The Exorcist

Father Merrin, an aging Jesuit archaeologist, unearths a small statue in northern Iraq — a relic tied to a demon called Pazuzu. The opening is quiet and ominous, a prelude to something that won't arrive for another hour.

In Georgetown, actress Chris MacNeil is filming a movie and raising her eleven-year-old daughter Regan largely alone. Regan begins behaving strangely: she talks to an imaginary friend called Captain Howdy, uses a Ouija board, produces sounds from beneath her bed. The changes are gradual, then not. Medical tests find nothing. Neurological tests find nothing. Her behavior escalates into violence, obscenity, and physical transformation — voices not her own, objects moving, the bed shaking. Chris works through every rational explanation medicine can offer and exhausts them all.

Father Damien Karras is a Jesuit priest in crisis — his faith worn down by years of counselling and the guilt of his mother's lonely death. Chris seeks him out. He investigates and documents what he sees, reluctantly concluding it is beyond psychiatry. The Church sanctions an exorcism, and Father Merrin is sent to lead it.

The exorcism is a prolonged, brutal ordeal. Merrin and Karras work through the night as Regan — or what is in Regan — fights back with everything it has. Merrin dies of a heart attack during a pause in the ritual. Karras, alone with the demon and breaking under the weight of it, makes a choice: take me instead. The demon accepts. Still fighting, Karras throws himself through the bedroom window and tumbles down the long stone steps outside. He dies at the bottom. Father Dyer gives him last rites.

Regan recovers. She has no memory of anything. Chris and Regan leave Georgetown.