Dis­cov­er the post-trau­mat­ic insan­i­ty of this athe­ist horror

“You’re going to die up there.” In William Friedkin’s The Exor­cist, whose script William Peter Blat­ty has adapt­ed from his own 1971 nov­el, the pos­sessed 12-year-old Regan (Lin­da Blair) creep­i­ly directs these words at an astro­naut in atten­dance at her actress mother’s house par­ty – and punc­tu­ates them by freely uri­nat­ing all over the car­pet­ed floor.

Regan’s words, evi­dent­ly, put the fear in their tar­get. For when Blat­ty turned his 1978 nov­el ​‘The Ninth Con­fig­u­ra­tion’ (itself a rewrit­ten ver­sion of his 1966 nov­el ​‘Twin­kle, Twin­kle, Killer Kane!’) into his direc­to­r­i­al debut, it would open with astro­naut Cap­tain Bil­ly Cut­shaw (Scott Wil­son) dis­rupt­ing a NASA rock­et launch mid-count­down. ​“There’s noth­ing up there! Noth­ing!” Cut­shaw raves in ter­ror, as he is escort­ed away from the abort­ed mis­sion. Just before this, an impos­si­bly out­sized moon was seen ris­ing over the Cape Canaver­al launch­pad, fore­shad­ow­ing the luna­cy (from the Latin for ​‘moon’) that dom­i­nates the rest of the film.

After his pan­icked men­tal break­down, Cut­shaw is now resid­ing in an exper­i­men­tal psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty, housed in a pri­vate cas­tle on loan to the mil­i­tary – the only non-sol­dier amongst intel­li­gent Viet­nam vets suf­fer­ing vary­ing degrees of com­bat-induced delir­i­um. Cap­tain Fair­banks (George DiCen­zo) claims to have mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties, and keeps try­ing to pass through walls – when he is not dressed in a habit and exor­cis­ing drinks machines. Lieu­tenant Ben­nish (Robert Log­gia) imag­ines he is lost in space with aliens. Lieu­tenant Gomez (Ale­jan­dro Rey) paints obses­sive­ly. Major Nam­mak (Moses Gunn) fan­cies him­self a caped African Amer­i­can Super­man. And Lieu­tenant Reno (The Exorcist’s Jason Miller), with the help of his dry-wit­ted assis­tant Lieu­tenant Spinell (Joe Spinell), attempts to adapt the com­plete works of Shake­speare for a cast of stray canines.

It’s Reno who most clear­ly artic­u­lates, via the exam­ple of Shakespeare’s ​‘Great Dane’, the ques­tion of whether the unit’s inmates are gen­uine­ly mad, or mere­ly pre­tend­ing to be mad, or else tee­ter­ing some­where in between those two states. The Ninth Con­fig­u­ra­tion also con­founds the dis­tinc­tion between staff and inmate. When the unit’s new psy­chi­a­trist and com­mand­ing offi­cer Colonel Kane (Sta­cy Keach) first arrives at the cas­tle, he is greet­ed by the ​‘med­ical offi­cer’ Frome (Blat­ty in a cameo), who quick­ly turns out to be a delud­ed patient in disguise.

The ​‘real’ med­ical offi­cer – whose doctor’s uni­form Frome has stolen – is Colonel Fell (Ed Flan­ders), although that is not his real name or iden­ti­ty. Fell’s men­tal sta­bil­i­ty too is some­what ques­tion­able, as he walks around in a trouser-less state, express­es com­pul­sive anx­i­eties about get­ting his cloth­ing wrin­kled, and even at one point is seen, Ham­let-like, address­ing a human skull on his desk. And sev­er­al of the inmates make explic­it their doubts about the san­i­ty even of their new CO. ​“I’m telling you, he’s Gre­go­ry Peck in Spell­bound,” Reno insists of Kane. ​“He comes to take over the men­tal asy­lum and he’s nuts himself.”

Marked by a wide-eyed inten­si­ty, and giv­en to vivid­ly dis­turb­ing night­mares that – through a bizarre kind of dis­so­ci­a­tion – he claims are not his own, Kane cer­tain­ly seems less than sta­ble, and many view­ers will be quick to share Reno’s sus­pi­cions that they are wit­ness­ing a lunatics-tak­ing-over-the-asy­lum sce­nario akin to the one found in Hitchcock’s Spell­bound or Mar­tin Scorsese’s Shut­ter Island. Still, Kane’s pres­ence in the unit – his ded­i­ca­tion to the patients, his indul­gent meth­ods – all begin to have a pos­i­tive effect on the oth­er men.

Like the Goth­ic cas­tle (fes­tooned with gar­goyles, cru­ci­fix­es and posters of Bela Lugosi) in which The Ninth Con­fig­u­ra­tion is pre­dom­i­nant­ly set, Blatty’s film is some­thing of a grand fol­ly. By turns uproar­i­ous­ly fun­ny and dead­ly seri­ous, it offers mul­ti­ple, dis­ori­ent­ing insid­ers’ views of insan­i­ty, break­ing through the walls that divide ratio­nal­i­ty and mad­ness and build­ing up a sur­re­al struc­ture which con­stant­ly con­fus­es our sense of what is con­crete and what mere emp­ty delu­sion. As these dif­fer­ent men work through very real prob­lems via ther­a­peu­tic role play and man­ic mas­querad­ing, the film too uses its fic­tive frame to exam­ine, with both great wit and unset­tling grav­i­ty, the stress­es and trau­mas of the Viet­nam War.

Yet it is when the film starts to focus on Kane’s treat­ment of the unit’s only non-com­bat­ant, Cut­shaw, and on the ques­tion of why this astro­naut refus­es to go to the moon, that The Ninth Con­fig­u­ra­tion allies itself most close­ly to the Catholic con­cerns of The Exor­cist. For much as Kane is a con­flict­ed Chris­t­ian des­per­ate­ly search­ing for redemp­tion, Cut­shaw has fall­en vic­tim to a cri­sis more spir­i­tu­al than men­tal – a sort of athe­is­tic hor­ror – and requires an exam­ple of gen­uine­ly altru­is­tic self-sac­ri­fice to renew his faith that maybe there may be some­thing up there after all.

We are all going to die, whether down here on Earth or up in the heav­ens – but after grap­pling with orig­i­nal sin and the prob­lem of evil, Blat­ty also pos­es ques­tions about what hap­pens after death, and whether we tru­ly live in an indif­fer­ent, unfor­giv­ing uni­verse. In the end, the answer that he gives is as irra­tional as it is opti­mistic, pulling tri­umph from tragedy and find­ing a para­dox­i­cal spot where faith and fol­ly enter a par­al­lel orbit. All of which makes for one crazy film, strug­gling to have its mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties and con­tra­dic­to­ry ambi­tions mean­ing­ful­ly coex­ist under the one tur­ret­ed roof. That strug­gle is both The Ninth Configuration’s appeal and its message.

The Ninth Con­fig­u­ra­tion is released both on DVD and Blu-ray on 25 April cour­tesy of Sec­ond Sight.