Category: Group E

Just to preface this, I did read the end of the book.

Throughout my reading of A Head Full of Ghosts I kept trying to decide if the parents were truly invested in Majorie’s well being or if all this was just a front to save a failing family. From the beginning of Mary’s problems her mother and father play rather withdrawn and emotionally fragile roles. They never seem to send her to any kind of practical medical practitioner nor do they seem to operate in a way that put her needs first.

The father’s unconvincingly quick transition back into Catholicism can be chalked up to fear or to his will to make the television show work. Either way his connection to the faith seems flimsy at best. Even Mary can detect the lackluster-ness of his prayers and actions. During the exorcism he puts the pain of his daughter second to the words of men that he pretends to know. Even with his connection, or lack there of, to Christianity aside Mary’s father is a very complicated man. We learn a lot about his possible motivations in chapter 25 when Majorie has Mary read some more stories. These stories are all about the “breadwinners” of the household and how the loss of that status drove them mad in some way. I believe many of us have assumed that Mary’s father’s motivation to invite the camera crews into his house were largely monetarily based. He even says that in one of the earlier chapters when he hails the TV show as the thing that will save the family. In reality it breaks it apart beyond repair. He is a fragile man and I do believe that his fragility likely stems from his inability to hold work and provide for his family. He then imposes this self-consciousness and weakness upon his family, namely Marjorie.

The Mother is one of the most disappointing characters in the entire book I believe. She sees all that her husband is doing wrong and even visibly shows disapproval, but never fully puts a stop to it. Unlike her husband I believe that her heart is in the right place and that her desperation comes not from a projection of self-centered beliefs, but rather from the fear of harm befalling her child. As any good parent she does not want to see Marjorie in pain and she does do what she can to be compassionate and caring. What is frustrating as a reader is that she is as complacent as she is loving. It is hard to judge her as her pain is clear and her confusion is even more so. Her husband has embraced a path which she does not agree with, as seen in many cases especially during the exorcism when she does not participate, and yet she is too afraid and confused to offer up any solutions to counter him. Her desperation combined with his desperation lead to the sad ending of the story and families’ lives.

The actions of Marjorie’s parents are that of desperation. They both want to save her, and, in the case of her father, save themselves. Her dad feels as though he has failed his family and in this book we see his final attempts to fix his shortcomings. Her mother is terrified of what is happening to Marjorie, reasonably so, but her fear drives her to accept irrational thought. In the end both parent’s desperation leads to their joint suicide and joint murder of their child. An act which I personally find unforgivable.

Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts obviously has many parallels with William Blatty’s The Exorcist, and often points quite directly to the influences of one of the best movies from the 70s.  Of course, there are some key differences, but for the most part, I, like Sidney and probably many others, had certain expectations about the exorcism scene itself in A Head Full of Ghosts.  There is lots of similar imagery, from the young teenage girl as the focus of the exorcism, to her being tied to the bed, to the spectacle of it all.  However, the two works definitely have their own takes on the nearly-identical situation they work themselves up to.

In The Exorcist, the event is a spectacle simply due to the medium in which it participates:  by very nature, movies have audiences, for whom they must perform.  In this sense, much of what happens in The Exorcist’s exorcism can be seen as a performance, putting on a show for the priests but most importantly for the American people, sitting in theaters or in their homes consuming this digital media.  Though much of what goes on obviously pertains to the plot, to the movie itself, lots of the details of the scene seem to be “pointed at the camera” so to speak.  We see this vile, ill young woman, tied to a white bed in a monochromatic room, surrounded by priests, literally vomiting, screaming, floating around, (and maybe there really is more to it than this, but) largely for show, whether there really is a demon or not.  Furthermore, as others have pointed out, Regan does not really seem to fully understand what is going on or what is coming her way leading up to and during the exorcism, as she is unaware of the audience she is truly performing for.

In Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Marjorie’s position is different.  The whole time, Marjorie is likely doing research about possessions, exorcisms, priests, reality tv shows, family issues, you name it.  Due to the time period, she has easy access to the wealth of human knowledge that is the internet and clearly has the opportunity to use it to gain more intel.  In A Head Full of Ghosts, the audience of this exorcism scene is not us, the readers, real living people.  Instead, contrasting with The Exorcist, the book implants its own medium to deliver this imagery to the general public of its reality.  For Marjorie, her show to put on is primarily for her family, though.  In addition, Marjorie knows that she is performing, can see the cameras and the mics and their operators in the room with her, whereas Regan could not.  Marjorie even gets a mini pep-talk from Merry to reinforce this concept, with Merry telling Marjorie that she will do fine, as though she has to worry about her personal performance through all of this.

I’m not sure if I’m being a cynic or not, but I frankly don’t buy that Marjorie’s not faking or exaggerating whatever true, well-founded claims she might have of mental illness, physical illness, psychotic break, or any other explanation.  There is something too suspicious about the way Marjorie seems to taunt people, especially Merry and thereby us, the readers, with the truth.  However, I don’t know that Marjorie herself even knows whether or not she is possessed.  It seems to me that her one last form of control over this whole situation and seemingly her whole life, is this final, crucial piece of information at the center of the entire narrative, and that she is willing to fight to the end to keep that truth swimming in mystery and confusion.  Furthermore, Marjorie knows to make use of the spectacle by, in her own way, performing for her family and for the camera, whereas Regan truly comes off as an unsuspecting victim, forced to perform on a camera neither she nor the priests know is there.

The night of the exorcism, Merry acts as if nothing is wrong, clinging to Marjorie’s back and asking her to carry Merry away like a backpack. Although young Merry does change throughout the filming of the show, she forces herself to act as if everything is fine and at least somewhat the same. Sometimes, this is for the cameras, as Merry notes when she goes into the basement to look for a snack because she would “feel pressure to perform” for her father and the TV producers if she went into the kitchen (118). She also launches herself around the room while the family watches TV the night before the exorcism, as energetic as she had been before Marjorie became ill and looking to receive a “sign of approval” from Ken and Barry (194). When the TV crew comes into Marjorie’s room to set up for the exorcism, Merry yells for them to stay out, hoping she can remain with Marjorie and their mother, safely sequestered away from the men and their prayers downstairs.

In her blog post, Claire discusses the idea of the liminal in the novel and how the exorcism should serve as a sort of rite of passage but leaves Marjorie hanging in the air forever. Merry is similarly in a sort of stasis, trapped by her desire to keep the family unchanged, or at least to avoid this particular night/rite. *Spoilers ahead* When the rest of the family dies, they end up at the table, eating pasta exactly like they did in the beginning of the book, before Marjorie really showed signs of mental illness. Merry is found under the table, hiding like she did so many times. These parallels lock Merry’s childhood into a sort of loop, one that we never see break, just as we never really see Marjorie fall.

Regan of The Exorcist is young, bright, and plagued by an absent father. Marjorie of A Head Full of Ghosts navigates financial trouble and an increasingly fractured family, while her sister Meredith must cope with the same destruction she is too young to understand. Finally, Sidney in Scream, which I analyzed for my Postmodern Horror Snapchat Story Project, still has not recovered from the rape and murder of her mother a year ago. Each of these heroines suffers from a direct possession, illness, or serial killer, but also from more abstract concepts that ground them in a reality to best frighten audiences.

Humans fear loneliness and instability. The most introverted of us crave grounding in the worldly context; doctors Baumeister and Leary described that “…a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation and…can provide a point of departure for understanding and integrating a great deal of…human interpersonal behavior,” in 1995, (Baumeister, Leary). This yearning can manifest officially in marriages and the forming of families, who become legally and, often, instinctively loyal to each other. Such bonds can of course function positively, but can also prompt or hinder the resolution of crimes: only thirty percent of the juvenile victims of sexual assault, for example, agree to tell and testify against their related aggressors (Psychology Today). In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the remaining live members of a family keep up their usual routines despite knowing one among them must have killed the rest of their clan.

So, the prevalence and significance of familial ties explain how jarring Regan, Marjorie, Merry, and Sidney must find their scenarios. It also, though, speaks to the effect on the reader or viewer. We discussed in class how watching horror lets us experience thrills without the long-term consequences. That notion rings true– my reading A Head Full of Ghosts will not dissolve my family. However, the dissolution of families like our own in these books and movies introduces or exacerbates that the same fate might befall our’s. Exposure to an idea over and over again can cause its internalization (in fact, the motive of the killer himself in Scream, is that fictional characters would respond to his troubles by murdering). Observing the fall of the Barretts then, for example, reminds us that no family, however nuclear or seemingly perfect, is ultimately safe.

Another similarity between the afore-mentioned pieces of media lies in their feminine anxiety. The demon of The Exorcist apparently identifies as male and infamously compounds Regan’s purity through making her say expletives, perform objectively filthy actions, and masterbate with a crucifix. Most people have negative reactions to female masterbation itself, if they even acknowledge its existence, not to mention the perversion of the sacred regarding the crucifix. Her mother undergoes increasingly intense trauma as her daughter changes through the demon. Intriguingly, the demon Marjorie claims inside her is female. That difference supports that Marjorie is merely faking her predicament, as she spends much of her exorcism scene and the pages leading up to it pointing out the self-interest of the Father Wanderly and his underlings, Dr. Navidson, her father, and the show’s producers, all mostly male. Finally, the male killer in Scream harps on his maternal abandonment, prompted by his father’s affair with Sidney’s mother. Rather than consider the intricacies of that development, especially his father’s wrongdoings, Ghostface takes out his anguish on women, killing men only as part of his larger schemes to attack female victims.

Altogether, these and other horror narratives prey on audience anxieties: we shame, exalt, fear, and demean women within a male-designed context, and we deeply fear being alone. These are the real horrors, and the violence and supernatural occurences in The Exorcist, A Head Full of Ghosts, and Scream merely manifest them.

This weekend’s reading in A Head Full of Ghosts, focused on the buildup and the actual scene of the exorcism of Marjorie. I thought that the buildup to the exorcism was especially interesting because of Marjorie’s involvement and knowledge of what was going to happen and how the exorcism was actually going to work. To me, it was very counter-intuitive that Marjorie would be in the know of how the process was going to work since she was the main subject of the event.

In the movie, The Exorcist, Regan was not a part of the preparation for the exorcism at all. In fact, she was completely out of the loop and not involved in the process at all. This is what I expected out of the exorcism build up in A Head Full of Ghosts due to the similarities that we have discussed in class of the two stories. However, after processing and thinking about the differences in the two, it is clear why Marjorie would be involved in the buildup to her own exorcism. Since they are filming a reality TV show, those are normally planned ahead of time and it would make sense why all characters would be involved. Merry even whispers in her ear, “You’ll do great, Marjorie” thereby reinforcing the idea that this is a show or performance, rather than a real exorcism. This comment contributes to the question we are all asking ourselves as we read the novel, “Is she faking it”?

Another question we as readers consider throughout the novel is wondering if the exorcism really is done to help Marjorie or is now just for the benefit of the show. I found myself questioning this even more throughout the actual exorcism scene. Specifically, when Father Wanderly address Marjorie as a creature and she responds, “I’m not a creature. I’m Marjorie, a fourteen-year-old girl, scared of everything, who doesn’t know why she hears voices that tell her confusing things. And I try to be good and I try.” This exclamation reads as a plea for help and left me wondering, is this exorcism hurting her as a young girl for the benefit of the show, or is it hurting the demons inside of her, therefore helping her escape them?