When I was a kid, horror movies were really scary. I saw an ad when I was about eight for a movie about a monster under the bed and I could not sleep for weeks (I remember my dad saying too much but understandable frustration, “We will never let you watch TV again!”) high school we watched the old silent Nosferatou because our teacher did not want to deal with us for the day and I was afraid to walk home at three in the afternoon with the sun outside.
Time was passing. Eventually I fell asleep and the walk home from high school ended. I became a fan of horror movies, which could distinguish a Carpenter from a Cronenberg and a Nosferatou from that other Nosferatou. Along the way I stopped being so scared that sometimes it scares me when I realize that other people want to be scared of their horror movies. One of the criticisms for this year’s wonderful candy man was that it was not scary enough. To which my immediate reaction was: “But are horror movies never scary?” The movie was beautiful, ugly, bloody and gloomy. What else could you ask for? Bad dreams?
Recently, however, I watched again The Exorcist III, and I remembered that I used to have bad dreams. first time I saw The Exorcist III in the early 1990s, shortly after its release. I had just moved to the big city to go to school. I did not know anyone and I lived alone in a tiny apartment. I had no cable or video, just a tiny black and white TV. One night I turned the knob and it was there The Exorcist III.
Thirty years later, some of the images of director William Blatty are still burned in my brain. The shot in the corridor where the nurse walks on the screen, ignoring the masked figure with the pointed pole stalking her. The girl was pulled from the middle as the giant cutters of the hospital close where her neck was. And the eerie scene with the old woman crawling around the ceiling, a demonic smile on her face, as the detective played by George C. Scott looks ignorantly, wondering where the demon has reached.
Looking back, I think my appreciation for the film was probably reinforced by the fact that I did not see it all. In full swing it is a tangled tangle of plots and themes, something for serial killers, to lose yourself as you get older, somewhat pointless to revisit the first Exorcist. But I lost the beginning. And better yet, I missed the unfortunate stuck end. The studio disliked the first cut, which did not involve an exorcism. How can you have an Exorcist movie without exorcism? So they added an explosion of special effects with lightning and the floor to open and so on. He is stupid and clumsy. The eight-year-old would have been scared. But even he would probably think, “This is not it Nosferatou. »
I do not remember why I came back The Exorcist III away before the end. I remember the movie bothered me. I glanced at the low ceiling at least once or twice to see if there were any smiling seniors crawling up there, waiting to put their teeth in my throat. And this time, 30 years later, when I finally watched the whole thing, even to the wretched end, I knew there were no elderly people on the ceiling without looking. The only old man in the room was me. Age brings wisdom, or at least indifference.
Which is not bad. I doubt I would be a horror fan in the same way if I found horror movies as scary as when I was younger. part of getting older is that I really do not like to lose sleep. However, it is a strange feeling to realize that a certain part of who you were has been exorcised and exiled. Between his first watch Exorcist III and second, someone else has overwhelmed me. That does not make me afraid. Just a little haunted.
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