by David Bering-Porter
The following article is taken by Calibano #7 – The turn of the screw/dove abita la paura
We are all haunted by the past, but are we possessed by it? And is there a difference?
When The Exorcist came out in 1973, it was met with one of the most extreme audience reactions in cinema history. Members of the audience were said to have vomited in the aisles, fainted, and fled to the lobby in sheer terror at the images they saw on screen; some theaters reported that they had ambulances parked outside ready to attend to the overstimulated guests. These stories were almost certainly exaggerated for sensationalism and effect (no publicity is bad publicity after all) but what is certain is that these stories accrued around the film. Rumors spread ahead of screenings like rolling thunder, lending it a semiotic weight and adding to the potency of the network of discourse that circulated around it.
The Exorcist was an event in American culture and its reputation served to whet the appetites of potential audiences who were eager to see what all the fuss was about and test themselves against the film’s reported horrific power. In contrast, few other films seem to have garnered more of a bad reputation than The Exorcist, terrifying an anxious public whether they had ever, or would ever, see the film itself. As Mark Kermode points out in his close reading of the film, “For the first time in a mainstream movie, audiences witnessed the graphic desecration of everything that was considered wholesome and good about the fading American Dream – the home, the family, the church and, most shockingly, the child.” (Mark Kermode, The Exorcist (BFI Institute/Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New York: 2003). Yet, as Kermode goes on to point out, “…the solutions The Exorcist appeared to offer were oddly reassuring for those who longed for a return to an absolute moral order”, even going so far as to suggest that the film serves as a kind of fantasy or wish-fulfillment, feeding off of the desire for a nostalgia for past certainties and an inherent and structurally conservative worldview (Kermode, 11). It is not simply that the film is politically conservative, although the relation between gender and metaphysics certainly seems to veer towards a politically conservative worldview, but rather that the real horror of the film circulates around a desire for the solid ground of the past and a politics of sameness and return.
Indeed, isn’t this the secret desire, hidden at the core of the horror genre more broadly? To be returned to a state of innocence or grace that has been lost; to feel once again the simple certainty of the child in the face of an uncertain world that we know, as adults, offers no easy answers to the complex questions and deep uncertainties that confront us. My point here is not to elevate The Exorcist as a phenom of the horror film, but rather to suggest that it serves as a symptom for something that lies deep at the heart of the horror genre more broadly and, perhaps, as something indicative of the horror that lurks in many other forms of cultural production as well: that we are in the grip of the past, a past that won’t let us go. We see the evidence for this all around us, in the discourse about the media and the movie industry, a discourse that decries the plague of the same that appears on our movie screens in the form of the sequel or prequel, as well as remakes, reboots, and revivals. The Exorcist itself spawned three official sequels, several spinoffs, and an official TV series, which does not even begin to consider the scores of unofficial imitations. Stories of possession were relatively rare in movies before The Exorcist, and now the industry is brimming with possessed bodies and haunted lives. We might even say that Hollywood is haunted by the ghosts of what came before it and is seemingly possessed by intellectual property (IP), which now seems to be the driving force of so much contemporary cultural production. Driven to constantly repeat the stories they tell, based on the stories they have already told and, thus, already own, Hollywood and other avatars of the culture industry have fallen prey to a plague of the same and repetition seems to be at the heart of the industry’s modus operandi.
And so I return to the question that opens this piece: we are all haunted by the past, but are we possessed by it? And is there a difference?
The horror of haunting is the horror of something that will not let go, of a subject, a discourse, or an event that remains stubbornly in the present moment even after its time has passed. To be haunted by a thing is to have the past and the present comingle, it is a pastness that refuses to pass and continues to assert itself in the now regardless of the consequences. Almost every human culture seems to have some anxiety around the dead coming back, refusing to die, and otherwise appearing as unwanted guests in the homes and lives of the living. As far back as the ancient Mesopotamia spells and rituals were crafted specifically to keep the dead from showing up like a bad guest at dinner or from creeping up and whispering in your ear (that most unguarded of cephalic orifices) while you slept (see Irving Finkel, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd, 2021). We tend to imagine ghosts as the central feature of haunting but, in some sense, this is quite anthropocentric insofar as the part of a haunting that we most closely attend to is the part that seems to look the most like us. The sociologist Avery Gordon describes haunting in the following way, “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place.” (Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8). Gordon’s thinking around haunting is especially helpful in thinking of haunting in spatial terms. Rather than focus on the ghost as the singular cause of a haunting, Gordon suggests that we could better understand this situation by looking for the structural conditions that make the haunting possible. What Gordon makes clear is that haunting is more spatial or schematic and, in this way, haunting becomes an analytical tool for understanding the social and cultural surround.
Examples of this abound in ghost stories. One classic instance of this comes in the gothic story by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in which a governess travels to a country manor to take care of two children, only to discover that the house, and the children, are haunted by the ghosts of two dead servants. Just as Gordon suggests, the ghosts themselves seem indicative of a more complicated and problematic situation. The ghost of the male valet seems especially taken with the young, male child in the story and what seethes out of sight of the explicit narrative is the possibility of sexual abuse that seems to drive the actual haunting in the story. In the original narrative, the story turns on the ambiguity of the text; not knowing if the ghosts were real or a sign of unreliable narration. Yet, the specter of abuse and the sexualization of the child then reappears in later iterations of the story, particularly in Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation, in which the ghosts were made more concrete, more real, lending weight to the role that problematic and dangerous desire played in the ghostly obsession; a decision made even more concerning in light of Britten’s own pederastic tendencies.
As Phillip Brett notes, “this context taps directly into the nineteenth century’s discourse surrounding sexuality, and makes us realize that the haunting has a sexual purpose” (“Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw” in Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 89). Freud might say that most things have a sexual purpose, underlying their more obvious cause, but Britten’s sexual obsession with adolescent boys speaks to a more troubling set of secrets and seething presences in this classic case of haunted children. This reading suggests that, as with many kinds of trauma, there might be some aspect of repetition compulsion at work. In this instance, repetition appears and reappears across adaptations and iterations of the story, but this reading does not tell us the everything and while it does speak to one way that the past can traumatically return in the present, I have something else in mind; a different reading of the horror involved not with haunting but with possession.
If a haunting is a space in which the past reasserts itself in the form of a ghost or some other spectral presence, possession seems to take place inside the terrain of the individual rather than outside. A house might be haunted, but you are possessed. A haunting takes place outside the borders of the self, whereas possession seems to take place inside. In the case of possession, the call is coming from inside the house, as they say. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a film like The Exorcist is so terrifying; in an instance of possession, the threat is not coming from outside but, rather, the self is already revealed to be open and porous, already permeated by the outside and the other. Indeed, possession is not simply about the openness or possibility of outside influence within the deepest recesses of the self, it is about the active occupation of our interiority.
In The Turn of the Screw, the ghosts haunting Bly manor seek access to the children living there, for the purposes of corruption, sexual or otherwise, whereas in The Exorcist the child is already open and vulnerable to corruption from the inside. Marlena Williams points out in her semi-autobiographical writing on The Exorcist that much of the horror of the film comes in the form of what we hear, not what we see on screen. She writes, “At the height of her possession, bronchial wheezes and guttural moans seep out of the young girl’s mouth … The voice – like a dying animal clawing its way out of a smoke-stripped throat – isn’t the voice of a young innocent,” and Williams’ insights are supported by the startling profanity of the possessed child, including what is perhaps the most famous line from the film, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” (Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist, Columbus: Mad Creek Books, 2023, 4.). Here, it is not just the words the feel out of place, but the voice: the possessed voice of Reagan was not provided by the young actress, Linda Blair, but by the much older actress, Mercedes McCambridge, who lent her voice to the demon “Pazuzu” in the film.
The theorist Mladen Dolar writes on this uncanny relation, of voice separated from the body, as an “acousmatic voice,” which he defines as a voice severed from its visible source, which created a sense of the supernatural or otherworldly (A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006, 61). The demonic voice in The Exorcist works precisely because it reveals the voice’s capacity to unsettle our sense of unified subjectivity and bodily integrity. This other voice, emanating from the child’s body, revealed an occupation of the self by the other and a challenge to the unified notion of the self that serves as the ground for so much of our social, historical, and legal understandings of responsibility, agency, and ownership.
Earlier in this piece I suggested that the horror genre, along with the major movie industries, were in a way possessed by IP; that the intellectual property that they owned was compelling them to repeat the same ideas, the same stories, the same style over and over again in the guise of an economic imperative to ‘give the people what they want.’ Yet, by all accounts the viewing public is sick to death of the same franchises trotting out the newest iteration of the same old thing and so, as usual, we ought to take the economic argument with a grain of salt. Here is where I think that the horror genre might provide some insight to a broader cultural problem: perhaps the real horror of possession is not the occupation of the self by an other (as alarming as that may be) but that the real horror has something to do with the relation of ownership itself.
If, as Avery Gordon suggests, haunting is an analytic tool through which we can better understand that conditions that make possible certain social and historical situations, then possession too functions as a kind of analytic lens through which we can learn something important about the interior territory of subjectivity. Thus, to say that Hollywood is possessed by its own IP is another way of saying that it is possessed by its own possessions, and it is in the dual meaning of possession – as simultaneously occupation and ownership – that this insight comes to light.
Turning the tables from the possessed to the possessor, it becomes clear that to possess something is to understand it as an object, a thing, and to reduce its living complexity down into a kind of half-life whose existence is now in service to an other. The act of possession is the act of rendering something property that, in turn, suggests the worst forms of objectification if that thing which is possessed is a living, breathing subject. Possession tends to undermine the sanctity of the individual by revealing that we are not necessarily masters of ourselves and that there may be multitudes contained within. Even the term ‘individual,’ suggesting a certain fundamental indivisible character seems undone in the face of possession, which whittles down the sovereignty of the self. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that a corporate entity can also become possessed since it exists as a more literal embodiment of this multiplicity.
The horror of possession reveals itself not merely as a supernatural phenomenon but as a profound meditation on the nature of agency, ownership, and the self under capitalism. When we observe Hollywood’s compulsive repetition of franchises and IP, we witness a corporate body possessed by its own possessions; trapped in an endless cycle of reproducing the same narratives not out of creative necessity but out of the structural imperatives of ownership itself. This possession operates as a kind of undead labor, where past cultural productions continue to animate present creative work, reducing living artistic expression to the mechanical reproduction of profitable formulas.
The distinction between haunting and possession becomes crucial here: while haunting allows for the possibility of exorcism, of putting the past to rest, possession suggests a more totalizing occupation where the boundaries between possessor and possessed become increasingly unclear. Hollywood’s possession by its own IP mirrors the broader cultural condition under late capitalism, where subjects find themselves possessed by the very things they believe they own, whether those things are material possessions, cultural narratives, or ideological frameworks.
In this light, the true horror of The Exorcist and the possession genre more broadly lies not in the supernatural violation of bodily integrity, but in how it exposes the always-already compromised nature of individual sovereignty. The possessed child becomes a symptom of a broader cultural possession, one in which we are all implicated. The voice that speaks through Reagan, that acousmatic voice of the other, reveals that we are never fully masters of ourselves, that our interiority is always already occupied by forces beyond our control. Perhaps the real exorcism we need is not from demons, but from the possessive logic of ownership itself.
David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. His research interests bring together digital media theory, media studies, and the intersections of race and political economy. His book, Undead Labor: Capitalist Fantasies and the Uncanny Vitality of the Zombie, is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press his writing has appeared in the journals such as Critical Inquiry, MIRAJ, Culture Machine and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
The illustrations and the cover in this issue were made by Oona Ode.
