Another notable addition is a conversation between the film’s exorcists, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Father Karras (Jason Miller) while they sit on the stairs outside Regan’s room in the third act. In this deep breath, they debate why the possession is actually occurring (in the original, the men just sit briefly in silence). According to Mark Kermode’s BFI Movie Classics: The Exorcist, Blatty was particularly incensed that Friedkin cut this scene, saying it was the spiritual and theological core of the movie.
Among the biggest differences though is the one that left Blatty most unhappy: Friedkin cut a coda in the theatrical cut where Father Dyer (real-life priest William O’Malley) and detective William Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) bond over their shared affection for movies and the now-dead Father Karras, a supposedly uplifting epilogue that, in Blatty’s view, indicated that good had clearly triumphed over evil and that Karras’ spirit lived on within these two mens’ newfound friendship. According to Kermode, Friedkin recalled (before reinstating it, of course), “I shot that ending and it was no fucking good at all.”
Again, while all these scenes are intriguing historically, they don’t affect the fabric of the movie much by their absence from the original version. But there is one brief shot that Friedkin altered that, to our thinking, changed the character arc of Regan’s mother, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), and thus changed the thematic conclusion of the picture itself.
It happens right at the end. In the original version, Regan and Chris leave their Georgetown house and get in the car to head to the airport. Father Dyer stands outside the gate, waving as they go. The car stops and Chris calls to the priest. He comes to the window, and Chris hands him a St. Joseph medallion, found in Regan’s room, that belonged to Karras and was pulled off his neck by the demon. Dyer wraps his fist around it, then we cut to the car driving away with Regan looking out the rear window.
In the 2000 cut, however, Dyer holds the medallion in his hand for a minute, then gently hands it back to Chris, saying, “I think you should keep it”–and she does.
The reason this is so important, and why this scene changes everything, is that Chris MacNeil is presented throughout the film as someone who does not believe in religion or God. Asked by doctors if she has any religious beliefs, her answer is a definitive “no.” She exhibits little knowledge of the rites of the Catholic Church. When the same doctors suggest that she look into an exorcism, she says with more than a little disdain in her voice, “You’re telling me that I should take my daughter to a witch doctor?”
