The Power of ‘The Exorcist’ Compels You

In the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of The Exorcist, the film’s director, William Friedkin, reflects on the remarkable range of responses to his work, ranging from canonization to demonization. Few movies have inspired such extreme reactions as The Exorcist, possibly the most iconic and influential American horror movie of all time. And yet for all its love-it-or-hate-it hype and stark, Manichaean themes and imagery—light versus dark; heaven versus hell; good versus evil—Friedkin saw his modern fable of possession and redemption less as a Pietà or a potboiler and more as a Rorschach test. “I always come back to the feeling,” he says, “that everybody who sees the movie takes away from it what they brought to it.”

It would be an understatement to say that Friedkin, who died earlier this year at the forever-young age of 87, was not exactly a master of understatement, whether about his art or anybody else’s. But he was right about The Exorcist, which turns 50 this year and stands tall as a lightning rod for criticism and contemplation: a cinematic superconductor that still carries its share of bracing jolts.

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Circa 1973, there had never been anything like The Exorcist’s all-out sensory assault; even more than The Godfather, it pioneered the possibilities of the feel-bad blockbuster. Adapted by novelist William Peter Blatty from his own loosely fact-based bestseller about a 12-year-old girl whose family comes to believe she is being inhabited by a demon, the film version yoked state-of-the-art special effects to primal fears, overwhelming viewers through sheer sound and fury. No less than Cecil B. DeMille’s cynically pious ’50s biblical epics, it was an exercise in peddling transgression under cover of transcendence, using Scripture to ward off a dreaded X rating: Perhaps the power of Christ compelled the MPAA to look past the sheer depravity of what was on-screen. (For maximum Catholic brownie points, it even opened on Christmas Day.) Ticket buyers, whether skeptics or true believers, stumbled out of theaters scandalized, horrified, and even physically ill.

Nobody would argue if you wanted to call The Exorcist a seminal masterpiece of the New Hollywood era, an example of what happened when a rebelliously minded artist was given access to studio resources. At the same time, The Exorcist, along with Jaws and Star Wars, bears a certain responsibility for ushering in that era’s end, and for gentrifying genre to the point that B movies with A budgets became an industry standard. For viewers looking for spiritual edification, the film’s ending, in which a Jesuit priest bravely sacrifices himself to save an innocent child of God, was a source of uplift—a sign of divine justice in godless times. A more secularly minded viewer, meanwhile, could get off on the R-rated thrills—the flying dishes and the 360-degree rotating head—while dismissing the story as beguiling hokum, or even a reactionary allegory about the danger of a broken home. After all, if Little Regan MacNeil’s daddy had been home, maybe she wouldn’t have spent all that time in the basement playing with her Ouija board and getting to know Captain Howdy. Then again, maybe she was always going to turn into a monster the day she hit puberty. They grow up so fast.

Religious tract, sociopolitical critique, coming-of-age fable, extra-bloody pulp: The Exorcist is legion. The multiple angles of approach were a by-product of its immense popularity—it functioned as a mass-cultural talking point like almost nothing before it. “That New York phenomenon, the longlonglonglonglong movie line, was carried to new lengths in recent weeks after William Friedkin’s Christmas offering, The Exorcist, opened on Dec. 26 at Cinema I,” wrote Judy Klemesrud in a New York Times piece examining the burgeoning box office phenomenon. “This time, people stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film about a 12‐year‐old girl going to the devil.”

It was that same omnipresence—and its impact on the larger American flock—that drove no less a figure than James Baldwin to analyze the power and possible perniciousness of The Exorcist in his 1976 memoir, The Devil Finds Work. The book contains a long and damning section on the film in which the author takes issue with Friedkin and Blatty’s hucksterish reduction of sin to sensationalistic B-movie spectacle. “I have seen the devil by day and by night, and have seen him in you and me,” wrote Baldwin, whose Pentecostal upbringing surely informed his analysis. “[The devil] does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.” Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael bashed The Exorcist as “an utterly unfeeling movie about miracles” and “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had” before zeroing in on the conjoined sadism of its production and subject matter. After noting that the film’s young star, Linda Blair, had been chosen from a casting call of 500 little girls, Kael imagined the parents of the rejected applicants watching the finished product: “When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, ‘That might have been my little Susie—famous forever’?”

Whether her mix of sarcasm and concern was misplaced, Kael was right that Blair—or at least the f-bombing, pea-soup-spitting, Mercedes McCambridge–dubbed version of her who served simultaneously as The Exorcist’s Mephistophelian antagonist and virginal victim—would be famous forever. Any highlight reel of the most indelible movie close-ups includes Blair’s head-on, dead-eyed glare burning a hole through the screen. The same goes for pretty much everybody else involved in the film’s creation, whether they were already industry A-listers at the time of its making, like Friedkin, who was coming off a directing Oscar for The French Connection; foreign ringers like Max von Sydow, imported for the spiritual gravitas he’d displayed for Ingmar Bergman as the chess-playing knight in The Seventh Seal; or even obscure, groovy British instrumentalists like Mike Oldfield, whose album Tubular Bells went platinum after the title song was featured in The Exorcist’s opening credits. And if being part of The Exorcist didn’t make you famous, it made you infamous: An entire cottage industry has been built around “the curse” of its production, the details of which have been duly inventoried for decades in articles and documentaries and mostly testify to the potency of the movie’s all-around craftsmanship rather than to some higher (or lower) power. “We were plagued by strange and sinister things from the beginning,” said Friedkin in 1974. Ask the real-life priest whom he slapped to provoke an emotional reaction during a key scene—or Ellen Burstyn, who fractured her coccyx during a stunt, the footage of which was left in the final cut—and they might have said that the obstreperous poltergeist in their midst was Friedkin himself.

“I [felt] like the devil [was] asking my price,” Burstyn joked earlier this summer when asked why she agreed to appear in David Gordon Green’s new legacy sequel, The Exorcist: Believer, out on Friday; it turns out that the price for an 89-year-old Oscar winner to reprise a role that pushed her to her limits was a scholarship program for acting students at Pace University. When Linda Blair appeared in John Boorman’s deeply wacky—and Martin Scorsese–approved—Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, it was seen as a cash-in, as was the return of Jason Miller in The Exorcist III. But enough time has passed that Burstyn’s screen presence has become imbued with a certain weight—the same calculus that figured into Jamie Lee Curtis’s return for Green’s nu-Halloween trilogy. But whatever the filmmaker has up his sleeve for Believer, he’s fighting a losing battle against the brand. If he tries to revise the material in interesting ways, like Boorman arguably did for his hallucinatory but scare-free sequel, he’ll be accused of breaking faith with the fan base; if, as the trailer suggests, he’s just parroting the same visual and tonal vocabulary established by Friedkin and his collaborators five decades ago, he’ll be seen as squatting in intellectual property.

What made Friedkin such a good fit for The Exorcist was the tension between his penchant for a sort of sweaty, unglamorous realism—consolidated in the gritty, street-level thrills of The French Connection—and the flamboyant mysticism represented by Blatty, a former air force lieutenant who specialized in “psychological warfare” and who bizarrely spent the beginning of his writing career in Los Angeles impersonating a Saudi prince. The story goes that Blatty was inspired to write The Exorcist by his fascination with a 1949 exorcism near his college stomping grounds of Georgetown (a story that gained a lot of media traction before being debunked) and also by Roman Polanski’s 1968 film version of Rosemary’s Baby. Supposedly, the writer loved the ambiguity inherent in Polanski’s filmmaking, which played close to the vest the question of whether Mia Farrow’s urbane naïf had been secretly impregnated with the Antichrist—which makes it all the funnier that neither the book nor the film version of The Exorcist has much use for the powers of suggestion.

If Polanski’s movie was the cinematic equivalent of a carnival mentalist working stealthily to help the viewer convince themselves that there was something sinister going on, Friedkin went for a full-on haunted roller-coaster ride—one where the bumps are legitimately bruising. The sun-blasted Iraq-set prologue, which introduces Father Merrin and hints at the origins of the film’s demon, is a miniature masterpiece in and of itself, evoking an ancient, ephemeral sense of terror through arduous location shooting and careful editing. (The opening of David Prior’s underrated 2021 cult movie, The Empty Man, is a direct homage, while the Safdie brothers similarly paid tribute during the excavation sequences of Uncut Gems.) No matter how over the top the movie gets, it’s always rooted in granular, physical details: The reason we remember Regan projectile vomiting onto the priests in her room is because the puke itself is so thickly, palpably goopy when von Sydow’s Father Merrin cleans it off his glasses. When Regan floats off the bed, we get shots of her wrist restraints bursting to reveal scarred, bruised skin beneath; the letters spelling out “help me” on her chest (one of several brilliant practical makeup effects by Dick Smith) are so tactile that we feel like we can touch them. The Magritte-inspired image of Father Merrin arriving at the MacNeils’ home is uncharacteristically poetic in context; even the ostensibly “subliminal” jump scare—the synapse-quick insert of actress Eileen Dietz in pale-faced Pazuzu makeup that punctuates Father Karras’s night terror—is jammed, unceremoniously and shamelessly, in our faces.

It’s telling that in later cuts of The Exorcist, Friedkin doubled down on his most elusive and poetic visual effect, scattering images of the demon face throughout the film—too much of a good thing, probably, but in keeping with his maximalist sensibility. In truth, the 2000 director’s cut, dubbed “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” is filled with additional scenes that work against the film’s momentum, although the infamous “spider-walk” sequence—a bit of inexplicable, spine-tingly body horror carried over faithfully from the book—goes a long way toward energizing the first act while also retrospectively contextualizing a shot in the original cut of Burstyn looking in horror at something happening off-screen. When Roger Ebert suggested that the extended version was essentially a marketing ploy—an observation that smartly anticipated the DVD-era trend of endlessly repackaging classic titles for a voracious consumer base—Friedkin called the critic, fuming, to argue his side of the story. He said that he and Blatty had always disagreed on the final cut and that the new, longer Exorcist felt closer to an ideal shared vision. “We had to take [Warner Bros.] to the wall to release this,” he insisted. “They hate us because we forced them to do this by exercising a load of muscle, and if it turns out to be successful, it has nothing to do with them.”

It’s classic Friedkin: passionate, self-aggrandizing, slightly unreliable, and ultimately persuasive. At the end of their conversation, he told Ebert the pointed and possibly apocryphal story of a French painter who, late in his life, was reprimanded for trying to touch up his own paintings in the Louvre—a thinly veiled self-portrait of the artist as eternal perfectionist. That Friedkin could look at The Exorcist and mostly see flaws is a measure of how much he brought to its creation. Whatever the rest of us ultimately take from this towering, frustrating, and undeniable movie, it’ll stay with us forever.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.