The doctors say she has a brain lesion, but that seems like the wrong diagnosis when she can speak in reverse and move her bed and furniture off the ground. Her desperate mother Ellen Burstyn seeks the help of the Catholic Church, and eventually a young and an old priest appear, willing to give their lives to free Regan from an evil spirit proclaiming itself to be the Devil. The directness of The Exorcist is why it has been copied, mimicked, and built upon a thousand times over the years.
Opening on Dec. Ad — content continues below. Audiences would gather around the block to wait hours for the next screening, often only so they could be filmed by local television news teams as exiting the theater early due to fainting or vomiting spells. No, it wants to proselytize you. Blatty, a product of Catholic upbringing and a Jesuit education, crafted a story meant to diagnose evil in quantifiable terms for an increasingly apathetic society.
Or, in other words, he sought to bring secular readers closer to God by literally scaring the hell out of them. Conversely, William Friedkin , the director of The Exorcist , is a self-professed agnostic of Jewish background and a through-and-through cynic. Thus when landing the chance to adapt a bestseller that studio heads viewed along the lines of a Universal monster mash, the eternal provocateur decided to push the material to the point where even he could understand the desire to seek spiritual aide from the Catholic Church.
Watch The Exorcist on Amazon. As a result, this offspring of a believer and a skeptic became a master class in rationalizing turning to God when faced with the visage of genuine evil. More than horror, The Exorcist is a forbidden journey into the many variations of human despair, enveloping the viewer with a melancholy so indescribably merciless that it pervades almost every frame, even the ones without demons subliminally inserted in the corners.
Just as Friedkin used the ravages of an impoverished New York City to inform his seedy criminal masterpiece The French Connection , he returns to the then slums of Lower Manhattan as one of his many devices for world-building. Her cheeks become scarred with deep red cuts, and her eyes bulge out. The image haunted me in my nightmares and occasionally still does. However, what frightens me most about the film now is that the events told throughout are based on a true story. This is because the set was refrigerated , a choice made by director William Friedkin.
Although not unbelievable with our technology today, this was rare for and goes to show the lengths this crew went through to produce one of the scariest movies ever made, and it paid off. It is also interesting to note that the movie does not use overarching soundtracks, but instead, relies upon haunting piano sounds to suit the aura and mood of the frame.
As the veil of suspense lifts, and the narrative makes it undeniably clear that Regan is under possession, even the most self-assured of skeptics are bound to re-evaluate how they feel about narratives that delve into the supernatural. It is highly probable that the intense, visceral reaction in audiences of the time was due to the surreptitious use of frightening subliminal imagery that subconsciously impacted audience reactions.
The demon who possesses Regan, Pazuzu, was derived by Blatty from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, and it is his statue that is found by Father Merrin Max von Sydow during an archeological excavation in Iraq. Certain actors underwent accidents that impacted them for life, which is true in the case of Ellen Burstyn, who suffered a permanent spine injury due to a malfunctioned harness.
While this can be chalked up to the untoward misfortunes that life often throws at us, the death of nine cast and crew members during production and shortly after the release of the film seems too much to be a mere coincidence. Supernatural forces at work or not, some works of art undeniably carry an aura so inky, so heavy, that life starts imitating art, for the better or for worse.
Nevertheless, it is due to a combination of nature and cinematic nurture, that The Exorcist still manages to scare today. Debopriyaa Dutta is a content curator, poet, and film critic based in India and a frequent contributor for High On Films.
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