The Devil Finds Use: Black Queers Do The Exorcist

Much of black horror studies today is premised on the assumption that true horror, for the black audience, is found not in the paranormal but in the normal and the systemic.¹ It is now conventional, for instance, for scholars to preface their research with a personal anecdote that swaps out a supernatural on-screen threat for a more pressing—and more horrifying—social one. Certain objects of study readily accommodate these claims, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the films of Jordan Peele, while others do so only coincidentally, like Night of the Living Dead. Such anecdotes have helped produce a seeming consensus about where the greater horror lies for black artists and audiences. Though no black horror studies scholar cites him, the claim that the horrors of real life exceed those of the horror film actually originates in James Baldwin’s searing critique of The Exorcist (1973) in his long essay on Hollywood cinema, The Devil Finds Work (1976). In the first half of this essay, I summarize the black-life-as-horror thesis to trace its lineage back to Baldwin. In the second half I depart from this thesis to offer a more capacious account of black horror spectatorship that need not maintain a traumatized fixation on a more horrifying real. Although I understand the political importance that such trauma-based claims have, the way that they naturalize black life as a collectively shared horror is too sweeping. As Kinitra D. Brooks argues, “In too many instances, horror texts have been subject to the privileging of the horror of trauma above the specific genre of horror.”² Reading only for collective traumas erases the idiosyncratic and even playful attachments that black viewers cultivate toward horror, as evidenced in the work of three contemporary black gay authors: Larry Duplechan, James Earl Hardy, and G. Winston James. How might these campy allusions to The Exorcist activate new ways of seeing the film and new ways of articulating the many affective and political uses that horror has for black artists and fans? By setting their perverse delight in The Exorcist against Baldwin’s larger rebuke of the film, I model an alternative investment black fans can have in the horror genre that does not prioritize the traumatic real.

What’s Horrifying in Black Studies

For Linda Williams, the horror genre is taken to be a “low genre” because it is a “body genre,” provoking bodily responses over thought. As scholars have noted, horror relies on our ability to be shocked or grossed out in ways that mimic character responses on-screen: when they scream, we scream.³ This universal account of horror reception does less to explain the more particular ways that black subjects narrate their own visceral and psychological responses to the genre. For the leading voices of black horror today—including fiction writers such as Tananarive Due, Walidah Imarisha, and Victor LaValle and scholars such as Robin R. Coleman, Maisha L. Wester, and Leila Taylor—the visceral feeling of horror depends more on racial triggers than on the otherworldly frights. For instance, in a foundational work of black horror studies, Horror Noire (2011), Coleman recalls how the zombies from Night of the Living Dead were far less frightening than the trigger-happy white mob who arrive at the film’s conclusion and fatally mistake the black lead for a zombie. While the director never intended for race to be meaningful, its impact on black audience members was enough to usurp the film’s intended horror. Coleman’s takeaway—“In the real world of Black men White mobs are far more deadly”—has helped establish a narrative about how black fans really regard such otherworldly horrors: as far less terrifying than their everyday lives.⁴ Her account neatly exemplifies the powerfully disjunctive way that black subjects enter into the horror genre by disidentifying with horror itself. As José Esteban Muñoz theorizes, “To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.”⁵ These reading strategies ensure that black subjects can experience racially affirming connections both with and within the horror genre even when they are least intended to do so. Moreover, disidentification disrupts how horror both markets and identifies itself. The horror genre may be named after the very emotion that it hopes to provoke in its audience, but the leading voices of black horror today never rightly experience those horrors most intended by the genre.⁶

By swapping out superficial horrors for social ones, black subjects today enter into the horror genre as its rivals, if not its foils. Instead of reeling from horror’s intended “dreadful pleasures,” they experience a horror that arises more traumatically, more personally, and more incidentally as a result of their racial consciousness. Walidah Imarisha thus begins her introduction to the 2017 landmark anthology of black women’s horror stories, Sycorax’s Daughters, with the declaration that “devils and vampires are almost banal” when compared with the lived experiences of black people, especially “the ultimate horror story, slavery.”⁷ Taylor similarly begins her essay collection, Darkly (2019), with the memory of a tour guide on a haunted plantation who astutely replaced all the usual ghost yarns with quotidian histories of black suffering: “But as the tour guide understood, America’s haunted history is Black history.”⁸ In such cases, black subjects can establish a strong affinity with the genre in ways that have little to do with its intended forms of reception.

Without delving too deeply into the black horror literary tradition, I will only note that the most acclaimed voices of literary horror today also tend to elevate the everyday horrors of black life over otherworldly ones. At the top of this list are Victor LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom (2016) and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016), two Lovecraftian novels that rely on the premise that normal life for a black person is far more frightening than anything Lovecraft could have dreamed up. LaValle powerfully makes this point when he has his black protagonist grudgingly state his preference for battling Lovecraftian gods over the more frightening everyday world of white supremacy: “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.”⁹

Yet there are just as many depictions of black horror fans as recreationally turning to the genre as an empty, trigger-free pleasure. If the real world intrudes on them in any way, it is only as an obligation: a felt shame that by watching and reading horror they are shirking the responsibility to confront the reality of race. In one especially poignant example—Tananarive Due’s possession thriller, The Good House (2003)—Due’s protagonist uneasily admits to preferring supernatural thrillers to a black realist canon, epitomized by Baldwin. Confronting the horrors of black life seems more like a grudging necessity that exists totally separate from the relief that horror affords him: “With so much to learn about the real world, how could he justify wasting hours wandering through the realms of make-believe? With so many real problems, he’d never had time to care about the imaginary ones.”¹⁰ His vexed articulation of horror fandom powerfully intervenes into our fixed doxa about how black subjects experience the horror of the horror film. From this perspective, we cannot take it for granted that black horror fans are always processing and prioritizing the greater horrors of black life. Horror is instead valuable because it grants a reprieve from having to confront the weightier meaning that race assumes within the real world.

I say this to risk a simple point: the horror that black fans experience cannot always be explained by recourse to a singular collective trauma. The importance of black horror studies as a field need not come at the expense of these more recreational, more generic, more wayward pleasures. Whether experienced innately or as an external imperative, such accounts ensure that recreational terrors matter for the black viewer only insofar as they confront the collective trauma that black people face daily. I am troubled by these accounts because they occlude other forms of reception. The danger of this story—a single story—is that it tends to naturalize how black fans are expected to see themselves in horror. Moreover, it tends to naturalize black life as horror. It does so by erasing entirely the possibility of reprieve—and pleasure—and insisting that black audiences have no other way into the genre than through traumas that they are always said to be processing. We are left with only one imperative: black horror simply cannot—must not—lose its grip on its greater and more horrifying knowledge of the real. It must face in everything the devil we know—the horrors of normal life—rather than those imagined forces that we have no right to fear.

I argue not that we should let go of this approach altogether but that we might do more to conceptualize the multiple ways black fans find pleasure in horror films that have no clear relation to the story of black life as the greater horror. In a moment where the market is turning more to social horror films that explicitly tackle racism, my interest in what The Exorcist means to black audiences hopes to ignite a critical interest in horror films that as yet have no readily available place within black study. I look to The Exorcist—rather than its Blaxploitation remake, Abby (1975)—because it illuminates the complex identifications that black subjects continue to have with white mainstream horror films. For this same reason I do not locate the meaning that possession has within black studies through its two more likely candidates: the “voodoo” film and the vodun religion that it maligns. Instead, I look to the paranormal antics of The Exorcist’s possessed child, Regan, because I want to take seriously what the generic thrills of the possession film can offer black audiences beyond yet another sobering encounter with the real.

Opening Night: The Exorcist and Black Studies

In his foundational study The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Noël Carroll suggests that perhaps it is only through our willing “suspension of disbelief” that we can experience that same fear which characters on-screen feel toward otherworldly horrors.¹¹ Baldwin’s own account of such openness problematizes this account of reception. Carroll may be terrified by otherworldly horrors like The Exorcist, but Baldwin suggests that black viewers cannot entertain these same generic frights as easily because they can never suspend their knowledge, and dread, of the real. Though Baldwin tries hard to play along with The Exorcist—“I saw the film again, alone. I tried to be absolutely open to it, suspending judgment as totally as I could”—his racial consciousness as a black subject prohibits him from doing so.¹²

Baldwin’s closed response has a powerful and understudied importance within the less racially literate field of horror studies. Specifically, his inability to remain “absolutely open” to The Exorcist here undercuts a powerful voice in horror studies: Carol J. Clover’s landmark study Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992). In her chapter on the possession film, “Opening Up,” Clover uses this phrase to dramatize and critique the gendered politics of the possession film. She reads into the subgenre a gendered tension between two warring epistemes: masculine reason (“white science”) and feminized faith (“black magic”).¹³ Elevating gender-based analysis over the racial salience of her terms, Clover uses them to incisively argue that possession films dramatize the need for rigid men to “open up” to this superstition that they abject onto women. She rightly points out that The Exorcist is not really about the possessed child, but about her ability to win over those who were falling away from faith both in and out of the film. The film itself centers around the attempts of a single mother, Chris MacNeil, to save her violently possessed daughter, Regan, from her lewdly destructive behaviors. To do so, Chris must renounce medicine and psychology’s diagnostic powers (“white science”) and instead embrace the more antiquated practices of the church (“black magic”). Regan is ultimately cured when Chris gets a jaded pastor, Father Karras, to perform an exorcism that he at first doesn’t believe in but that eventually strengthens his faith. Within the film, possession is a performance the devil stages to provoke a loss of faith in his audience. Outside the film, however, it is a performance staged by the film (and the novel it is based on) to do the opposite: lead the wayward back to faith. Audiences are meant, like Karras, to open up. Spectacularly, they do.

Though Clover’s gender-based claims are powerful, her racially salient yet largely colorblind categories of “white science” and “black magic” do less to explain why Baldwin, as a black person, is himself kept from “opening up” to the film’s message. His racial difference introduces into Clover’s framework a critical disposition that she nowhere anticipates. His racial difference leaves him indifferent to the film’s intended horrors. He is open neither to its message nor to what Adam Charles Hart refers to as the “sensational address” of the horror film—its ability to excite in the viewer’s body those same fear responses that characters portray on-screen.¹⁴ We can contrast Baldwin’s coolness—his closedness—with the infamous hype that the film generated. As Adam Rockoff recalls, “When it was originally released in 1973 . . . many in the audience vomited. Some fainted. Others had to seek therapy or religious counsel.”¹⁵ Such hysterics bothered Baldwin. If Regan’s wildly vomiting body proves that she is possessed, then those of the audience members proved that they were equally possessed by the rising power of faith. Fearing the film’s hold over its audience, Baldwin pens a corrective that shifts the source of terror from the possessed child to the normative social body that fights to reclaim her. In a clever act of disidentification and displacement, he routes the language of terror from the demonic to the more insidious world of white normativity that dissembles its wickedness:

Baldwin concentrates most of his ire on Chris, whose job as an actress helps channel his earlier critique of Hollywood as an enterprise that elevates white fantasies over reality. Chris exemplifies complacency not only in her wealth but also in the lines that she delivers as an actress at the start of the film. Getting into character, she mounts a podium to address campus protesters, demanding, “Order! Order! If you wanna effect any change you’ll have to do it within the system!”¹⁶ Even after she exits the set, Chris emblematizes for Baldwin “all of the really dreadful apathy of the American middle class” for remaining unable to confront “her guilt concerning . . . her essentially empty and hypocritical and totally unanchored life. . . . This uneasy, and even terrified guilt is the subtext of The Exorcist, which cannot, however, exorcise it since it never confronts it” (DFW, 123, 125). Her ideology thus becomes—like that of the film itself—the true devil of the film. Through this framing Baldwin usurps the film’s titular hero—the exorcist—and himself becomes this heroic figure. Ideology critique becomes the new exorcism. It allows Baldwin to cast out the more terrifying normativity in a way that the film simply will not, even though, as Baldwin quickly notes, “this confrontation would have been to confront the devil” (DFW, 125).

Baldwin’s “deliberate attempt to leave myself open” to The Exorcist and his inability to do so thus constitute a critique of the film that Clover cannot capture in her loaded binary of “white science” versus “black magic” (DFW, 125). Baldwin remains closed to the film’s black magic simply because, as a black person, he cannot suspend his disbelief in the more insidious reality of racial capitalism. His reading shifts the onus from “opening up” to faith to falling away from it: falling away from our whitest faith in all institutions that perpetuate this killing banality. We are to see evil not as some otherworldly affliction but as inextricable from our encounters with and susceptibility to those normative ideologies that reinforce the oppressive world around us. “For, I have seen the devil by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me,” he writes, and proceeds to list cops, junkies, presidents, and, yes, even housewives and preachers (DFW, 126).

Baldwin twists the word possession in the same way he does horrifying, dreadful, and exorcism. He prefaces his turn to The Exorcist with a critique of how “the Western world pivots on the infantile, and, in action, criminal delusions of possession, and of property” (DFW, 120). His rage against the materialist will to possess belittles what, in his opinion, Chris most wants for her daughter: to “make as much money” as her (DFW, 124). Not once does Baldwin seem interested in Regan’s paranormal afflictions; he cares less about her status as possessed than about her status as future possessor. How many lives must be dispossessed to continue that normal life that the MacNeils so yearn for? Baldwin hints at this concern when he recalls a remark that his friend makes on exiting the film: “So, we must be careful . . . lest we lose our faith—and become possessed.” According to Baldwin, his friend “was no longer speaking of the film, nor was he speaking of the church” (DFW, 121). Passed between black people, the word possessed is here loaded with a knowledge of how often black people were possessed, as objects, on the pious road to white world-building. Baldwin is speaking of faith as a spiritual force that allows black subjects to persist against the normative world that has never dispossessed itself of the urge to possess black life as property, nor once stopped to consider how the systemic devaluation of black life still enables certain families, like the MacNeils, to own and pass down property, and to have so many institutions of “white science” rush to their aid when they are in crisis. In minimizing paranormal horror, Baldwin here echoes those points made by later black horror scholars. He seems to say, like LaValle’s protagonist, I’ll take Satan over you devils any day.

Baldwin’s ideological critique of the film finds its contemporary stakes in how we understand its place within horror studies and the attempts of the franchise to update itself in our current Black Lives Matter moment. In the first season of the television series The Exorcist (2016), Regan has grown up into exactly the possessing subject that Baldwin abhors. Her family is once again afflicted when one of her own daughters is possessed. But by whose devil? For a moment it seems to be Baldwin’s. The franchise and its mother are given a chance to exorcise their own racial guilt when Chris calls a town meeting to search for her possessed granddaughter. The ensuing scene at the podium reprises the aforementioned one where Chris—with cameras rolling—admonishes a group of student protesters to find order within the system. Here, however, white fantasy clashes with real-life black horrors as she finally confronts that guilty conscience which Baldwin says neither she nor the franchise was ever rightly able to exorcise. As she speaks into a now-real crowd, the gathering fills with black protesters who demand to know where justice is for their own slain loved ones. They demand to know why cops care more for Regan’s child than for their own. A black protester articulates Baldwin’s own indictment of the film: she rails that nobody cares about the slain “poor people of color, guess that don’t rate with your department superintendent. I guess because we don’t have any movie stars backing us. . . . Point your damn cameras in this direction, get your lights on these faces. We don’t have any reward money, but they’re people too.”¹⁷ For a moment, it is as if the searing disinterest that Baldwin claims black audiences felt toward the film can rise up, as critique, within its diegetic world. The command to “point your damn cameras” shifts the language of damnation from the paranormal to the interlocking cinematic and media apparatus that keeps black lives from mattering. To point those cameras where there is no money is to route the possession story from its more spectacular frights back to the systemic world, which is a daily horror for its most dispossessed. The show itself, however, fails to heed the black woman’s plea, allowing the story line to disperse as easily as its most fickle crowd. Still, for a moment the racially unmarked audience of The Exorcist must see their ability to connect with the earlier paranormal terror of the MacNeils in terms of race. They are made to watch as black folks protest The Exorcist and call out—for just a few seconds—the greater and unfaced horrors of their lives. They call out their desire to appear within a genre whose prevailing mood has long been central to their lives.

Such convergences around The Exorcist constellate the different investments that scholars of critical race and gender studies have in the film and in its ability to dismantle—or perpetuate—harmful ideologies. And while I value the imperative to see black life as the greater horror, I have one reservation. I fear that this will become the only claim that black studies can offer to horror studies: to make black folks into its more traumatized foils; to set the encounter with the insidiously normal over that of the paranormal. Contra Baldwin, who masterfully closes down the black audience to the generic thrills of The Exorcist, I turn now to more playful and diffuse ways that black audiences find themselves open to it. To do so, we need not scrap Baldwin. We need only set aside Baldwin’s status as the coolly detached and demystifying spectator of black realism in favor of his less-mentioned status as a perverse reader of black reality.

However conclusive Baldwin’s indictment of the film may now feel, he actually regards his audience’s responses with curiosity and openness, not condemnation. “When I saw the film again, I was most concerned with the audience. I wondered what they were seeing, and what it meant to them” (DFW, 121–22). His curiosity creates a moment of potentiality in which he suspends his initial judgment to consider instead what other ways of seeing and feeling existed at the time. To sample these other perspectives, we need only set Baldwin’s 1976 essay alongside another from that year, “Return of the Repressed,” by horror’s most canonical critic, Robin Wood. Like Baldwin, Wood sees the devil as but a manifestation of repressed urges that we displace onto others. Unlike Baldwin, however, he seems open to the film’s norm-toppling play at possession. For Wood, Regan’s “violently assertive sexuality” shatteringly unleashes everything that is repressed in “this ostensibly happy, somewhat complacent surface” of the home.¹⁸ He may not be as racially astute as Baldwin, but he takes normativity to be just as stifling. “The implication of these films,” he writes, “is that the norms by which we have lived must be destroyed and a radically new form of organization (political, social, ideological, sexual) be constructed.”¹⁹ His enthusiastic openness to regarding “the devil as hero” mirrors Andrew Scahill’s own queer delight in possessed children.²⁰ Scahill sees The Exorcist as able to excite “contradictory pleasures” that “allow for the expression of repressed desires that are not sanctioned in society.”²¹ Would knowing of this far more unruly audience for the film have changed Baldwin’s perspective? As Adam Rockoff notes, audiences today may watch the film with a kind of campy irreverence. Rockoff is shocked to see how a predominantly “Hispanic” audience now “laughed when Regan’s head spun around 360 degrees. They howled with glee when she projectile-vomited pea soup. . . . Watching a preteen jab a crucifix into her vagina . . . didn’t seem to faze them in the least.”²² Such creatively campy and disidentifying audiences existed both then and now, and though Baldwin’s starkly realist viewing practices seem to disqualify him from these looking practices, I would suggest that he is an equally perverse reader of black reality.

Smuggling Baldwin into The Exorcist

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie challenges the idea that black film must authentically represent the realities of black viewers. Though stunningly precise, his polemic—“If we must see ourselves, then let it be in mirrors and not on screens”—little prepares me for Baldwin’s own queer attempts to see his own self up there on the screen.²³ For all his talk of black folk’s reality, Baldwin’s attempts to find traces of it in films are oddly unreal. Often he finds it by looking at white women. Though Baldwin initially makes it seem that “no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American Screen,” that world nonetheless appears everywhere due to his strange way of looking (DFW, 20). After summarizing white films, he often deploys his most elastic phrase—“I knew something of that”—to demonstrate his ability to relate to the experience that it captures (DFW, 13, 14, 18, 26). This is not because there is something universal about these films but because they seem better suited to address uniquely black realities that Hollywood still cannot bear to represent. His most dramatic claims therefore do not simply identify with white films; rather, they evacuate them of their positivist content altogether to insist that such all-white films are best read as black films. In this way, a film containing only white people, “for me, had not been about white people” (DFW, 22–23). Baldwin’s ability to see himself—as a black person—in unlikely white forms is best exemplified in one especially convoluted moment that becomes the basis for queer of color critique: the moment when Baldwin latches on to Bette Davis, insisting that “she moved just like a nigger” (DFW, 7). I will spend some time with this moment because it allows me to model—by rereading Baldwin—exactly the kinds of idiosyncratic identifications that Baldwin otherwise loses for me when he remains closed to The Exorcist.

As queer film scholars have argued in work on identification, the audience is open to seeing themselves in films in more ways than any director ever intends. The scarcity of black representation equals not the impossibility of identification but its creative overflow into unlikely bodies. This openness to connection with mainstream texts is precisely why Muñoz begins his theory of disidentification with Baldwin’s attachments to Davis. Disidentifications champions precisely such “crisscrossed” ways that marginalized subjects draw fulfillment from dominant texts that aren’t coded to represent them.²⁴ In the following, Baldwin identifies with Davis not only because of her black movements but because her large eyes allow him to rework the shameful things his stepfather says about his own eyes to insult his mother’s: “Because I sensed something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the screen, I gave Davis’s skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a nigger” (DFW, 7). Baldwin’s identification smacks of ambivalence. As Muñoz notes, this “vexed identification with Davis” offers “something both liberatory and horrible”: “A black and queer belle-lettres queen such as Baldwin finds something useful in the image; a certain survival strategy is made possible via this visual disidentifcation with Bette Davis and her freakish beauty.”²⁵ Seeing Davis on-screen triggers Baldwin’s own queer inkling that “perhaps I could find a way to use my strangeness,” a strangeness that has been hatefully marked, by the patriarch, as a reviled sign of his mother (DFW, 8). Baldwin experiences a highly personal form of significance (in her eyes) that helps activate that racially shared knowledge that he subsequently reads into her movements. He makes a similar move later when he elevates a minstrel image of a black man rolling his eyes before the police into a far more serious encounter with black life as horror: “It is also possible that their comic, bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a terror by which I hoped never to be engulfed” (DFW, 20). In such moments Baldwin can disidentify with mainstream representations to perceive starkly realistic images of black life in unlikely forms.

In looking askew at these subjects, Baldwin steals affirmation not only for himself but also for the black audiences who wish to see their own shared reality up there on the screen. Taking back this black reality from Hollywood is strange, though, because it requires us to look for its traces in the bodies of white women. Note this conflation when Baldwin looks at yet another white actress—Sylvia Sidney—who “reminded me of a colored girl, or woman—which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality” (DFW, 21). To look for black representation in this way is to let go of the notion that representation matters only in its positivist sense. It is to embrace how blackness still matters for Baldwin even when no black bodies are present on-screen. In the absence of those actual black bodies, black reality persists in his viewings as a gesture, a feeling, or a punctum that resonates with his own memories of black life. This allows him to build and affirm a sense of black reality while using idiosyncratic memories that may in fact have nothing to do with black people.

This attempt to steal such an unlikely kind of affirmation from dominant texts comes together for Baldwin in the term smuggling. It is the job of the black actor and audience to smuggle into Hollywood as many bits of reality as might represent and affirm black people. “Black spectators supply the sub-text—the unspoken—out of their own lives,” he writes, just as actors go against “the confines of the script” to bring “hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale” (DFW, 104–5). Actor and audience work together as fugitives to smuggle black experiences into scripts that don’t represent them. They smuggle in the conditions that allow black folks to see themselves realistically up there on the screen before those conditions even exist. This is exactly what Baldwin does with Davis: he smuggles a black queer boy into a straight white woman. Though nobody has yet made the connection, this is exactly what Eve Sedgwick does with the queer reader in one section from Tendencies (1993) titled “Promising, Smuggling, Reading, Overreading.” Sedgwick also sees straight texts as withholding an affirmation that queer children require. To get at them, she becomes the “perverse reader” who can “wrest from them sustaining news of the world, ideas, myself, and (in various senses) my kind.”²⁶ Like Baldwin’s own relationship to black reality, Sedgwick’s desire to see queer realities leads her “to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled.”²⁷ With these two accounts of smuggling, I am readying myself to finally become the kind of smuggler that Baldwin both does and doesn’t intend for black audiences. Paradoxically, to steal such looks as Baldwin does is in the end to steal away from him—or rather, to steal away from him the possibility of closing down black identification with The Exorcist. Rather than entering the film through Baldwin’s critique, I want to reenter it now through his more capacious capacity to connect with unlikely bits of reality that other black queer viewers smuggle into these films.

If Davis teaches Baldwin to “find a way to use [his] strangeness,” then the devil too might have its otherworlding uses. With her dead-white greenish pallor, her disastrous lips, and her wickedly tensed and intelligent forehead, Regan exists as the unchosen shadow of Baldwin’s investments in Davis. He may not be open to her, but other black queer audiences are. In that spirit, I now turn to passing references to The Exorcist hinted at in the fictions of James Earl Hardy, Larry Duplechan, and G. Winston James. Each representation unlocks a vexed identification with possession that revolves around a felt tension between agency and passivity, self and other, and, finally, pleasure and trauma as they take hold within the erotic life.

Black Queers Do The Exorcist

In the first half of this article, I have argued that black horror fans are too often cast as being traumatically beholden to some greater real that takes precedence over the generic thrills of the horror genre. Pushing back against dominant and sometimes totalizing accounts of black reception, I turn now to fictional works that allow me to configure a different relationship between black viewers and mainstream horror. Such representations multiply black viewing practices. They offer alternatives to the standing assumptions that black horror fans are predominantly (1) attracted to the genre as a way of working through more pressing racial traumas; (2) fixating on some allegedly more horrifying reality backgrounded within these films rather than their more thrilling paranormal foreground; (3) largely moved and triggered by collective experiences shared equally by all black audiences rather than by those based more in their own uniquely formative experiences. In so doing, they push back against accounts that either too sweepingly reduce black life to horror or reduce black pleasure in horror to a cathartic way of working through traumas that they readily share with a larger black collective.

I now return to The Exorcist from the vantage point of black gay fiction so that I can part ways with Baldwin’s reading and offer a new take on its meaning for black audiences. Although my texts depart from Baldwin’s disinterest in the film, they align with his account of “smuggling” insofar as they disidentify with its white heroine to locate unlikely hints of black queer reality. In so doing, they smuggle black and queer viewings past Baldwin and back into a classical horror tradition that never had any interest in representing them.

The queer thrill that Andrew Scahill reads into The Exorcist nicely resonates with the brief allusions to the film that appear in Larry Duplechan’s novels Eight Days a Week (1985) and Blackbird (1986), James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues (1994), and G. Winston James’s Shaming the Devil (2009). As Scahill notes, the queer “thrill” of watching Regan is based on the freedoms that possession affords its subject to “enact the transgressive desires” written out by normative selfhood.²⁸ These black gay protagonists thus take Regan as an apt figure for their own no less vexed embodiment. As Regan, they are besieged by excessive desires that alienate them from their accustomed selves (even as they seem to articulate pleasures that they may have repressed in normative selfhood). Coincidentally, all references to possession appear in contexts when black gay men experience an attraction to their ultimate erotic ideals: hypermasculine, highly racialized men who hope to possess, dominate, and even harm them. The shattering states that they experience often muddle any clear demarcations between erotic agency and passivity. Through close readings of these moments alongside the film, I locate black spectators more capaciously—and more queerly—within the horror genre in ways that have not yet become available in black horror studies. In such cases, the horror film does not unlock any easily collectivized feeling of racial trauma. Instead, dwelling on possession offers a far campier embrace of both the paranormal and the paranormative.

In James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues, the narrator uses The Exorcist to describe the rapture that he experiences while having sex with the ultimate “homie-sexual”: the b-boy.²⁹ Getting with a b-boy, he hopes, will free him from his sexual inhibitions and “bring out the freak in me” (BB, 39). On the one hand, bringing out the freak is an act of self-possession that allows him to expand his erotic subjectivity. On the other, it is an act of possession. He can bring out the inner freak only by giving in to the other—the b-boy—who helps him give in to that lewd other locked up within himself. He activates this otherness with the titular b-boy, Raheim, who praises him for being “so fuckin’ wicked” in the bedroom (BB, 63). This pleasure of giving in to what is freakish and wicked marks the beginnings of possession as Scahill describes it. From here on the subject of possession experiences himself not as a subject but as coming under the sway of an unrecognizably lewd other. In the climactic moment I examine below, the narrator turns to The Exorcist to articulate this rapture of letting go of his accustomed identity to come under the possession of another. He thus appropriates the key tropes of possession—the speaking in tongues, the banging bed, the rolling eyes—to perform a pleasure that takes him beyond himself:

In possession films, we know that the subject is possessed because they can speak in other tongues, usually Latin. Here too both men’s speech becomes “unintelligible,” as when Raheim climaxes just before this scene while “screaming something that sounded like Pig Latin” (BB, 60). Their hollering is “horrifying” because it playfully shocks them with hitherto repressed versions of themselves and one another. To be fucking wicked is thus to let go of oneself, one’s humanity and attendant inhibitions, to experience a rapture that momentarily dissolves—or shatters—one’s accustomed sense of sovereignty. In a twist on Muñoz’s reading of Baldwin, Regan—with her “freakish beauty”—offers the narrator “something both liberatory and horrible”: a way to “use my strangeness” in the bedroom.³⁰

But how much of this performance is passive and how much agentive? The allusion to The Exorcist complicates how we locate the subject in this instance because it mixes the passivity of being overcome with the agency of giving a commanding performance. Importantly, the narrator does not claim to be Regan; instead, he sees himself as the actress who plays her, Linda Blair. His split allusion thus casts him as both within the scene and masterfully without. In the role of the possessed child, he is pleasurably overcome with his passivity. In the role of the talented starlet, however, he can boast of his more commanding ability to play the role. Getting into character, he performs a rapturous feeling of self-loss that allows him to bring up the wicked inner freak. He becomes, in this sense, the scream queen: horror’s hallowed version of the diva. What he therefore masters (as Blair) is his ability to lose control (as Regan). And while disidentifying with Regan allows him to get into the scene, disidentifying with Blair allows him to look back approvingly on his role.

We might contrast the acclaim Hardy’s narrator wholly accords to Blair with yet another look at the film, this one from the narrator of Larry Duplechan’s earlier novel, Eight Days a Week (1985). He gives the glory of this moment not to Blair but to the too long uncredited actress who vocally performs the possessed Regan: Mercedes McCambridge. McCambridge’s masterful ability to both demonize and masculinize Regan is complicated.³¹ She channels possession by drinking raw eggs and chain-smoking (to roughen her voice) and by breaking her sobriety to perform while drunk on whiskey. To intensify the strained quality to her voice, she is tied to a chair. In a 1998 interview, McCambridge recounts:

Her methods blur the lines between the agency of acting and the helplessness of willingly being acted on by distorting substances. Her masterful presence is generated in part by her willingness to get drunk and actually embody a gasping experience of self-loss. The director applauds her ability to subject herself to all the “duress” she embodied to make the role real. In her 2011 interview, she admits that such restrained status is required to play at being possessed: “It has to happen when you have no freedom.”³³ So, acting out her unfreedom backstage, she expertly performs possession in ways that further entangle the power struggle that Hardy’s narrator witnesses during this scene. Counter to what he sees on-screen, it is not just that Regan is trapped inside the demon Pazuzu, but that the adult McCambridge is trapped inside the dissembling body of Linda Blair. Although Blair does do her own work—“Uh-huh”—she also takes credit for McCambridge’s theatrics for years until McCambridge sues the studio for the right to appear in the credits.

As a “trivia receptacle and detail monger,” Duplechan’s narrator, Johnnie, recovers this credited diva to her rightful place, just as he does elsewhere with other black women singers (E, 240). He references McCambridge during a taxing musical tour. Overworked, he abandons his otherwise smooth demeanor and now “mumbled curses in a voice not unlike Mercedes McCambridge’s voice-overs in The Exorcist.”³⁴ Such an allusion lands queerly. It marks an alienating shift in Johnnie’s demeanor by identifying his otherwise feminine singing voice—“Even sings like a girl”—with that of a woman who worked hard to play a mannish girl (E, 49). To this degree, it shows the behind-the-scenes strain of his labor as he drifts from his accustomed image of himself. In noting McCambridge’s labor, he pays homage to her talent in his exhaustion. The joke lands not because the voice in his throat belongs to a female, but because it belongs to a female who—like him—could so masterfully play across the gender spectrum that she was mistaken for a male.

The reference also activates how exhausted Johnnie is not only from work but also from his domestic struggles with his domineering boyfriend, Keith, whom he adores for his whiteness. He “worshipped” Keith, as “my blond fetish incarnate”: “I loved Keith’s dick to the point of religion. I made up names for it like a primitive tribe might name its god over and over” (E, 171, 90, 192). Yet Keith’s “overzealous possessiveness” makes him violent, and he demands that Johnnie give up his job to stay home (E, 195). Johnnie goes from skipping breakfast to balance his career with Keith—instead, “I gulped down three raw eggs”—to enduring violent tirades that curtail Johnnie’s freedom (E, 128). Here McCambridge’s furious mumblings do not relay—as with Hardy—an unintelligible rapture; instead, they signal the unfreedom that she endures to make art for a public who seems unlikely to remember her. By listening for McCambridge in Johnnie’s voice, we hear many things at once: the gruff break in his otherwise smoothly feminine composure; the tragic foreshadowing that he will soon be upstaged by other performers; and, above all, the worn quality of his voice as he is overcome by someone who violently wishes to possess him.

Johnnie’s relationship to The Exorcist gets a backstory in Duplechan’s subsequent novel, Blackbird (1986): a prequel in which Johnnie comes out in high school. Watching the film in his small, conservative, largely white town, Johnnie feels exactly the kind of spiritual terror that Baldwin distances himself from. While one friend laughed as “Linda Blair spewing hot guacamole,” and another puked, “only I seemed to have been moved to a profound sense of spiritual guilt” as a gay youth.³⁵ Feeling “a sudden fear of eternal damnation (or terrestrial demonic possession at the very least),” he confesses to his pastor (B, 150). By the next day he is “completely over the notion that my gayness is inherently evil,” but the priest and Johnnie’s family now regard his homosexuality as “possession by unclean spirits” (B, 150, 153). His baffled response—“Like in The Exorcist?”—casts him in the role of the actress, now reluctantly having to act out an affliction that he no longer believes in (B, 153). He may no longer wish “to be normal,” but he is forced to undergo an exorcism and told exactly what to expect: “Spirits leave your body, they may come out as a sneeze or a coughing spell or something like that. I’ve had one or two people throw up” (B, 153, 160). To really play the part, as McCambridge knows, you must have no freedom, and Johnnie does this by giving the pastor and Johnnie’s family all the pathos of a black queer boy forced to undergo an exorcism.

Camp is notably absent from his delivery and his recounting. It is a tool that he is aware of but whose strategy of ironic distancing remains unavailable to him and to us in this moment: “If it hadn’t been me down there on [the exorcist] Solomon Hunt’s living-room floor, I might have found a certain dark humor in the situation. But it was me. And it wasn’t funny. I felt sad and cold, and very much alone. And I knew what I had to do” (B, 162). He screams. Hard. He refuses to “throw up for them,” but everyone “assumed my unclean spirits departed my tortured little body in the scream” (B, 162). This aggrieved scream adds to Duplechan’s earlier engagement with The Exorcist—and to Johnnie’s passing McCambridge quip later in life—a longer, sadder queer complaint. The loneliness that he voices as a youth trapped in a small town compounds his later expression as an older singer who still feels trapped in his new city life. His worship of that punishing whiteness feels only like a second, more crushing form of possession. His vexed identification with The Exorcist persists, perhaps because he still experiences his erotic life as a black gay man through some degree of alienation and unfreedom. Though now openly gay, he seems no freer—no more self-possessed—in those moments when he gives in to his innermost desires.

Both of these black gay characters use The Exorcist to dramatize overwhelming feelings of estrangement and self-loss brought about by an erotic ideal. In the short story collection Shaming the Devil (2009), G. Winston James delivers a more difficult rendition of possession in his story “Somewhere Nearby.” There his nameless cruising narrator is lured out into the woods by two thuggish black men he has been pursuing. Soon he realizes that they plan to kill him, and the remainder of the story is graphically located within the moments leading up to his own death. What makes the story so “haunting,” as Darius Bost notes, is that the narrator comes to realize that some part of himself, though frightened, has always thrilled to become the object of another man’s eroticized violence.³⁶ In the story’s climactic moment, he secretly masturbates one of his two assailants (a man he calls Tupac) to wring one last bit of pleasure from an erotic life he still cannot understand. In what he terms an act of “self-affirmation and pseudo-heroic resignation,” he practices the agency of surrender.³⁷ He surrenders not only to his imminent death but also to his vexed ability to somehow find pleasure in it. And at this moment we again find ourselves in The Exorcist.

The assailant, who is also aroused by the violence, allows himself to be masturbated on one condition: the dying narrator can never mention it to anyone. The narrator notes the absurdity of this moment as follows: “I can’t say anything with a gag in my mouth, even if I tried . . . I cannot cause letters to rise on my skin like Regan in The Exorcist. I’m not altogether sure that Tupac would be able to read them even if I could” (SD, 111). This rash of letters refers to a key moment in the film that helps me draw together several allusions to possession that appear elsewhere in other short stories from the collection. The allusion references a moment when the once sweet Regan—now raunchily possessed—manages to halt her lewd antics long enough to send her mother a message through her sore-crusted body. Her mother unbuttons her nightie to find that the words help me have pitifully materialized across Regan’s chest (see figs. 1 and 2). The devil perhaps allows Regan this supplication to tease the mother, Chris, with the suffering, submerged presence of her once sweet child. But the meaning this phrase takes within the short story itself is far more slippery. To see why, we first need to look back at the film itself.

In the film, right before the words help me surface on Regan’s stomach, a detective reviews Regan’s case with Chris while staring at a picture of Little Red Riding Hood. As Scahill notes, this quick glance signifies that “Regan seems to exist quite literally inside the Wolf’s belly. . . . The beast has swallowed her whole and suppressed her soul into its belly, awaiting the Woodsman to release her from consumption.”³⁸ There is no straightforward way to apply this allusion in our reading of the story, however, for James’s cruisers all celebrate their sexual conquests in just such predatory language. They can so adeptly cruise one another, they boast, because they too are “so attuned, like wolves” (SD, 57). It is not that the narrator is simply asking to be saved from his bashers, then: he is also asking to be saved from his own willfully erotic body. He seems as much at the mercy of his own impulses as of those of the men who beat him. The beast that “has swallowed [him] whole and suppressed [his] soul”—to borrow Scahill’s phrase—is a figuration of his own alienating sex drive. Like Regan, he seems possessed, yearning to cry out from within himself. He is done in by his own desires. He is undone by them. They permit him no feelings of self-possession, so he allows us to read this unlettered phrase—help me—as if it were a deep-down plea from the innocent child that he once was. Having laid out his formative traumas, he seems to beg the reader to free him from his own compulsive body.

Possession thus concentrates the feeling of being trapped within a lewd and unwilled body. But unlike Regan, the narrator is not so easily the passive victim of possession. Instead, he embraces his desires, mixing agency and passivity. As Darius Bost argues of the story, “Acknowledging that his incessant desire will position him outside of innocent victimhood, the corpse still demands the pleasure promised from these men as potential sexual partners, even now, as his murders. The victim refuses to sanitize the messiness of black queerness produced in these tangles of death and desire.”³⁹ Indeed, he may feel trapped within his erotic body by virtue of these formative traumas, but he still claims its vexed pleasures in ways that signal self-possession: “I am still driven by the erotic, and I am grateful” (SD, 112). He is possessed insofar as he is controlled by alienating drives, yet he is self-possessing insofar as he can finally claim them in a life-affirming way. He looks back on his erotic life in a cinematic way, as if he were, not unlike Linda Blair, the star of a sexualized desecration: “I realize I have been training myself for this moment of desecration. Unfortunately this night of torment has come well before my masochistic graduation. Cast in this snuff film . . . I remember things in this moment that were long forgotten, but explain so much about how I came, almost unbeknownst to me, to link sex and violence” (SD, 110). Using carefully placed commas, James breaks this phrase—“how I came, almost unbeknownst to me”—to suggest that the narrator is alienated from the very conditions that allow him to attain his orgasm. The reason he comes remains opaque—“unbeknownst to me”—yet it is these very conditions that bring him a vexed pleasure that he tries his best to embrace. He thus casts himself as being both the desiring subject and the yielding object of this transaction. In light of his experiences, he seems himself as having auditioned for a role that he neither fully chooses nor understands but still tries to perform in a convincing way.

The word desecration, moreover, powerfully frames what the three men—the narrator as well as the other two—are doing with his body as sacrilegious. These violent sexual acts register as blasphemous in ways that once more help activate his following allusion to The Exorcist. Father Karras describes “satanism—meaning people who can’t have any sexual pleasure unless it’s connected to a blasphemous action.”⁴⁰ In the film, this is signified by a makeshift cock and pair of breasts—both bloody—that are grafted onto a statue of the Virgin Mary. In the novel, it is also signified by a vandalized Bible that describes “an imagined homosexual encounter involving Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin Mary” (TE, 96). The possessed were subject to acts that spectacularly link sex, violence, and queerness in blasphemous acts. The possessed were, Blatty writes, “helpless in the state of possession, they had regularly attended Satanic orgies at which they had varied their erotic fare: Mondays and Tuesdays, heterosexual copulation; Thursdays, sodomy, fellatio and cunnilingus with homosexual partners” (TE, 241). Such desecration interarticulates demonic sex with queer group sex performed in honor of the emphatically phallic god that possesses Regan: Pazuzu. Pazuzu is fashioned with a “bulbous, jutting, stubby penis” and “a feral grin” (TE, 5). He exemplifies exactly the violent and phallic forms of masculinity that the men of “Somewhere Nearby” perform in their violent desires for one another.

It is difficult, though, to say whether or not James wishes to exorcise this kind of erotic bedevilment or to embrace queer expressions that are marked as demonic. Turning to the devil is useful in that it allows him to embrace desires elsewhere regarded as shameful. Rather than follow this scene further, I will demonstrate this ambivalence by turning to one final scene from another story in the collection that further complicates how we understand possession. This moment does not reference The Exorcist, but it deploys the word pig in ways that powerfully activate its place at the intersections of gay and religious histories. The wolf—the aggressive male top—is but one model of gay virility; the pig is another. As Tim Dean notes, barebacking cultures were giving new prominence to these desires as “wolves metamorphosed into pigs”: “Being a pig entails committing oneself to sexual excess, to pushing beyond boundaries of propriety and corporeal integrity; being a pig thus positions a man for membership in a sexual avant-garde.”⁴¹ In James’s story “Path,” the narrator’s claim to the category of “the pig” both activates this commitment and questions its volitional status as a fully agentive or empowering act. His narrator is late to work because he stops to have sex with a stranger in a subway stall. While doing so, he sees a homeless man watching them through the crack with a “lunatic eye” (SD, 59). Rather than feeling shame, the narrator is delighted: “Recognizing how much of a freak he was, the pig in me almost swooned” (SD, 59). Only in the most straightforward sense can we take the narrator to be the heroic pig that Dean describes: a no-limits man who gets off on voyeurism. To see why, we must cut to the biblical allusion on our way back into The Exorcist.

In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus exorcises a demon from a possessed man by casting it out into a nearby group of pigs, which immediately drown themselves. Throughout The Exorcist the devil several times mocks this moment by referring to Regan as his “pig.” He often does this when he invites others to desecrate Regan. In the most infamous scene, the possessed Regan—having just masturbated with a bloody crucifix—forces her mother’s face between her legs, demanding that she lick. In the novel, Regan moans just before this moment—“Aahhh, little pig mother!”—and concludes by “sensually” sliding the cross back in while crooning over her own body, “Ahh, there’s my sow, yes, my sweet honey piglet” (TE, 205). By calling Regan his pig, he declares his sexualized dominion over her. “The sow is mine!”—he shouts to a group of doctors in the film, right before demanding that they fuck her (SD, 114). Being the devil’s pig thus entails surrendering your body to others. Much of the film suggests that Regan herself is not present during these moments. But scholars counter that she is both present enough to spell help me and aware enough to gratefully kiss a pastor once she is exorcised, as if she could dimly remember how good the church was to her. What makes us unsure whether or not she was conscious for these actions is how often she swoons during these early acts, as if the knowledge of her actions were too unbearable.

Returning, then, to that line from James—“the pig in me almost swooned”—we see now that the phrase is cut with an ambivalence that is legible only when we read intertextually. Because the devil calls his helpless vessel his “piglet,” it is possible that the narrator is alluding to some truer and more reserved self that is held captive within his erotic body. The pig is no longer simply, as it was with Dean, an innermost self, hungry for unlimited intimacies. We can only meet it with questions. Does the pig in me swoon inside because it is overcome with shock and disgust at my outward actions? Does it swoon joyously—perversely—at its unimaginable luck? Or is it some combination of the two? Does the pig in me—no longer held captive by my reserve—rejoice to see that I have finally let go of my shame and given in to what I most want deep down? That I have finally given free rein to what others would call my inner demons? All readings are in fact necessary if we are to experience what the erotics of possession makes possible for James. In possession, the subject—also a nonsubject—performs desires that force into crisis the very ideas he has of himself. In the throes of passion, he performs acts that later make him feel conflicted. Such a pig might—when he comes down—swoon not from joy but in the way that Regan does. He might swoon from his inability to endure such acts that he cannot bear to see himself performing.

Throughout his stories James thus deploys possession in ways that never allow us to simply equate exorcism with a desired freedom. We witness the various efforts of therapists, priests, friends, and parents to converge on the bodies of black queers to force them to renounce their pleasures. Sometimes exorcism articulates a yearning to find freedom from self-destructive behaviors, and in other instances it allegorizes a conversion therapy that is forced on black gay men. While it is certainly possible, then, to read help me as the traumatized black queer once more seeking help from “white science” to escape these self-destructive impulses, it is equally possible to imagine the call as coming from elsewhere. Given how the narrator leans into this pleasure, the plea help me might be, in fact, a strained call from the misunderstood pig in him who still hopes to be let out. It might be yet another iteration of the voice that opens the story collection—a queer boy who cannot understand his attraction to his uncle’s nude body, and whose yearning falls back on a strange plea: “Please, please . . . Satan” (SD, 15). The answer to who he is seems to lie not with God but with the devil, and in this way he is little different from how James remembers himself as a queer boy, puzzled by his erections: “In my pre-teens, fascinated with demons and black magic, I attempted on several occasions to summon not just any demon, but Satan himself. I wanted to talk with Lucifer about God since my prayers had always seemed to go unanswered.”⁴² Turning from God seems to draw us back into the same curious question that possession poses: What might I want when I let go of who I thought I was?

Keeping alive this vexed state of possession, I prefer that we leave all potential readings in play when attempting to analyze what The Exorcist means for black, queer, and feminist viewers. Indeed, only by dwelling in this place of irresolution and inner conflict can we understand the intimate place that possession has in the erotic world of James’s fiction. The conflicted black queer subject both does and doesn’t beg for release from the overwhelming desires of his erotic body. He both does and doesn’t delight in wolfing down and pigging out on gruff strangers. He is both the wickedly subversive figure that some feminist and queer scholars take Regan to be and, at the same time, the helpless subject cruelly driven by an alien force that has dominion over him. He is, I mean, everywhere just as vexed, complicated, and messy as our identifications with The Exorcist itself.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my colleagues Caren Irr and Paul Morrison for workshopping an earlier version of this draft, and to Naima Karczmar, Mehak Khan, Kyra Sutton, and the rest of the editorial board of Qui Parle for their insightful suggestions and revisions.

Notes

References