In the summer vacation of ‘78, I was still quite a few years shy of the official age to watch ‘adult’ ( translation - grownup) movies in the movie theatres. But that didn’t stop me from pleading, cajoling and finally bullying and blackmailing my brother to let me go and watch The Exorcist with him. Himself and two of my girl-cousins were planning to watch this movie, which was released in India after a long delay of four and a half years and nothing, absolutely nothing, would’ve stopped me from seeing this movie with the reputation of being the scariest movie of all time.
At that time in the seventies, we had just come out of the Emergency rule by Indira Gandhi and the strict censorship of the period was still in vogue. It was quite usual for the current crop of Hollywood blockbusters to reach our shores a few years after been released in the west and a movie like The Exorcist, I understand, languished in the Indian Censorship Board’s table for a long time. The moral police during the Emergency Raj couldn’t make up their minds whether the movie was too scary or too blasphemic and its only when the Congress party and Indira Gandhi lost the General election, the new regimes ‘openness’ allowed the film to be released albeit with a sizeable cut including a scene involving a cross, which even by todays standard, is shocking.
I had known all about the movie from whatever information you’d get in those days from newspapers and magazines. Swapan Mullick, the film reviewer from The Statesman had said that the movie lives up to its hype and even with the cuts of vital scenes, the shock effect is sizeable. There were some reports of people leaving the theatre early in Kolkata but there was no confirmed reports of people fainting, unlike the reports from the west. A close friend of my brother who’d seen the movie, told us that it was really really scary and self confessed that he’s scared to got to the loo at night by himself and asked his little brother to stand guard.
My father bought the ticket for us – either he didn’t know much of the movie or he thought that the scare would be good for us. I remember my mother telling my brother, your brother is underage if the staff doesn't let him in, you need to come out with him too and forget about the movie. New Empire, where the movie ran, in those days still clung to the great British traditions of eligibility for admissions and we remembered a story when another of our cousins were ejected out of Dr Zhivago by David Lean because she didn't look old enough to be sixteen, though she truly was. And that was nowhere as adult as The Exorcist.
Both my cousins wore saris and girls when they wear the right kind of makeup looked distinctly older. My transformation was trickier. Though I was taller for my age, my face looked pre-pubertal, though there was some hair follicles desperately making an appearance above my upper lip, but nobody in their right mind would mistakenly call that a moustache. So out came my cousin’s eye- brow pencil and the ‘mo’ looked a bit more substantive. As for the rest of the adult look I pinched my mother’s reading glasses which I realised had to be kept on at all times and I’d be watching the movie, most likely, over the frame of the glasses.
At the door my brother gave the usher the pink tickets with the illegible seat numbers and the middle aged man had one look at me and asked , Is he old enough?
Yes he is, said my brother in sheer panic and snatched the tickets from him and literally shoved me inside the movie theatre. After we found our seats my brother hissed to me to stay down; I sunk low into the soft seats to avoid detection till the lights dimmed and the advertisement's started. Even then, I’d will myself to blend into the corduroy seats every time a man with a flashlight walked past.
To this day I don’t know what was more terryfying that day – the thought of being evicted by an usher with a flashlight in the darkened theatre for being underage or the mastery of William Friedkin’s horror tale. What I do know now is that, in a way on that summer day, I crossed a line, stepped over a border and entered the realm of grown up life.
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