My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.

I love the scene at the end of The Exorcist when Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair say goodbye to Father Dyer and drive away, leaving town. It’s delivered like this happy ending but I always watch it and think, “That’s going to be an awkward road trip.” Like, I bet Linda Blair gets to listen to whatever she wants to on the radio. Endings in horror are tough, because what’s more interesting to me is how people live after they survive something terrible. I feel like the traditional bleak horror ending just means the writer has ended the story too soon. Life goes on. Everyone has to get up the next day, shampoo the ectoplasm out of the carpets, and paint over the blood on the walls. Someone who lost a child once told me, “The hardest thing is that life goes on.” Eventually that exorcism becomes a distant memory, that time Jason killed everyone at Camp Crystal Lake except you becomes a story for your Tinder date, that haunted house turns into a life lesson you tell your kids. All you have to do is stick with it for long enough and the worst horror story just becomes another anecdote. If you let your characters live beyond that supercool, edgelord twist ending you came up with, their lives continue, and to me that’s when it gets interesting.