On the heels of a new album from the rock band Queens of the Stone Age, the group’s front man spends some quality time with Linda Blair’s “Exorcist” character.Illustration by João FazendaYou’re reading The Talk of the Town: fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond.Josh Homme, a guitarist and vocalist in the art-rock band Queens of the Stone Age, paid a visit to Regan MacNeil, the demonically possessed adolescent girl at the center of the 1973 film “The Exorcist,” the other day. Actually, it was an animatronic-doll version of Regan, complete with head-whirling, and it was on display in a Plexiglas box at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria. Somehow, the doll’s bleached-out eyeballs seemed to follow a visitor around the room.Homme, who is fifty-three years old, first saw “The Exorcist” when he was twelve. His parents weren’t home. “My brother was supposed to watch me, and, of course, he didn’t,” he said. “I started it at around six-thirty. The sun went down, and I’m in my parents’ waterbed, just gently jiggling. Sheets and blankets pulled up to my nose. And this movie just happened to me. I couldn’t get up.” He continued, “ ‘The Exorcist’ deals with things that are sort of esoterically possible: possession, the Devil. I had a pretty sincere Christian upbringing, so it seemed like nonfiction. To me, this was a documentary.”In an adjacent gallery, an exhibition on Jim Henson’s Muppets was visible. Homme looked up from Regan and locked eyes with Kermit the Frog. “Oh, shit!” he said. “Seeing all this horror stuff and then looking over at Kermit, it feels like Kermit’s doing something dark.”Homme founded Queens of the Stone Age in 1996, shortly before he returned to his home town of Palm Desert, a sunbaked oasis in the Coachella Valley. “I grew up right where the desert starts,” he said. “There are pine forests at the top of Mt. San Jacinto, in Palm Springs. It’s snowy, and then the snow melts and it comes down, and that’s right where the desert begins. I love transition, the braiding together of worlds. I think that’s where the interesting stuff is.”His songwriting has always embraced heavy and devious themes: lust, death, menace. The day before Halloween, the band released its ninth album, “Perfecth.” It’s a record about making reluctant peace with love gone asunder—“Letting go of you is beautiful,” Homme sings—and it was inspired, in part, by an acoustic show that the band played in the Paris catacombs, a subterranean ossuary containing the bones of about six million people, in 2024. “There’s a lot of gravel on the floor, so you crunch your way through,” Homme said. “It makes you feel really insignificant, which makes me feel comfortable.” He went on, “I took a dark alleyway and got on my knees and said, ‘I promise to try as hard as I can.’ It was very special to be alive there.” At the time, Homme was dealing with some health issues, and the band would soon cancel a tour. “The line between where they were at and where I was at—it felt paper thin,” he said, of the piled-up bones.These days, Homme likes to watch horror movies with his twenty-year-old daughter, Camille. “She calls it Satan-ing,” he said. “She’s, like, ‘Do you want to Satan tonight?’ We just scratch each others’ arms and eat popcorn. I can tell it’s soothing to her, and it’s my chance to get unadulterated time—kid-straight-off-the-tap is hard to come by.” He finds the experience of being frightened cathartic, even calming: “You get on a roller coaster, and by the time you get off all anxiety is gone. It’s been replaced with adrenaline, endorphins. Jump scares flush the body of anxiety.”At the museum, Homme paused to examine a vomit device that, on the set of “The Exorcist,” was attached to the actress Linda Blair, who played Regan. It resembled a single-jointed horse bit, with plastic tubing at the center; this was glued to Blair’s face and then concealed under prosthetics and makeup. Crew members fed bile-colored porridge into a hand-cranked pump hidden under her bed. Homme marvelled at the mechanics of the thing. “I think, nine times out of ten, the fascination with horror is that it lets us deal with death in a way that’s a little campier. It initiates a conversation,” he said. “Modern society kind of tells you not to look at the sky. Don’t think about death, especially in the United States. Sweep it under the rug. But sending someone off into the ether, into the great parent that made us, should be revered and ritualized.” ?