The Exorcist is easily one of the scariest films ever made. It’s a harrowing horror narrative about the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her child through an exorcism.
Yet ask director William Friedkin about it and he says it’s a spiritually enriching movie. The reason is, he feels that any story that confirms life beyond this world, even if was evil, was a comforting story.
That’s scary!
But he’s not alone. Stanley Kubrick who made another A-list shocker called The Shining based on a Stephen King novel about ghosts that inhabit a holiday hotel resort, felt the same thing.
He once half jokingly told an interviewer that the film was actually a happy one because “any story about ghosts proves there’s life beyond death.”
That’s happy?
By inference, a case could be made that horror story writers and filmmakers are scared of death being the unhappy end of everything and that they ply their tools to invent and believe in proofs to the contrary.
And that we the readers or audience get our money’s worth because it vicariously lets us invest in the same belief too. Otherwise ever since the dawn of our sentience the suspense has been, literally, killing.
The atheist moral philosopher C D Broad who never claimed enlightenment nevertheless had a far more pragmatic take on the topic. “For my part,” he wrote, “I should be slightly more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my physical body.”
Then he sardonically added: “One can only wait and see. Or alternately (which is no less likely), wait and not see.”
(This piece first appeared in The Economic Times)