Carol Clover is Professor of Scandinavian and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, and author of Men, Women and Chain-saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. One dark night in affluent Georgetown, Regan (Linda Blair), a sparkly-eyed pubescent girl, begins bucking uncontrollably in her bed. Medical tests find nothing and Regan's condition worsens: she acquires demonic strength, cackles with a horrific voice, and goes through monstrous physical deformations. Friedkin manages to project a bifurcated character, part demon, part victim. Regan is a nightmare of adolescent transgression: blasphemously disrespectful, grotesquely sexual, she appears as a radical affront to the adult viewer, and to the youthful viewer, perhaps, an anti-hero of fantasized extremity. As furious and female as Regan may seem at first fright, she is really subservient to a body-wracking array of special effects-and to the occupying force of the growlingly masculine demon. What we shudder at is not so much a distorted and terrifying young girl, but a cross-dressing monster, wearing some of Hollywood's most pronounced make-up. Possession becomes a parodic (and totalizing) form of oppression. And it is through the flesh that Regan finally speaks, the welts on her body rising to form the words "Help me."-Steve Seid