The late William Peter Blatty, famed author of The Exorcist, only directed two misunderstood films in his decades-spanning career. The most well-known, yet still underrated, of the two is The Exorcist III, otherwise known as Legion. But a decade before that unfairly maligned work, in 1980, he directed another, stranger film based on his 1978 novel of the same title, The Ninth Configuration.
It’s a film that remains largely undiscussed and under-viewed, a cult classic in every sense of the word that stands out as much more than simply an oddity – though it certainly is one. Divorced from, yet nevertheless inexorably connected to, his classic horror work, The Ninth Configuration is a mesmerizing, frequently confounding rumination on war, PTSD, faith and mental illness that refuses to be categorized by genre as it bounces freely between nonsensical farce, action and existential drama.
The premise itself sounds like something conjured up in the mad ramblings of one member of the film’s eclectic ensemble. In the days leading up to the Vietnam War, a handful of conscripted military personnel develop cases of sudden-onset mania. Are they actually insane or just pretending to be? This question prompts the creation of several research sites, one of which is an experimental makeshift mental hospital set up in an abandoned Gothic castle somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
With little to no progress being made by the current staff, Colonel Hudson Kane (Stacy Keach) is sent to take over treatment of the patients. Attempting to acclimate to an impossibly bizarre environment, he soon finds himself drawn towards a patient named Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), an astronaut who suffered a mental breakdown during a moon launch and had to be dragged from his capsule. Meanwhile, he finds himself haunted by wartime dreams of a “killer,” dreams he insists are not his own. Though it’s only specified in The Exorcist novel, Cutshaw is intended to be the same astronaut present in The Exorcist’s party sequence, in which Reagan coldly tells him “You’re gonna die up there.” Though hardly important to the story, connections like this only serve to enrich and complicate both works.
There’s a lot going in The Ninth Configuration, perhaps a bit too much. An initial watch, especially in the willfully incoherent first half before a major plot twist recontextualizes the entire story, will likely prompt a mixture of confusion and frustration. Not helping things is the sound design, since it purposefully disassociates dialogue from its speaker, often having characters speak off-camera so it’s not clear whether their words are diegetic or interior monologue. That’s also the film’s distinct appeal. Blatty invites the viewer to get lost in the madness inherent in his rich collection of characters, all played by brilliant and underrated character actors like Wilson, Robert Loggia and The Exorcist’s Jason Miller.
The mental asylum in which they reside is a free-for-all madhouse, in which the patients are invited to do whatever they desire, as long as they don’t harm themselves or others. We are treated to memorable plot threads such as Lieutenant Frankie Reno’s (Miller) attempts to stage an entire adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with dogs, or unexpected images like a patient sailing through a castle corridor on a jetpack. In a stunning, visually perverse dream sequence, Kane imagines an astronaut walking on the Moon, only to pan back and reveal a crucified Jesus planted on the lunar surface. If you feel like you’re going insane, that’s probably the point.
Blatty’s script is also immensely quotable. Much of the patient’s dialogue is made up of quippy non sequiturs, spoken in rapid retort. “You’re so dumb you’re adorable,” Cutshaw cuts at Kane. Elsewhere, “show me a Catholic and I’ll show you a junkie” or “I believe in the devil alright. You know why? Because the prick keeps doing commercials!” Kane is the straight man to this unmitigated mania, and Keach’s intentionally stiff performance builds effectively towards the conclusion of a man whose mind is quickly unraveling. There are also compelling monologues on faith and the nature of morality, which despite their verbosity, never dip into excessive theatricality. It’s a difficult needle to thread, especially as more pertinent information is revealed that illuminates why everything is just so weird.
The Ninth Configuration arguably loses focus in the film’s last third, as the tone dips away from farce into a dark rumination on existential dread. An absurd climactic brawl with a comically evil biker gang notwithstanding (incidentally also the original use of the heavily memed stock sound effect “the Howie scream”), it’s almost disappointing to see the story take a cleaner, more traditional shape after the delightful incongruence of the initial stretch. Blatty arguably doesn’t land the film’s emotional ending either, although it features a gorgeous, terrified monologue from Wilson.
But it’s nevertheless a film that offers far more than most, using nonsense as a way to make sense, insanity as a way to stay sane. Especially in the context of the Vietnam War, that’s an incredibly cogent tactic. By removing itself from the physical battlefield and instead entering a psychological one, The Ninth Configuration can be related to any time period. “How do you fight a war called Madness?” the film’s tagline reads. The answer turns out to be a lot more humanistic than that sentence would imply. Blatty’s obvious love for these characters urges us to accept their reality rather than judge it.
The title, itself, refers to the specific amount of protein molecules that came together to form the Earth, and the improbability of how these billions of molecules joined at the right time to create our planet. “I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God,” Kane narrates. This “madness” doesn’t have a simple answer, so allow yourself to embrace the unknown.
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