‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (2024)

Essays by Jason Zinoman, Manohla Dargis and Erik Piepenburg

Could a movie about a girl possessed by the devil really have caused audience members to faint and lose their lunch at theaters? The vehement reaction to “The Exorcist” when it premiered in late 1973 helped create a special place for it in pop culture, as evidenced by the media frenzy at the time. We asked three of our critics for new perspectives on the film: what it accomplished then and what it represents to us now.

KNXT-2 News / David Sheehan Report (1973)
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“I spent an evening in the lobby just to see if people really do come stumbling out in the middle of the picture as reported — they did.”

Tri-City Herald
Feb. 19, 1974

‘Exorcist’ makes him faint, break 3 ribs

“‘I must have fallen onto the edge of an aisle seat. That’s the only logical explanation for what I did to myself,’ said Mark Reuben, 27, of Mill Valley, Calif.”

U.P.I. TV News / Associated Press (Jan. 31, 1974)

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“Disgusting.”

The New York TimesJan. 27, 1974
They Wait Hours — to Be Shocked

“Otto Ross, 22, who described himself as ‘a New Jersey tombstone engraver,’ said: ‘I wanted to see how the girl’s face becomes contorted and how she emits a foul odor from her mouth. And I want to see how they show her masturbating with a crucifix. I can’t believe they could really show that.’”

“The Cultural Impact of ‘The Exorcist’” (1974)
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“I must confess that there were times where I had to force myself to look at the screen.”

‘The Exorcist’ is a Clash of Belief Systems

By Jason Zinoman

Of all the heads to spin, why this one?

That question was at the core of the dispute between the director William Friedkin and the screenwriter William Peter Blatty during the making of “The Exorcist.” Their artistic argument was not merely about narrative or character, but the fundamental meaning of the movie.

Blatty, a devout Catholic whose screenplay was an adaptation of his best-selling novel, aimed to make a movie about how an evil demon tests the faith of a priest, Father Damien Karras, through taking over the body of an innocent girl. In an interview more than a decade ago at his Maryland home, Blatty told me that he aimed for more than scares. He took exorcism seriously, and perceived a real and urgent threat. “There are demons running all over that campus,” he said about Georgetown University, the school he attended and the setting for the movie.

Friedkin, an agnostic Jew, was less invested in the religious message but was fascinated by Blatty’s story, which follows an increasingly desperate mother as she tries to explain why her daughter is behaving strangely. After exhausting medical options, she contacts Karras, a priest questioning his faith.

To Friedkin, the seeming randomness of this girl was part of what made the movie so frightening. He preferred some ambiguity, so he cut out two scenes: one that spells out how the priest is being targeted, the other a comforting coda where a detective talks to a friend of Karras. These changes rattled Blatty, who thought they snipped the message right out of the movie. Friedkin told him: “I’m not doing a commercial for the Catholic Church.”

Blatty appealed to the studio to restore the changes but got nowhere. By its premiere, he felt his movie had shifted from being about the virtue and triumph of faith into exactly the kind of morally indifferent gross-out he didn’t want to make.

Blatty and Friedkin stopped talking to each other but later reconciled. (Blatty died in 2017, and Friedkin died this past August.) As a “gift,” Friedkin restored the cuts when the movie was rereleased in 2000. But the original, which you can still see streaming on Max, hits harder. Its abrupt ending and refusal to overexplain are strengths. Not knowing why this girl is being tormented is far more horrifying than the narrative satisfaction of pat closure.

The religious conviction of Blatty’s story still comes across, but with more dimension. “The Exorcist” works on multiple fears of the unknown: the confusion of a parent over the changes of a child approaching puberty; the intimidating jargon of doctors. But its most important fear, one achieved through the clash of aesthetics between Blatty and Friedkin, stems from the mysteries of faith. It holds onto the anxiety of inexplicable awe in the face of an overwhelming world, something horror and religion share.

Sometimes the best work comes not from an artist achieving a vision but compromising it.

U.P.I. TV News / Associated Press (Jan. 31, 1974)

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“It was a traumatic experience.”

Toronto Star
Jan. 9, 1974
‘Exorcist’ Keeps Ambulances Busy

“‘We’ve practically got a plumber living here now,’ theater manager Henry Marshall disclosed yesterday. ‘The smell in the bathrooms is awful. People are rushing in and they’re missing the toilet seat by inches.’”

The Boston Globe
Jan. 2, 1974

‘Exorcist’ literally makes filmgoers sick — especially the fainthearted

“Steven Houghton, a theater employee, said a stockpile of smelling salts was on hand to accommodate the fainters. ‘It’s mostly at night that they faint,’ he said. ‘And it’s mostly guys who faint.’”

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Lincoln Journal Star
Feb. 17, 1974

Record crowds both fascinated and nauseated

“The Roman Catholic clergy is as divided as the critics about the film. Some join psychologists in expressing concern over its effect on younger viewers, others see it as a useful parable.”

“The Cultural Impact of ‘The Exorcist’” (1974)
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“The part where she started spitting out all the green stuff … Ugh.”

The New York TimesJan. 27, 1974
Will the Real Devil Speak Up? Yes!

“Millions of parents may find it especially chilling that Linda Blair, the horse-loving teeny-bopper who played Regan, actually spoke all of the brutal obscenities and blasphemies heard in the movie.”

It’s essentially a ‘women’s picture’

By Manohla Dargis

Filled with exquisite pain and drenched in tears, the classic women’s picture — “Stella Dallas,” “Now, Voyager,” “Imitation of Life” — follows a familiar trajectory. A beautiful woman struggles and endures; experiences romantic troubles and family issues; suffers deeply if magnificently while often sacrificing her happiness and giving her all for a man or maybe a child or both, which is pretty much what happens in that unsung maternal melodrama, “The Exorcist” — except that here the tears come with a generous serving of pea soup.

Of course “The Exorcist” is a horror movie, but, among other things, it’s about fraught female lives and deep emotions, and in rewatching it, I was struck by how much it shares with the women’s movies that I love. At center is Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a glamorous actress and single mother who’s raising her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), in a Georgetown townhouse that may have rats in the attic. The novelist William Peter Blatty based the character on his old Georgetown neighbor and fellow paranormal enthusiast, Shirley MacLaine, who starred in a very different mother-daughter weepie, “Terms of Endearment.”

The mother-daughter film that I flashed on while looking at “The Exorcist” again, though, is the original “Mildred Pierce,” the 1945 noir starring Joan Crawford that memorably mixes crime and melodrama. Like Burstyn’s character, Crawford’s Mildred is a hard-working mother devoted to a daughter whose ugliness nearly destroys them both. True, Regan’s problem is that she may be demonically possessed, but Mildred’s daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) is more terrifying because her cruelty toward her mother is so deliberate. It’s the devil that seems to slap Regan; it’s Veda who slaps Mildred so hard her mother falls to the ground.

The focus on Regan’s body in “The Exorcist” similarly ties it to female-driven melodramas in which ostensibly troubled (physically or otherwise) women are diagnosed and cured invariably by a male doctor or lover. Blatty was inspired to write his novel by an exorcism involving a teenage boy. Blatty seems to have changed the child to a girl to put some distance between his novel and the case; by making Regan 12 (she’s 11 in the book), the film further complicates the character. Looking back, I wonder if it was the devil or the vision of an out-of-control child-woman that freaked me out when I fled the theater at age 13.

It’s fitting that the biggest, most contested film to open in 1973 is about a life-or-death struggle over a female body, a fight that was also at the center of the Supreme Court’s biggest, most contested decision that year: Roe v. Wade. After “The Exorcist” hit, Friedkin told Variety that it was a “woman’s picture,” and while he didn’t elaborate on that comment I wonder if the Roe decision was rattling around in his head. True, Regan isn’t pregnant (for that story line, see “Rosemary’s Baby”), but her body is also no longer her own. In the end, medical science proves incapable of helping Regan, so Chris desperately turns to two Catholic priests to free her child body and soul, a turn that only solidifies “The Exorcist” as one great women’s film.

The Press (Atlantic City)
Feb. 2, 1974

CLERGY SURVEY:‘Exorcist’ Reaction Eyed

“The Devil does exist and can possess a person. This is the belief of a majority of area clergymen surveyed this week.”

U.P.I. TV News / Associated Press (Jan. 31, 1974)

‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (7)

“In the name of Jesus Christ, the demon has to come out.”

The Palladium-Item
May 10, 1974

‘Exorcist’ Faint opened Door to One Couple

“‘The Exorcist’ will always hold a special place in the hearts of Larry Watts and Doris Davey. Watts, 41, manager of the State-Lake Theater, and Miss Davey, also 41, met two months ago when she fainted in his arms during the showing of ‘The Exorcist.’ They were married this week.”

Florida Today
Feb. 17, 1974

Brevardians Horrored, Excited by ‘Exorcist’

“I’m no prude, mind you. I went to see ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and enjoyed it. I recommended it to my best friends. But I wouldn’t and don’t recommend ‘The Exorcist’ to anyone.”

KNXT-2 News / David Sheehan Report (1973)
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“Oh God, I can’t believe it.”

‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (9)

‘The Exorcist’ Is aSubversively queer movie

By Erik Piepenburg

In horror movies, otherness is terrifying. Psychopaths, life-suckers, girls with freaky powers: They’re all monsters. That’s been a trope that was applied to gay people even when hom*osexuality could only be hinted at in cinema’s shadows. When Michael Landon’s character pleads for help in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957) — “I know what I am!,” he confesses to his doctor — he isn’t just talking about being a dreamboat in a varsity jacket.

I didn’t know any of this in the late 1980s, when I was a teenage closet case and my father took me to see “The Exorcist” at the Aut-O-Rama drive-in theater in North Ridgeville, Ohio, if my memory serves me right. I remembered being grossed out by vomit and shocked by the sexualized blasphemies that came out of little Regan’s pustulous mouth. I liked Father Karras, a handsome nice guy who loved Jesus, like I did. I couldn’t wait to see the movie again.

What I didn’t understand then is that like all horror films, “The Exorcist” is about traumas and how they originate, fester and can be overcome. I also didn’t recognize — and it took leaving Christianity and the closet for this to click — that the film, released four years into a post-Stonewall America, is subversively queer.

There’s gay stuff on the surface. Father Karras and Father Dyer are in a tender bromance. The film is so outrageous, it borders on camp; “Repossessed,” the 1990 “Exorcist” parody, parlayed that sensibility into gay sex gags and a joke-puking Linda Blair.

But the deeper reason “The Exorcist” resonates as queer is because it’s about a child consumed by an entity that the church is called on to excise, a hideous intersection of metaphorical queerness and real trauma that sounds a lot like conversion therapy.

Hear me out. When I was a Bible-believing teenager, I thought God was mad that I liked boys. The only way to treat this abomination, I believed, was to beseech Him to make me go straight. I tried. It failed.

That’s similar to what happens to Regan in “The Exorcist,” only her demon is an allegorical hom*osexuality. When Fathers Karras and Merrin try to cure Regan with the words “the power of Christ compels you,” they say out loud the quiet part that I whispered to myself. They tried, priests died, and it worked.

Ready for the really queer part? Unlike the first time I saw “The Exorcist,” I now root for the demon. That’s what horror can do: align your sympathies with the monster and against the presumed forces of good, not to learn evil but to understand it.

As I see it, Regan wasn’t an innocent girl overcome by an old demon. She was a young woman with new rage who gave voice to queer people who were tired of being told — by religion, parents, medical professionals — that they were sick and needed to be cured. Her message to the church and her well-meaning mom was a prophetically queer one: Back off. I’ve got power now.

KNXT-2 News / David Sheehan Report (1973)
‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (10)

“I passed out in about the first half hour.”

The Capital Journal
Feb. 9, 1974

Exorcist Reaction Mostly ‘Hokum’

“‘... about 95 percent of it.’”

U.P.I. TV News / Associated Press (Jan. 31, 1974)

‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (11)

“I don’t know … I guess it was a good movie?”

‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World (2024)

FAQs

Why is The Exorcist the scariest movie of all time? ›

Presented as the ultimate battle between good and evil, it asks its audience: are you right with God? The director's use of realism, underpinned by the premise that what happens to the 12-year-old Regan could happen to anyone, is what makes the movie truly unsettling.

How did The Exorcist impact society? ›

Some of the ways it influenced society include: Fear and Horror: The film created an unprecedented level of fear and horror, which became a benchmark for other horror films to follow. The intense and graphic portrayal of demonic possession and exorcism made audiences feel terrified and disturbed.

What happened to Katherine, the exorcist believer? ›

Katherine is dragged away to hell, even as back at the exorcism site, Angela starts breathing again. The film ends with Angela going back to school while Katherine's parents mourn the passing of their daughter. Victor visits Sorenne's grave and in hospital, MacNeil is reunited with Regan, who has chosen to forgive her.

How disturbing is The Exorcist? ›

Expect extreme gore, grotesque effects (bulging eyes, sores, etc.), and scares, and two important characters die. A girl repeatedly stabs her crotch with a cross and crawls a flight of stairs upside down, turning her head completely around.

What is the #1 scary movie ever? ›

1. The Exorcist (1973)

What is the scariest horror movie ever to exist? ›

100 Scariest Movies of All Time
  1. The Exorcist. 19732h 2mR. 8.1 (462K) Rate. ...
  2. Hereditary. 20182h 7mR. 7.3 (391K) Rate. ...
  3. The Witch. 20151h 32mR. 7.0 (309K) Rate. ...
  4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 19741h 23mR. 7.4 (187K) Rate. ...
  5. The Babadook. 20141h 34mNot Rated. ...
  6. High Tension. 20031h 31mR. ...
  7. Get Out. 20171h 44mR. ...
  8. Sleep Tight. 20111h 42mNot Rated.

What does The Exorcist teach us? ›

The director of The Exorcist always insisted his movie was not a horror movie. It was a movie about faith. And it reminds us that when we feel helpless and hopeless, there is power in being present.

What did the Catholic Church say about the movie The Exorcist? ›

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office of Film and Broadcasting (USCCB-OFB) officially and publicly condemned the film as being unsuitable for a wide audience, but reviews produced for the office by priests and lay Catholics and correspondence between the Vatican and the USCCB-OFB show that the church ...

What happened to people when they watched The Exorcist? ›

Audience Reactions to The Exorcist

Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks, a guard told me. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said," the New York Times reported.

What happened in The Exorcist Believer? ›

As the group proceeds with the exorcism, the demon reveals that Victor did not choose to keep Angela thirteen years ago; he chose Sorenne but she died from her injuries. The demon says they need to choose which of the girls gets to live and which one will die, and if a choice is not made, it will kill them both.

Is The Exorcist based on a true story? ›

While its sensationalized depiction of demonic possession has all but defined this type of narrative in the popular imagination, the material itself is loosely based on a real-life case from 1949, where Father William Bowdern performed a series of exorcisms on a 14-year-old boy.

Who desecrated the Virgin Mary in The Exorcist? ›

In Regan, Pazuzu presumably left the house and vandalized a statue of the Virgin Mary, which was later discovered by a priest. The possessed Regan also killed Burke Dennings and threw him out of Regan's window. Apart from superstrenght, the demon also manifested telekinetic abilities and xenoglossia through Regan.

What scene was removed from The Exorcist? ›

One Exorcist moment that took decades to get noticed was The Exorcist spider walk scene, in which Regan walks backward down the stairs on her hands with a mouthful of blood. The reason it went under the radar is that The Exorcist spider walk was deleted from the film's initial 1974 release, only being restored later.

Which part of Exorcist is the scariest? ›

The scariest scene in The Exorcist is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment during Father Karras's first meeting with the possessed Regan, which is filled with intent and scope.

Where is Exorcist banned? ›

In the United Kingdom, The Exorcist faced potential censorship and was withdrawn from circulation on VHS due to concerns about its availability to young viewers, although it was still shown in cinemas.

What is the scariest Exorcist movie? ›

In a surprise to no one, 1973's "The Exorcist" is still the best of the franchise according to critics. Yes, "The Exorcist" is still the best of the franchise according to critics. It hinges on Linda Blair's brutal performance as Regan MacNeil, who is terrifying as the possessed young girl.

Why is The Exorcist cursed? ›

Behind the scenes, a carpenter lost a thumb and a technician lost a toe. The Exorcist is noted for the preponderance of accidents, injuries, and setbacks that occurred during production, which—Friedkin's extreme directing style notwithstanding—has led some to believe that the film was cursed.

Which is scarier, Conjuring or Exorcist? ›

Ultimately, but not surprisingly, The Exorcist was far more effective overall. I knew nothing about The Conjuring, save that it was a well-regarded supernatural horror movie.

Why is the movie Exorcist banned? ›

From religious groups denouncing its content as immoral to audience members fainting and vomiting during its theatrical run, the overblown reaction to The Exorcist is most of the reason why it's synonymous with the phrase “scariest film ever made” despite how comparatively tame it can now appear.

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