It's all a state of mind

IN "Bug," paranoia is a bug. The bugs themselves -- little, tiny aphids burrowing into the skin, growing in egg sacs under teeth, spawning welts across chests -- may or may not be real. But that's a moot point for Agnes, a sad sack honky-tonk waitress (Ashley Judd) who finds the visions of her laconic drifter lover, Peter (Michael Shannon), utterly contagious -- an intoxicating vision of reality that leads into a hellish biosphere of tinfoil, Raid and homemade bug-repellent chandeliers.

It's been more than 30 years since director William Friedkin made the horror classic "The Exorcist"; despite the title "Bug," Friedkin doesn't think of his latest film as horror, although it too mainlines human suffering into a druglike dream of codependency. For Friedkin, the movie's main metaphor is entirely apt in today's society, where fanaticism spreads like cancer.

"There's the fact that people who are vulnerable -- like Ashley Judd's character -- meet someone they think they can trust finally, and they tap into the other person's worldview no matter how far out it might seem. It sometimes leads to extreme violence. Like most of the other films that I've made, this is largely to do with the thin line between good and evil in all of us. I think there's a constant battle in each of us for our better angels to prevail over our demons. I think this goes on every day."

At 71, Friedkin is a survivor of Hollywood's vicissitudes -- hailed as a cinematic firebrand for his early films, such as the Oscar-winning "The French Connection," then increasingly criticized for outrageous bad-boy theatrics and for films like "Sorcerer" and "Cruising" that didn't earn enough lucre to quiet his studio critics. As the millennium turned, he was churning out competent but not particularly successful studio fare -- macho thrillers such as "Rules of Engagement" and "The Hunted."

But "Bug," based on Tracy Letts' play, has some of the kicky, take-no-prisoners insanity of his earlier films -- in part because Friedkin, who now sounds as calm as an urbane film professor, skipped the studio backing and filmed most of the $4-million movie in 20 harried days in a school gymnasium in Metairie, La., right before Hurricane Katrina hit.