By Dee Holloway 
This serial column revisits The Exorcist television series. Conceived by Jeremy Slater for FOX and starring Ben Daniels, Alfonso Herrera, Geena Davis, Alan Ruck, and John Cho, the show ran 2016-17 and was generally well-received by critics and audiences. DIS/MEMBER returns to the show in the context of new Exorcist franchise films, seeking insight on what made the show work and why it’s lesser-known than its film counterparts. All screencaps sourced from Kiss Them Goodbye.
The original Exorcist film established, with its infamous pea soup scene, a standard of emesis embraced to one degree or another by all following installments. The vomiting-forth of blood, mysterious black goo, unknown substances, or even animals and insects is a hallmark of possession films. In purely physical terms, it makes sense: demon possession as depicted in the Exorcist franchise enacts serious strain on the body. In metaphysical terms, too, vomit indicates that even the body is trying to expel its invading presence–that corporeal purging can affect the spirit.
Episode three of The Exorcist season two, “Unclean,” leans into this purging theme from a variety of angles. From its cold open in Rome, featuring disembodied hands preparing a strange dessert, to its FDIA monster-of-the-week plotline, the Ti West-directed “Unclean” is intent on unsettling audience stomachs. More pointedly, throughout the episode, reminders spring up of the young women at the franchise’s heart. In witnessing bodies vomit, gush blood, and be abused under the guise of care, we’re given visual cues of some of the most teen-girl-coded experiences: menarche and bulimia, fractured mother-daughter bonds and erosion of self-determination.
Two of this season’s ensembles converge by episode’s end, with Fathers Marcus and Tomas encountering social worker Rose at a house in Seattle. Lorraine (Rochelle Greenwood) and Harper (Beatrice Kitsos) live a lonely existence, with Harper in and out of hospitals, no doctors able to provide a useful diagnosis. Lorraine believes she knows why: her daughter isn’t sick, but possessed. The exorcists once more diverge, with Father Tomas accepting Lorraine’s position and Father Marcus remaining unconvinced.
Sure, Harper’s in bad shape–gaunt, sores on her face–but Marcus has been around the block a few times and isn’t ready to whip out the holy water and crucifix just yet. His skepticism is mirrored in Andy, back on the homestead and increasingly confronted with intrusions from other worlds–natural, psychological, and possibly demonic. In the wake of burying Shelby’s malformed lamb, Andy seeks the farmer next door, inquiring whether his neighbor has ever seen something he couldn’t explain.
As though to confirm Andy’s growing unease with the island he calls home (that de-familiarization essential to horror), a Hitchcockian trauma transpires: a massive flock of black birds flies directly into Andy’s house. One even breaks through a window, a sure sign that whatever evil is haunting his woods has penetrated the home’s protective barrier.
Abroad, skepticism also prevails. Father Bennett has traveled to Antwerp, where the woman from his photo finds him. Introducing herself only as Mouse (Zuleikha Robinson), she’s responsible for the torching of a private banquet at the Vatican… a little light arson that occurred only after she’d dosed the attendees with crushed communion wafers in order to rouse their demonic sides. Her hands are those in the episode’s opening shot, sprinkling blessed crumbs atop fancy tarts, inter-cut with Cardinal Guillot’s hands preparing the vocare pulvare.
Another mirror that prompts reflection on what we take into ourselves, willingly or otherwise; another scene of violent expulsion, blood and thrashing. The cold open’s theme is doubled when Mouse challenges Bennett to take communion and prove himself free of possession. With demons haunting even the highest echelons of church power, there’s no such thing as being too careful. The scene, ostensibly designed to provoke nerves in the viewer, contains a chilling hint that even Bennett isn’t quite sure of his own cleanliness. In turn, Father Marcus challenges Harper to prove that she is possessed.
Despite what Tomas wants to believe, the evidence offered by Harper’s mother–a drawing of two priests confronting a monster, an imaginary friend–isn’t conclusive. Fearing dangerous effects should an exorcism be enacted on a non-possessed person, Marcus aims to draw the demon out. There’s a bleak humor in his questioning of mother and daughter, his demonic-symptoms checklist akin to a clinician’s.
The scenes in Harper’s bedroom are echoes of Casey’s bedroom in season one, of Regan’s room and Cindy’s hospital chamber, of every possession and exorcism we’ve seen so far. They’re challenges to the viewer: are you seeing what you’ve been told you’re seeing? They’re invitations, as Marcus invites Tomas: exercise your own powers of discernment.
Information, who has it, and what they do with it is another theme pervading “Unclean.” Rose elects to withhold the information about Caleb’s nighttime wandering from Child and Family Services. Mouse is receiving information on corrupted church officials from a mysterious source, using it to hunt demons across Europe. And Lorraine’s information regarding her daughter may be bad, considering she lied about how recently Harper was admitted to the hospital. Lorraine’s untrustworthy aura takes a hard left for the truly twisted when she tells Tomas and Marcus that she has Chris McNeil’s book about Regan’s possession, has read it many times, finds it comforting in its familiarity to what she’s dealing with.
The Exorcist series has often dealt with the porous barriers between occult phenomena and real-world travails like grief and mental illness. “Unclean” is the most overt rendition yet, balancing a pitch-dark send-up of Satanic panics, a horrifically realistic abuse case, and a reminder that within the show’s universe, exorcists can make mistakes. It’s tempting, in fiction, to place all the world’s ills at the feet of a demon. It’s a deeper and more satisfying narrative that depicts horror both cosmic and human.
The absolute disgust displayed by Lorraine in her denouement makes clear that she’d rather see her daughter demonic than human. Incidentally, the Sharp Objects miniseries, also featuring FDIA, was in development at HBO contemporaneous to The Exorcist‘s season two airing. In the post-Trump era of 2016 onward, bodily autonomy of women and minors was once more top of mind in the US. In the post-pandemic era, nothing less than the factual reality of illnesses’ causes and treatments is at stake.
Written by Manny Coto (American Horror Story, Dexter, 24), episode three is a master class in connecting each plotline’s dots. Certain characters spring up as that very connective tissue; Rose accidentally maneuvers the exorcists toward Andy by way of Harper, while Shelby airs a dark theory of Andy’s wife being driven to suicide by a supernatural force. Lorraine’s abuse of her daughter provides a foil for the care Andy tries to provide his foster kids.
Likewise, within a series ultimately concerned with the human body, “Unclean” further plays up the human spaces that function as meta-bodies: the church and the home. The phrase “the body of Christ” is a common one, referring both to Holy Communion and to church members united in belief. If Mouse’s fears are correct, a demonic network seeks to corrupt the global body of Christ, its attack pincering from the heights of Catholic hierarchy and the rank and file. The single-family home, as shown with the Rance’s in season one, remains a horror location classic.
The home is queered in season two, as non-traditional families like fosters, gay parents, and communal groups queer normative nuclear structures. Biological mothers, culturally coded as correct, might drug their children to provoke desired effects. Foster fathers on remote islands could prove safer than families of origin. The human bodies within a home body may function as white blood cells, fighting off attacks… or as cancers, the body turning on itself.
In the case of Mouse’s information, the body of Christ has indeed turned on itself, since her “source” is a former exorcist, a nun now possessed by a demon. In the case of Andy and his kids, the walls between “home safe” and “world dangerous” are rapidly inverting–a development that might be hastened by the arrival of Harper and her new exorcist friends.
