The Exorcist

Tuesday

Kelly Chapman

The devil over Washington

It is difficult to romanticize the political theater of Washington, DC, when you live so close to it. The absurdity feels routine after a while. You grow desensitized to the Machiavellian scheming, the name-calling, the ceremonial outrage. News outlets blast cinematic plot twists to the American public while quieter forces go unnoticed. With September growing late and the humdrum heat and headlines of Washington refusing to break, I turned to film in an attempt to re-enchant myself with the city in which I live. I rewatched two movies which capture its deeper moods. In spite of their tonal differences, both struck me in their portrayal of life just apart from the curtain – Washington not as the center of power, but as a place shadowed by it.

Washington

Thursday

Amber Duke

Spooky season’s religious revival

One of the most anticipated films to hit theaters this October is The Exorcist: Believer, a direct sequel to one of the greatest horror movies of all time, The Exorcist, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Coincidentally, the original film’s director, William Friedkin, passed away just a couple of months ago. In the wake of Friedkin’s death, Matthew Walther reexamined The Exorcist in a guest essay for the New York Times. He posited that the film hinges on the acknowledgment of supernatural evil and the use of longstanding Catholic theology and tradition in defeating it.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why didn’t William Friedkin get much credit when he was alive?

Ask your average man on the street — or at least your average clued-up man with a decent knowledge of modern Hollywood — about the films of William Friedkin, who has died aged eighty-seven, and he will confidently sing the praises of Friedkin’s legendary pictures, The French Connection and The Exorcist. Then if he is pressed on the other eighteen films Friedkin directed, ranging from the excellent and underrated to the dismal, and a look of panic is likely to come over his face before he excuses himself and rushes into a nearby subway (or, if he is in New York, flees to an overground railway in homage to the legendary car chase scene in The French Connection). It is your choice whether you do a Popeye Doyle and head off in frantic pursuit, or leave him be.

william friedkin