The Exorcist

The opening stretch of William Friedkin’s 1973 film is a medical investigation rather than a horror picture. Arteriograms and a spinal tap are held on screen at length, and for many viewers those clinical scenes are harder to sit through than anything later in the bedroom. That bedroom set was chilled to roughly minus twenty nine degrees Celsius by a rig costing fifty thousand dollars. Ellen Burstyn fractured her coccyx and Linda Blair her lower spine, and both injuring takes were kept in the finished film. The demon is two performers. Mercedes McCambridge supplied the voice, mixed with bees, dogs, hamsters and pigs, and the studio left her off the credits until a Screen Actors Guild arbitration forced the issue. That changes how the possession reads: one body is occupied by another performance. William Peter Blatty adapted his own novel and won an Academy Award for it, and the sound team won too. In Britain the video was pulled from shelves at the start of 1988 and stayed unavailable for eleven years while cinemas kept showing it. A good fit if you will wait through the hospital sequences before any exorcism arrives. Not for you if violence through a child’s body, or a priest’s guilt about his mother, would be hard to watch.