Paperback Writher



Quick. Look at the cover of the paperback book right up above.

What comes to mind when you look at it?

I know what comes to mind when I look at it. And though I know in my heart that the image on that cover has almost nothing to do with the contents of the book, I can’t help but find it more than a little creepy. I have read rumors that that image was based on an actual person but it doesn't seem like the image of an actual person.

Which is probably the reason why it was chosen for the cover of the book to begin with...

Of course, when the movie came out, I could not help but anticipate a similar creepy image appearing in the movie itself. But it did not.

The radio ads for said movie were way creepy. But the movie itself did not seem all that scary. I have seen it on TV and on the big screen and the only part that ever came close to frightening me was the scene in which the priest is listening to a tape recordings of the demon-possessed girl and then suddenly the phone rings.

Perhaps the movie was ruined for me by all too many parodies. After all, I had no problem being scared by The Omen -- a film that were admittedly more lowbrow in its artistic ambition than The Exorcist -- and I had went into that film knowing a lot less of the film’s plot than I had known of The Exorcist’s plot the first time I saw it. On the other hand, a Mad Magazine parody had informed me of every major plot development in Chinatown long before I saw it and yet I still enjoyed that movie. And reading endlessly detailed reviews of Apocalypse Now did little to kill my enthusiasm for that film once I had a chance to see it on cable because no matter how much of the movie had been “spoiled“ for me, there was still much of it that seemed fresh.

Unfortunately, the more dependent a movie is on shock effects and cheap stunts, the less likely it is to survive pre-screening spoilers, much less repeat showings. I would like to believe that I would have been genuinely scared by The Exorcist had I seen it when it first came out. And that might even be true. After all, I found the "Tubular Bells" theme used in the movie to be creepy. I found the radio ads to be eerie. And I definitely found the cover of the paperback book to be disturbing.

And yet the movie did not move me all that much.

I guess that fetus demon on the cover was a hard act to follow.