An Actor’s Portrayal of Wavering Belief Endures

By the time he crashed through the window that autumn night and tumbled down the concrete steps onto the sidewalk, Father Damien Karras had lost his life but perhaps regained his faith, bringing the most disturbing movie of its era to a haunting conclusion.

“The Exorcist,” the social phenomenon of 1973 and 1974, still had a few minutes to roll. Actor Jason Miller lay face down in a pool of fake blood while a cast of extras crowded around, his fingers clasping and releasing a fellow actor’s hand, as they acted out the doubting priest’s wordless last rites.

It was riveting cinema, and less than half of Miller’s creative work that year. While filming “The Exorcist,” for which he would be nominated for an Oscar, Miller finished writing “That Championship Season,” his play that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, running on Broadway for more than 700 performances.

Such a high-octane burst of stage and film brilliance has rarely been matched. And yet Miller, who died of a heart attack last week at age 62, never again had such a prominent role.

He surfaced in the occasional made-for-television flick, and made an appearance in “The Exorcist III” (for the 27 people who saw it). But the last many of us saw of him was in that fateful denouement on M Street, his hands bloodied, his face turned away, the sirens wailing and Linda Blair crying in the room above.

That performance endures, in part, because “The Exorcist” was a bizarre and frightening cultural touchstone for its generation.

The film also set the modern standard for horror movies. A fan of the genre--as opposed to made-for-teens slasher flicks--I confess I loved “The Silence of the Lambs,” another faultlessly told tale. But let’s be honest: Moviegoers did not faint during Hannibal Lecter’s murderous escapades; millions of grown-ups did not sleep with the light on after watching Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” or Dennis Hopper in “Blue Velvet.”

All those things really happened when “The Exorcist” opened over the Christmas holidays of 1973, and it was always my belief that one of the essential reasons was Miller’s performance as the Georgetown Jesuit on the rocks, Father Damien Karras.

The movie was unique among its genre for taking the devil, and religious faith, seriously. Its creepiness came from not just making people jump, although it certainly did that, but in sliding a cold hand under the sheets to clutch our ankles and make us wonder, there in the dark, what really does happen when we die.

It was up to Miller to play the film’s central, wavering character. His Father Damien was a thirty-something priest with a Harvard education in psychiatry, an Italian mother dying in a New York slum, a fondness for boxing and a penchant for whiskey and cigarettes. How can you not love a priest who confesses to a colleague that he’s losing his faith while knocking back a beer in a Georgetown bar as “Lord, I Was Born a Rambling Man” blares in the background?

Miller plays the role all sad and serious and terribly intense--he only smiles once, the first time he’s on camera. He’s a boxer drawn into a fight he knows he can’t win, and the demon possessing Regan (Linda Blair) knows it, too.

“What an excellent day for an exorcism,” the demon taunts Damien early on. When the priest asks why, the demon looks at him and responds, “It would bring us together.”

That, as it turns out, is prophecy.

So it’s Damien’s soul the beast is after, it’s Damien whose dreams are invaded by nightmares, it’s he who breaks down. It was Miller’s role to portray all that and, in so doing, bear the film’s emotional weight.

Aided by a blistering screenplay, he did so with one word in the turning point of the story, where his boxer’s resolve overcomes his religious fear. He is sitting downstairs, head in hands, after his weakness has caused the elder exorcist (Max von Sydow) to banish him from the rite. Regan’s mother approaches him and asks, “Is she going to die?”

The camera comes in tight. Miller, head down, lowers an eyebrow, then snaps his head to face her. “No,” he says firmly. He then turns his head away, to look upstairs to the demon’s room, and you see the fear wash over his face like a splash of bleach.

Six words, maybe five seconds, and the movie careers toward its deadly conclusion.

But horror films seldom endure. You can be charmed by a comedy repeatedly, or delight in a love story told time and again, but you can’t be scared of the same thing every time you see it. When I went to see the re-release of “the most frightening film of all time” last year, it played for giggles. In that key scene when Damien turns his face upstairs, a guy a few rows down from me improvised a line: “Damn if I gotta go back to deal with that [expletive].”

Everybody, including me, laughed.

No matter. Miller, and the film he helped make a classic, had their moment. We watched Father Damien fight for his faith and then go flying through the window into the night and it seemed, just for a moment there in the dark, that like any good priest, Jason Miller made us believe.