This film is well-known, and I have encountered it many times before, but I didn't see it by accident. Now, I regret it, I should have read it long ago. It's not that it's so good-looking, I just want to read it sometime before reading the original. It's also because I don't have a long memory. I read the original Harry Potter book earlier, and I felt like watching a slideshow when watching a movie. So I made the decision to "never read the original first". It seems that the comprehension is still not enough, and the scar is forgotten.
Because the author's profession is a screenwriter, the original work itself is written a bit like a script. When it came time to make a film, it appeared again as a screenwriter and producer. Therefore, with his participation in the whole process, the process of filming the original work is equivalent to a seamless connection.
But this "docking" is a bit too complete. Maybe because it was his own work, the author was really reluctant to delete things when he changed the script. If you recall, except for the diagnosis process of the housekeeper Carl's daughter, the psychiatrist and Father Callas, and the deletion and streamlining of the three parts of the Kinderman Detective's investigation, the nearly 400-page novel was basically filmed. .
The 130-minute film is not short, but the consequence of being faithful to the original is that the length of each scene is excessively compressed. As a "ghost movie", the necessary psychological activities that require considerable time and the actors' acting skills cannot be carried out, and can only be explained in a hurry to quickly enter the next scene. Moreover, the transition between scenes is not processed, and almost all of them are simple and rude switching. This kind of faster rhythm, on the basis of insufficient content expression, gives the viewer a feeling of "going through the motions and watching slideshows".
Although Father Merlin, who appeared at the beginning and end of the film, took on the name of "The Exorcist", Father Callas is the real protagonist of the original work. His cautiousness and confusion in the process of diagnosing Legan, and at the same time immersed in the inner pain of being ashamed of his deceased mother, cannot extricate himself. This is the most exciting part of the original description, and also the character with the fullest image in the whole book. All of this has no chance to be expressed in the film, and the limited space makes Callas, like other characters, an ordinary existence as thin as a piece of paper. Perhaps only by attracting ghosts at the end and sacrificing one's life to be an act of understanding will it add a little bit to the viewer's heart.
If I had to say, it would have been much better if the film could have deleted all of Kinderman's scenes and reserved some for the fine-tuning of Callas's image. But this is just a hypothesis after all. Throughout the whole film, apart from the 180° turn of the little girl Regan and the horror scenes such as spider crawling, what else impresses the audience?
Perhaps, the films of the 1970s cannot be judged from the current perspective, after all, each film has its own characteristics and limitations of the times. And don't judge a time-limited movie by the standards of the original. But in any case, all of the above mentioned are really impossible for me to ignore.
Finally, once again, I recommend that you watch the movie first and then read the original book.
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