Films & Events
Now Showing
The Exorcist
Since its release in 1973, The Exorcist has been revered as one of the best horror films of all time. The plot revolves around twelve-year-old Regan, who, after playing with a Ouija Board, contracts an illness that baffles physicians and psychiatrists, leading her mother to seek out priests to perform an exorcism. Possessed by a sinister force, silenced and trapped in her own adolescent body, Regan levitates, pukes green goo, and behaves violently. This disturbing film conveys the challenges of single motherhood as Chris MacNeil turns to a forgotten religious rite to bring her daughter back.
This is the second film in a three-part series Possession: Contested Bodies and the Monstrous-Feminine, which depicts experiences considered most crucial to women’s self-fulfillment in a patriarchal society—the transition into womanhood and the challenges of pregnancy and childbirth—rites of passage that become attacks from hostile others. In each film, when a female character deviates from her expected role as obedient daughter, wife, or mother, she suffers a visceral loss of bodily autonomy alongside a new and dangerous form of empowerment. Possession explores this subversive power dynamic, asking us to question which is scarier: the monster that possesses or the monstrous and untameable woman? The fiendish fetus, demonic daughter, and murderous mother figures central to the series implore you to find out for yourself.
Curated by Julia Elliott and Nima Yolmo, Possession: Contested Bodies and the Monstrous Feminine is sponsored by Women’s and Gender Studies at USC. The series features presentational and marketing materials created by South Carolina Honors College students in Elliott’s Gender and Monstrosity in Horror Films course.
Other films in this series:
132 min.