Annilese’s case, although she was clearly suffering from, at the very least, temporal lobe epilepsy…displaying the symptoms of it, so too Dopey Doctor and the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Wizard gave up on a diagnosis of epilepsy. But there is present in the story someone, or someones, who did believe that Regan’s psychotic systems were NOT due to mental illness. Who?
I will show these shots…
Regan displays bizarre convulsions, and howls and growls…like a veritable herd of wild beasts orchestrated by Satan…which formed a hellish choir. I wonder if Regan played hide and cheek with her pharmaceutical poison!
The cuts on her face are clearly due to Self-Harm Behavior, and Anneliese also showed this. And…
…here Regan is shown restrained, staring intently, also described, in terms of epilepsy as…Staring Into Space, and seen in the side-by-side image below, she is also mumbling to herself. That behavior is shown twice…
These are the two shots of Regan mummbling to herself. In children, one of the features of an epileptic event is a fearful or pained look on the face, which is clearly visible in the shot on the left. And, of course, mumbling incoherently is another symptom of epilepsy.
So, in the shot on the right, where is she? In her bedroom? In Chris’s house? No…
…the Berringer Clinic and Foundation. I have, in the past, been very unfair to the Berringer Clowns, who aren’t clowns at all. They appear to be clowns only because we hear what they say through the ears of Chris. So it’s Chris’s fault, not mine! We have seen that Regan exhibits bizarre behavior, cuts her own face, howls and growls, and stares into space mumbling incoherently. And yet…the Berringerites send Regan home. They failed her? Not at all. What the Berringers say to Chris is not that she should get an exorcism for Regan. In reality, the psychotic behavior shown by Regan would be something they had seen time and time again. They tell Chris that the behavior is consistent with behavior associated by some with demon-possession delusion, and that is why they ask Chris if she, or Regan, have any religious beliefs…particularly mindless and goofy religious beliefs that could convey the idea of demon-possession to Regan. So did they refer all such patients to priests for exorcism? Certainly not…Karras makes it clear that exorcisms are rare, and in 1973, the Catholic church in America simply would not allow an exorcism for a child showing signs of psychosis…temporary psychosis. And he’s right. Did Chris really hear Berringers’ suggestion that Regan get an exorcism? Not until the Crucifix Scene, which, as I have noted in a previous essay, is a reversal of the Sow Is Mine scene. So what happened?
Right! She was discharged and sent home. This would be a horrible act of medical incompetence that would, at the very least, be grounds for certain legal action should something happen to Regan as a result. And the guys and gals at Berringer would be only too aware of this. So why send her home? I can think of only one reason…the Berringerites believed that Regan’s psychotic behavior was not due to a quantifiable mental illness. Regan wasn’t Schizophrenic. The doctors at the Berringer Clinic realized that what Regan was suffering from is…epilepsy. Thus her symptoms are created by a disorder having nothing to do with mental illness. There was, therefore, no justifiable reason to keep Regan at the hospital since there was nothing that an army of pscyiatrists and psychologists could do. It wasn’t their bailiwick…Regan’s problems were somthing they could do nothing about. All there was to do was to get the proper medical treatment for her, including getting the right medication protocol. Chris may not have done so, and if she didn’t, she became a conspirator and enabler just as much the Michels…depending on what you believe really happened to Anneliese…and on that point…I have some reservations about the canonical story. But another interesting possibility exists. Both girls were put on anti-psychotic medication…if the parents of Anneliese sought to justify an exorcism by withholding her medication…thereby making her mental condition worsen to the point that the spurious claim could be made that her condition must be spiritual since nothing medical was working…withholding Regan’s medication could make her situation worsen…eliciting behavior intended to provide proof to Karras that Regan’s condition was due to demon-possession as well.
But this would mean that Dopey Doctor and the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Wizard were the ones who failed. And that is quantifiable. The doctor initially prescribed Ritalin. Ritalin can make a big difference in children who suffer from hyperactivity, difficulty focusing and lack of self-control. The symptoms displayed by Regan at the outset of the film indicate that taking a shot at Ritalin being effective actually makes sense. And there is no reason why a family doctor shouldn’t prescribe Ritalin and see what happens. But what happened was that it became clear that Regan was not suffering from anything that Ritalin could help resolve. At some point, Dopey Doctor prescribed…Thorazine. This is rather amazing. Thorazine is a powerful anti-psychotic, and prescribing it is a tacit acknowledgment that what Regan was suffering from appeared to be Schizophrenic psychosis. Yet, it isn’t until much later that Chris is told that she should consult the services of a psychiatrist. Thorazine is a powerful drug when prescribed to an adult…all the more so if given to a 12 year old. Family doctors should not prescribe this type of drug to young patients…actually…not to anyone, in my opinion. Still, in 1973 there weren’t a lot of alternatives. But at the very least, only a psychiatrist who has observed Regan, which would require Karrasite hospitalization, should prescribe this drug to her. The effect of Thorazine on Regan offers a parralel to Anneliese Michel…
…the Sow Is Mine scene. Dopey Doctor receives a call from Chris about something happening to Regan, and requests that he come to the house right away. He does, taking the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Wizard with him. That is when we find out that Regan no longer takes Ritalin, having been put on Thorazine by a guy who shouldn’t have the legal right to do so. Entering the room, Regan is having severe convulsions. Remember that Regan is not having the kind of fits that Chris think she sees. Why? Because neither doctor sees anything they haven’t seen before. So unless they get a lot of patients suffering from impossible convulsions, then within the Artificial Reality, Chris is, in her mind, distorting what is actually happening. But what the scene does clearly show is the possible inappropriateness of Regan being on Thorazine. Here it is in the middle of the day. Why is there no tutor at the house helping Regan stay caught up at school while she is out sick? We find the girl in a nightdress, albeit a very pretty one with with blue flowers, in the middle of the day…in bed. And if you give a kid Thorazine, classified as an anti-psychotic AND a major tranquilizer…Thorazine was discovered when researchers were looking to develop new anti-histamines. Thorazine failed in this regard, but because it was observed to cause serious sedation, it was determine to use it with patients prior to surgery…a time when overwhelming fear and dread often set in. When given to violent patients in psychiatric hospitals, it not only functioned as a chemical straight-jacket…the patients’ psychotic symptoms began to improve. And thus Thorazine was off to the races, despite serious side-effects, including Acathesia and Tardive Dyskensia…the former being an almost unbearable state of never-ending inner tension, the latter being repetitive, uncontrolled unnatural tics that become permanent unless Thorazine is stopped immediately.
Here, Thorazine is a drug prescribed by…dermatologists…which is the real insanity.
One of the “fundamental drugs in medicine”?
Stop acting like a child…child…or I’ll dose you with Thorazine! This absurd suggestion is probably the one that Dopey Doctor was thinking about, although I must admit that I have no idea what is happening with the two girls in the ad on the right. The ad does, at least, point out that Thorazine should be prescribed only when used while the person…here a child…is under professional care…care by the RIGHT professional...something that was NOT happening with Regan. Once a psychiatrist was consulted, who turned out to be a Animal Magnetist Specializing In Magic Tricks...had Regan hospitalized as he recovered from Regan’s Testicular Assault. Yes, it was Regan’s violent assault directed at the Hypnotist that led to her temporary hospitalization. And there was no let up of that behavior, which circles back to my earlier statements about the only reason that the Berringers would release Regan.
A lobby poster for a creepy B-horror movie? No, much worse than that. This disturbing ad pretty much sums up my loathing of Thorazine.
A cool, psydelic rock poster from the 1960s? Move over Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin!
…men who beat their wives, something that American society shows a great deal of tolerance for. So many diagnostic categories! Does that include demon-possession? And I dig the fact that she’s running in high heels.That’s not easy to do…am I right, girls? If
Actually, you could set her free…let her get a job that privdes, at the very least, the sense of being something other some guy’s maid…French, Norwegian, or otherwise. However, Serax seems to be, like Regan’s Demonic-Voices-On-Karras’s- Magical-Tape-Recorder, to be arguing with itself…
You can be set free by Serax after all! And you hold your hands up in the air while wearing your nightdress against a depressingly dark and dreary backdrop, as you teeter on the edge of suicidally falling into a body of dark water. Free at last!
…and should your wife find that she isn’t happy living as your virtual domestic slave, you can dose her with Serax, Mornidine, or Thorazine…it doesn’t really matter, since it’s all the same poison. After all, a smiling domestic servant who cooks your fatty breakfast, makes your coffee, and buries herself in implements for cleaning YOUR house is better than one who isn’t. And let’s add…
…Mellaril, which keeps her dressing attractively as she buys your groceries for you.
Dexamyl, a combination of amobarbital…a tranquilizer which should have Metaphorical June Cleaver doing a Regan MacNeil…laying in bed 24 hours a day. But fix that by dumping dextroamphetamine into it…something akin to a Speedball…simulanteous taking of heroin and cocaine…but under a doctor’s supervision. So! She will smile contently as she vaccums your carpet and mends your clothes, crawling the walls, or unable to get up from the floor…a controlled woman is better than one who has something else in life than cleaning your floor. It will also help if you think she is fat…
Exchange grungy tennis shoes and the awful robe of a mental institution for nylons and heels…it’s so easy! And I suppose the children’s toys at her feet show just how good a woman she is when she’s doped to the gills.
Perfect, guys! Riddle me this…what do you do if your wife thinks that a mere moth is really a monster?
Right! Give her Mebaral! Sedation without that pesky sedation! Does anyone’s intelligence feel insulted? Wait!
Mothman is a monster! Who cares? Give her Mebaral anyway. Thorazine can also treat…
…asthma. A very similar drug, Anquil, treats…
…anti-social sexual behavior which only seems to effect women, and not men. So, ladies! Explore your own sexuality in a male-dominated society, then you are mentally ill and need to be sedated. Maybe the Naughty Nuns at the beginning of this essay should be given this Magic Elixir That Destroys Your Natural Feelings. And…
If you want something really insane to treat insanity, you could insanely produce an insane thing…
…Thorazine with something extra…Amphetamine! Dexamyl vs. Thoradex…who will win? And it can make you look down-right saintly! Now for the ridiculous…
And even better…
If you were a doctor who realized how dangerous Thorazine was, and you preferred to follow the time-tested treatments for mental illness, then you’re nothing more than a voo-doo witch doctor. And since that’s my hobby…I should become a psychiatrist! At least you would have a tiki-head for your Polynesian bar! And Thorazine can help keep patients from “cheeking” their pills and then trading them, like they were extra-baseball cards that you already have in your collection…
…an orange tablet gets three greeners…you got blue? Give me two.
What a song lyric that would make! Darla said she will put that in her next hit single...it’s a duet with Regan MacNeil. Thorazine will end the orange vs. green vs. blue wasteful games. Hide and cheek! Where do they get such talented writers? Well, not everyone can be a talented writer…something that I know only too well. Maybe add something effective against male-pattern baldness….that beats orange, green, blues, and wasteful games of hide and cheek!
Well, we’ll try Thorazine, Stellazine, Mornidine, Thoradex, Serax, Stellazine, and any other -zine we can think of! But not anti-convulsant drugs for temperal lobe epilepsy…despite her symptoms, Mrs. MacNeil. And since she just said a naughty thing like…fuck me! We’ll give her Anquil too. And yes, I can give you a prescription for Mother’s Little Helper while I’m here. After all…orange gets three greeners and blue gets you two!
But the point to make is that Regan is dosed with Thorazine, dressed for bed, with the apparent idea to leave her sleeping 24 hours a day. Nothing could be more unhealthy than that for a disturbed child. Of course, it would make things easier for her mother. Another point…the story goes that Anneliese was on anti-psychotic drugs through the approximately 10 months of her exorcism. Who prescribed those drugs? I think that’s a good question. Psychiatrists don’t simply fill prescriptions for powerful drugs over and over without seeing the patient…certainly not in the US…and I’m willing to assume that the same was true in Germany. But! Look at the condition Anneliese was in the photographs. Do you mean tell me that some psychiatrist was prescribing powerful anti-psychotic drugs to a girl in this terrible condition, discovered that this was all somehow linked to rather demented and extremist religious nonsense embraced by parents who were willing to slowly destroy their child to keep two priests busy? And he said…oh, well…let’s refill the prescription? In my opinion, the use of anti-psychotics in Anneliese’s case is problematic to say the least. Another consideration…I find it difficult to believe that she was being given anti-psychotics and simply continued to get worse. What psychiatrist would say…she’s getting much worse…but we won’t hospitalize her…we’ll just keep giving her drugs that aren’t working…with an exorcism chaser of course. It would seem as though there was a psychiatrist involved who should have been tried for negligent homicide, or the parents were getting the drugs from someone who wasn’t a doctor, or there weren’t any anti-psychotics involved at all. The exorcism may serve an important purpose…an attempt to switch one thing for another…a little sleight of hand. Hospitalization may have meant that she would talk…saying something that others didn’t want her to say. You can bolster the demon-possession nonsence by finding two idiotic and gullible clerics to throw holy water on her…for ten months? Still, this would reinforce, as Karras implied in what he said to Chris, the girl’s delusions and thereby ensure that all possibly relevant facts remain buried. Then the girl’s mental disturbances would appear to be due to something they are not. And the only thing that would justify this bizarre event is the belief that a girl who had been treated for mental illness was, in fact, possessed by a wide cast of non-demon characters…
…the priests believed Anneliese and these were the guys troubling her? Mortals who had been freed from their Mortal Coil? Where was I? Oh, yes! To justify the exorcism it was important to establish the fact that her condition couldn’t be psychological since all the anti-psychotics in the world had done nothing, and she was only getting worse. In most cases, whatever you think about these medications, they will produce results. But again…if Anneliese’s delusions were used to the advantage of someone else, then the exorcism was the way to go, and the complete and total failure of all medication to alleviate any of the symptoms would have to be established. She was dying of dehydration and starvation, and the non-demons broke her knees as if she were someone attempting to cheat a loanshark out of his money? And a doctor saw her to refill prescriptions? This produces another parallel..should Regan have been hospitalized? Yes, if what Chris saw was really happening…particuarly in the Crucifix scene. Should Anneliese have been hospitalized? Obviously. Neither were, instead, both disappeared into their parent’s, or parents’, house…isolated and away from anyone else other than…priests. However, the makers of the The Exorcist offset this by showing a nasal cannula, an IV drip, and other items used by nurses. And although Chris may have played a nurse in one of her movies…she wasn’t one. Nor was Sharon, Carl, or Willi. That means a nurse coming to the MacNeil home to treat and check on Regan. Ah, yes! And if what Chris saw is what was actually happening in the Artificial Reality, then the nurse saw it too. And that would mean she would have to have completely ignored it. Not possible. In the case of Anneliese, it was obvious that she belonged in a psychiatric hospital. This is an important comparison…
It seems to be rather telling that shots featuring the same kind of blackness around the eyes as Regan has…and the pictures of Anneliese are careful to include someone’s hand on her head…and no, Kooky Clerics Of Bavaria…neither of you can hold a candle to Merrin. So, nut-shelling it…
Regan and Anneliese:
Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
Self-harm behavior
Pneumonia
Dehydration
Anti-psychotic medications
Disappeared from public view
Increasing severity of symptoms
Exorcism
One must also remember that the makers of The Exorcist show restraints numerous times. It is known that Annaliese was restrained by her parents at various times, and one wonders if Regan-MacNeil-Like restraints were also being used with her. And most notably…an emphasis on the dark circles around the eyes. As I noted earlier, the darkness around Regan’s eyes change from scene-to-scene in the same way as her teeth. One more point…Regan may have started out dehydrated…after she recovered from pneumonia…but once she was getting a Banana Bag…even if temporarily dependent on it, no one getting fluids through an IV drip can be dehydrated. Yet, Karras continues…at various times, to see the dark black coloring around the eyes. In the same way, pictures of Anneliese show it. And restraints + black coloring around the eyes brings to mind…
One almost gets the idea that Regan and Anneliese suffered from the exact same thing…they are a reflexion of each other…too much of a reflexion. If one sought to establish that their child was possessed by demons, something they believed in, and that child wasn’t…then you would have to create a convincing Possession Big Picture. That means a template…an example to build on. It was, of course, during the years 1975-1976 that Annaliese was slowly being murdered. And to simply point out the historical context…The Exorcist was released in 1973, giving people more than a year to have seen the film, believe that what they thought they saw in the film…i.e. the demon-possession angle…was reflective of actual demon-possession…and then re-ceate it. The case of Anneliese Michel seems too dependent upon Regan MacNail to not leave one wondering about it. The point to start from is the blackness around the girl’s eyes, something that must draw upon Mr. Yucky Face and Regan MacNeil when she isn’t, at the moment, abscent that characteristic. And that would be instrumental, if pictures of Anneliese were suddenly to find themselves circulating in public view, and those were leaked to bolster the belief that the girl was truly possessed…then you must be able to see Regan in Anneliese, and since teeth are teeth, the dark circles around the eyes would be the thing that both scared people, and looked like Regan MacNeil. Now it should be said that the Annilese Case was the basis of the movie…the Exorcism of Emily Rose. And there are supposedly real photos of the case that are now out on the internet, and supposedly there is a tape…and secret photos and a mysterious videotape are elements of movies like…the Blair Witch Project. So I must admit that it is very difficult to know what, if anything, out on the interent is the slightest bit real. But whether real or not, certainly the perception of the Annaliese Michel case has been cast for the most part, in light of the standard-setting movie The Exorcist.
There is a difference in the darkness around the eyes in these two shots. And boy is the room clean! Chris MacNeil had to remove everything from Regan’s room that wasn’t absolutely necessary to continue being in the room. I dig the way the picture on the very neat-and tidy-nightstand isn’t flying across the room as if it were one of Regan’s records slamming into the window that leads to Certain Death.
…here the darkness is around one eye…but not the other. And that is NOT indicative of dehydration.
And she doesn’t even mess up the bed! Of course, she looks a lot like Regan in the original Spider-Walk scene.
There are other parallels. In Annelese’s case, the bishop was initially reluctant to agree to an exorcism, then relented and allowed TWO priests to perform the exorcism…equivalents to Karras and Merrin. It is also true that when priests were consulted, they were sceptical about the demon-possession angle, and recommended that Anneliese continue to be treated for her clear case of psychotic states linked to temporal lobe epilepsy.
How about this one…
There she is!
…ah, yes…crawling down the stairs in a spooky way! Not quite a spider-walk…because it takes a very skilled and practiced…
…contortionist to actually do a spider-walk, and so for someone who is not such a person to be able to do it is simply an impossibility. But in the Artifical Reality, Regan didn’t do it either. And it is clear that since The Exorcist, creepy-staircase-walking has become a notable feature in horror movies…
…from The Grudge (2004). And there is an image associated with the Exorcism of Emily Rose that rang a bell for me…
…it’s a pretty cool image. But so is this one…
…Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), one of the movies in my Top 10 Movies Of All Time list. And Dopey Doctor stars in it! I think the basic idea of totally fooling the audience into seeing a story other than the real one…done to perfection, with no rival, in the The Exorcist…which makes the movie, thankfully, not the novel, was first accomplished in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Sorry Emily Rosers…I know where you got your image from! The descriptions and images associated with Anneliese Michel are an imitation of what people saw, or thought they saw in The Exorcist. But that doesn’t make the murder of Anneliese a hoax. What it means is that the parents and priests involved…Valentin Fleischmann…really guys?...framed what happened in the only terms they knew…they made The Exorcist with Anneliese instead of Regan. One must reckon with the possibility that a mentally disturbed girl’s delusions allowed someone to manipulate her so as to prevent secret things becoming unsecret things. So Anneliese’s sad and horrible fate…her murder, was covered up, not by hiding or disposing of the body…no! It was covered up by writing a shitty version of The Exorcist, taking advantage of the gullible idiots at the time and ever since, that demon-possession is real and the central part of the movie and then superimposing it over the real events. And it was possible that someone believed that playing on her delusions, especially if backed-up by the Two Stooges Priests, and who knows whether they were paid, could convince the girl that what she experienced in her delusions could actually be sold to her to the extent that she would replace the reality of what really caused her madness with what was in her delusions. That could cover up a lot, and if she died in the process…that would do the same thing. And did it work? Well, I doubt that that the Horrible Four successfully repackaged Anneliese’s delusions and then sold her the bill of goods. If so, they wouldn’t have murdered her. And how did that go? The Four Who Will Be The Next Four Demons In Someone’s List of Troublesome Spirit-Entities…acknowledging that none of them had been the guy who stands, as far as the forces of evil go, the number two Malevolent Being in the Universe next to the Devil himself. Yes, I mean…Valentin Fleischmann. They were sentenced to six month incarceration…which was then reduced to three years of probation. Oh, yes…they also had to pay a fine. To whom do we make the check payable? But that’s not all. The prosecutor felt rather sorry for those involved…except the murdered girl…whoever cares about a murdered girl? The prosecutor felt that the parents shouldn’t been punished at all. Why? They had already suffered enough. What can I say about that? The parents suffered more than the daughter they murdered? I suppose, if they thought it would help, they could always say that a 200-year-old drunken priest did it.
So where is the shadow in all of this? The subject Anneliese Michel helped broach the subject of the explanation for a very important element of the story…Regan gets her temperature taken…
For a movie full of masterly subtlety and Ultimate Subliminality…it’s hard to know just how to classify this. I will refrain from repeating oft-said Sacred-Divine-Madness things about looking at something in the movie and…wait! Now I’m in trouble. Doctor, when I look at things I tell myself that I’m seeing what’s there…no! I’m seeing what’s not there, and only by seeing what’s not there and realizing it’s really there, can I can see what’s there and was there when I first looked at it and decided that it wasn’t there! What? Regan’s room is available? Does my health insurance cover psychiatric care? I don’t know, let me ask one of the others who dwell within me…and I’ll let you know. In 1973, sitting in the movie theatre, there would be no way to look at the thermometer read-out and see what’s not there but really is there. Close-ups…always key…flashing numbers…those are the things I see in my head! Still, I’ll be released from the Berrenger clinic when I’m all better.
It probably doesn’t take too much staring at these boring, not-worth-staring-at scenes to make the leap…
1968…1969…1970…1971…1972…then…Regan gets angry and throws a fit, making sure that we don’t see her temperature go to 97.3. Demons make you have high fevers! Perhaps the best way to drive out demons is a hot bowl of…chicken soup. Why don’t we see Regan’s temperature go to 97.3? Please! We’re in 97.3. Well, not right now, but if you were watching the movie in the year it was released, you would literarily be in 97.3, figuratively speaking. Yes…1973. So the reason we don’t see 97.3 is because you’re already there. Just open your eyes. But as long as I let go of 2018, which I will gladly do, and step back into the Artificial Reality of the movie in 97.3, I too will be looking around at…1973. If I’m right, and we are supposed to play…Change-Regan’s-Temperature-Into-Years Game… then we may well be told something very important. Or nothing at all. In other essays on this site, I have maintained that the story in the movie is completely different than the story in the novel. I re-assert that here and now. They are completely different. There is no Jamie in the movie…Regan is never Honey Piglet…and Chris never muses about the Flower That Was Her First Baby…a baby that died but in doing so, became a vengeful, furious spirit-entity; one that couldn’t move on; one that was committed to punishing the Sow by destroying the Piglet. Do you see the puke, mother? Karras did. Does it remind Chris of anything? By the end of the novel, it clearly did. But…I Come From God…that’s genius, and simply far too good to lose. In the book, Karras muses about how we see God in our brother…brothers…Yes! Regan’s brother Jamie, although Karras had something else in mind. The movie transcends all of this and provides a story so complicated…so intricate…that it’s beautiful in its simplicity.
But why show this succession of dates? What happened in 1968? It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the work on the story that would become The Exorcist began in…Yes! 1968. So this succession of years takes us back to the inception of the story. Then 1969 passed, then 1970 passed…until, in 1971, the novel appeared. Then 1972. Then 97.3! So what happened in 1972? Could something have happened that caused the writer to change the story so fundamentally that 97.3 would be nothing like 97.1? What was the Prime Mover that caused this change? Not knowing what I’m talking about, I’m thinking that whatever it was, it may well have taken place in 1972. And indeed, something may have. Veering off into fiction, I might have my fictional fiction writer write his Possession Story during the years 1968 - 1971. But then a friend of his tells him…Hey! Another book was published in 1971! It might be something you’d be interested in. Actually, the book wasn’t written in 1971. It was written in 1945, and went absolutely nowhere…it was a dud that fizzled out. But in 1971, the writer was asked to produce a second edition…an expanded edition. And this time, well…97.1 was nothing like 94.5. The second edition of this book became a fundamental underpinning for transforming the way society viewed something very, very important. And it lies at the heart of Regan’s Malady in the movie. I could, in my fictional work, have my novelist read this book in 1972, and be so impacted by this book…seeing something so fundamentally important in it, that he changes his story completely and then creates a story that, thinking you see what’s not really there, lets the viewer fall into the same trap in 1973 that people had been falling into for a long, long, long time…even before 1945! And what am I rambling on about? Well…wait! I guess I should discuss that in Part 2!