THE EXORCIST AT 50

William Friedkin’s masterpiece was hell to make, but changed the horror genre forever…

William Friedkin didn’t consider The Exorcist a horror movie. He thought there was nothing supernatural about it, emphasising how the story was based on the real-life exorcism of a 13-year-old boy known as Roland Doe, in Maryland, 1949. But boy, did his film scare the bejesus out of everyone, achieving recordbreaking success (10 Oscar nominations, $441m at the worldwide box office) and ushering in waves of prestige studio horror movies, cheap possession knockoffs and devil pictures.

It could have been so different. Warner Bros. originally wanted Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols to adapt William Peter Blatty’s bestselling 1971 novel, and had Audrey Hepburn or Jane Fonda in mind to play Chris MacNeil, the mother of a possessed 12-yearold girl whose only hope is a pair of priests. For the holy men, the studio was eyeing Marlon Brando as Father Merrin and Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman or Gene Hackman for Father Karras. But Blatty, who served as writerproducer on the film, had other ideas, going to bat for his acquaintance, Friedkin, and getting his way when The French Connection won Best Picture and Best Director at the 1972 Oscars.

‘[Friedkin] can bring the look of documentary realism to this incredible story,’ said Blatty. And so it proved, the director preferring Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller and a heavily aged-up Max von Sydow to Warner Bros.’ starry choices, and opting for natural light and lo-fi effects (a latex dummy for the head spin, Andersen’s pea soup mixed with porridge for the vomit). To play Regan, who goes from an innocent cherub to a foulmouthed demon with a penchant for upchucking and levitating when she’s not masturbating with a crucifix, Friedkin cast Linda Blair after receiving 600 applications. Her delivery of potty-mouthed lines carried enough venom to make Sydow forget his, while experienced voice actor Mercedes McCambridge was employed to dub the lines of Pazuzu, demon of the wind, aided by innovative sound design that blended snarling animals, droning insects and whistling wind.

On set, Friedkin was a tough taskmaster – or, as Burstyn put it, ‘a maniac’ – refrigerating Regan’s bedroom to -29 degrees Celsius in order to see the actors’ breath, and firing guns and slapping faces to elicit shocked on-camera reactions. His perfectionism, married to enough on-set accidents and setbacks to have onlookers claiming the production was cursed, caused the shoot to spiral – lasting over 200 days – and the budget too balloon from $4.2m to $12m. ‘I felt I was playing around with something I shouldn’t have been playing around with,’ said Friedkin.

Perhaps he meant it (he had a priest bless the set after Regan’s bedroom burnt down) or perhaps he was simply stoking a fire under the public’s interest. If the latter, it worked, with The Exorcist breaking attendance records when it opened on 30 screens on 26 December, 1973. It quickly rolled out to 366 screens and spent two years in theatres, obliterating The Godfather’s box-office record of $250m. The stories of white-faced cinemagoers vomiting and passing out didn’t hurt any, though the reality is that it was the unblinking medical footage of a cerebral angiography that caused most to keel over.

Watched now, Friedkin’s masterful horror film (he begrudgingly admitted, in his later years, that it could be viewed as such) is inexorably diluted by the four subsequent Exorcist movies and the TV series, as well as by the legion of rip-offs that exist. Regan’s profanity, so shocking at the time, is now often met with titters, and a decline in faith has perhaps robbed the film of some of its impact. But watch The Exorcist under the right conditions, with a respectful audience, and its slow-burn journey from the hot desert of Iraq to that icy bedroom in an unassuming house in Georgetown, Washington still has the power to compel. Its intensity continues to impact despite torture porn, Asian extreme horror and New French Extremity going further still to push the boundaries (do any of those movies, Martyrs aside, quite so shake souls?), and it’s the movie, along with The Shining, that most frequently tops the Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made lists.

Along with other American genre movies of the late 60s and early 70s – such as Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – The Exorcist changed horror, bringing it home with fearsome vehemence. Fifty years have passed, but the demon’s words still ring true: ‘What an excellent day for an exorcism.’

THE EXORCIST IS RERELEASED IN CINEMAS ON 29 SEPTEMBER