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In Iraq, Father Merrin, an elderly Jesuit archaeologist, has a premonition of evil while examining a medallion and strange figurine found in his excavations. In Georgetown, Washington DC, Chris MacNeil, an actress filming on location at the Jesuit college, is troubled by weird noises in the house she has taken with her twelve-year-old daughter Regan, who is behaving oddly and talks of an imaginary playmate called Captain Howdy. Panic-stricken when she finds Regan's bed bucking uncontrollably one night, Chris seeks medical advice. Diagnosing brain disturbance causing muscular spasms, the doctors are puzzled when exhaustive tests reveal nothing wrong with Regan. Psychiatrists also draw a blank. Meanwhile Regan becomes possessed of a demonic strength, speaks with an alien voice, and seems to be undergoing physical deformation. In the college chapel, a statue of the Virgin is found desecrated. And Burke Dennings, the director of Chris' film and a notorious drunkard, is found dead outside Regan's window after being alone with the child. When a detective, Kinderman, concludes that Dennings was murdered, the distraught Chris - realising that Regan must have killed him - begs the college's psychiatric counsellor, Father Karras, to perform an exorcism. Karras, troubled by loss of faith and by guilt feelings over the death of his mother, is sceptical; but when he sees Regan, now unrecognisable as a child, he secures permission for an exorcism. Since Karras is inexperienced in such matters, Father Merrin is summoned. At once recognising the evil within Regan, Merrin embarks on a lengthy battle with the demon, and seems to be winning when he dies of a heart attack. In despair, Karras calls upon the demon to enter his body, then jumps to his death from the window. Regan is at once freed, and has no memory other experience.

The dispiriting thing about The Exorcist is not so much that it so patently expects to be taken seriously, as the fact that it has been taken seriously by reverend gentlemen talking about "a social and religious phenomenon". In fact, of course, it is no more nor less than a blood-and-thunder horror movie, foundering heavily on the rocks of pretension. Which is not necessarily to say that the mysterious possession as described in the film is too incredible for belief: simply that it is a good deal less convincing than the analogous case in Brunello Rondi's remarkable Il Demonio, and no more 'serious' than the diabolic machinations which have been staple movie diet for years. In the more leisurely space of his novel, William Peter Blatty had time to build up the gradual sense of malaise overtaking Georgetown, a spiritual community become predominantly mondain, and to develop quite convincingly within that general malaise the more private torment of Father Karras' discovery of his loss of faith. The film, however, begins more or less in medias res, with little more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of the community (one Jesuit party, one shot of a desecrated church, one unhappy priest), and with the cross-cutting between the discovery of Regan's possession and Karras' spiritual torment all too clearly designed to establish a significant (but in fact quite empty) parallel between the two kinds of 'possession' or loss of purity. In addition, the whole Karras subplot has become embarrassingly perfunctory: with poor old white-haired momma languishing in the workhouse while darkly brooding son works off his guilt on a punchball, we are back with the old Oedipus-Schmoedipus stuff. The film, in fact, is at its worst with Karras (no fault of the actor), a cartoon character initially 'placed' by a clumsy piece of artifice - his horrified encounter with, and flight from, a beggar on a subway station who begs for charity with the cry "I'm a Catholic!" - and ending in full cry as the doomed hero with the Byronic taint when he takes the sins of the world on his shoulders and crashes to his death through a window. It is symptomatic of what is wrong with the film that in adapting his novel Blatty has simply thinned it out, leaving in characters who now have no function whatsoever (Father Dyer, Sharon Spencer, Willie) or are there merely as convenient plot hooks (Burke Dennings, Kinderman, Karl), wasting time with them which would have been better spent exploring atmosphere and motivations. Predictably, perhaps, the film is at its best in the centre section where it can forget about significance and concentrate on the chills. There is in particular a hair-raising moment when, almost at the edge of one's perception, one realises that the possessed child's head has turned round much too far for human possibility (the effect is repeated later, centre screen as it were and rather absurdly this time, with the head turning full circle like an owl's). Even more horrifying, perhaps, are the elaborate and endless medical tests to which the unfortunate child is submitted, with the ghastly ritual of encephalograms and spinals shot to look like a refined form of torture. Beside these scenes, the messier aspects of the possession (the vomited bile, the self-inflicted wounds) look all too much like routine paint and make-up jobs. Still, with Mercedes McCambridge doing sterling work on the demon's hoarsely mocking voice, the film does build up a fair tension - and an expectation all the more dashed when the Merrin-Devil confrontation promised in the (much too) exquisitely shot prologue turns out to be a mumble of oaths and prayers which doesn't even attempt the dialectic it had in the novel.

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