The Excorcist (1973)

Once upon a time I was in a dive bar in Green Point and the one TV was playing the movie The Exorcist. I had never seen this movie because I am too scared to watch it. But that night, in that crowded bar after 1AM, and with a death metal soundtrack, I was totally mesmerized by the visual power of this film. One did not need the sound; shot for shot the movie communicates domestic menace; it is clear that the house is the main character. The possessed child is expressing what the architecture represses: in Freud’s language, “daemonic sexuality.”  This would be that indeterminate remainder (from the parent’s unconscious) that becomes in the child more demonic and more autonomous the more it is denied: the famous return of the repressed.