The Exorcist

The film stars Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Linda Blair, and follows the demonic possession of a young girl and the attempt to rescue her through an exorcism by two Catholic priests.

Reviews were mixed, but audiences waited in long lines during cold weather; the sold-out shows were even more profitable for Warner Bros., who had booked it into those theaters under four wall distribution rental agreements, the first time a major studio had done that.

After viewing the footage the next morning, Friedkin realized that Miller's "dark good looks, haunted eyes, quiet intensity, and low, compassionate voice" were exactly what the part needed.

[1] Greek actor Titos Vandis, cast as Karras's uncle, covered his face with a hat to avoid associations with his role in the recent Woody Allen film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).

Unsatisfied with O'Malley's performance as Dyer ministers to the dying Karras at the end of the film, he slapped him hard across the face to generate a deeply solemn yet literally shaken reaction for the scene, offending many Catholic crew members.

Otherwise, Roizman said, Friedkin "demanded complete realism" and "wanted to see pictures with glass in them, mirrors on the walls and all of the other highly reflective surfaces you would naturally find in a house[;] we never tried to cover anything up, as we would normally do for expedience in shooting."

The house was set back slightly from the steps, so the crew built an eastward extension with a false front to allow the stunt double playing Karras to fall directly down.

[78][f] Finnish media professor Frans Ilkka Mäyrä notes how the scientific suggests the spiritual here as "the violent movements and noises of arteriographic machinery reach diabolical dimensions.

It was restored in the 2000 director's cut,[85] albeit with a "muddy, grainy" look that one critic said made the scene seem superfluous,[86] using an added shot showing Regan with blood flowing from her mouth.

[28] Many viewers did not realize he was made up at all; critic Pauline Kael, in her generally unfavorable The New Yorker review, called it "one of the most convincing aging jobs I've ever seen"[88] It took four hours to apply the makeup every morning.

[6] British film historian Sarah Crowther believes stories of the curse were disseminated by the studio, likening it to horror producer William Castle's elaborate marketing gimmicks.

"[98] Blair told Kermode that stories of the supposed curse circulated because viewers "chose to see a scary film, and maybe they wanted to believe all those rumors because it helped the whole process", she said.

Smith asked Friedkin to let him edit one large rack of footage from the Iraq sequence and worked through a weekend to recut it to a rhythm based on the sound of a blacksmith hammering an anvil near Merrin.

[104] Ron Nagle, Doc Siegel, Gonzalo Gavira, and Bob Fine created the sound effects,[105] mixing bees, dogs, hamsters, and pigs into the demon's voice.

[125] That same year, the Japanese version of the original soundtrack LP omitted the Schifrin pieces but restored the main theme, and the Night of the Electric Insects movement from George Crumb's string quartet Black Angels.

[88] Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, dismissed The Exorcist as "a chunk of elegant occultist claptrap ... a practically impossible film to sit through ... [e]stablish[ing] a new low for grotesque special effects.

[108] Burstyn recalled watching a television news report showing moviegoers in Montreal lining up during the dead of winter at 4 a.m. in frigid weather the morning the film opened.

One writer at Castle of Frankenstein took note of Friedkin's pride in the movie's sound, which theaters played at maximum volume, and wondered if its low frequencies had induced or amplified patrons' anxiety.

Officially the Church, whose influence over film content had declined following the demise of the Hays Office and the associated Production Code a few years earlier,[w] had bemoaned Warner Bros.' choice of release date.

"Surely it is the religious people who should be most offended by this movie", wrote Kael, incredulous that Georgetown and several priests facilitated the production:[88] Others can laugh it off as garbage, but are American Catholics willing to see their faith turned into a horror show?

Aren't those who accept this picture getting their heads screwed on backward?Kael nonetheless described The Exorcist as "the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's" since the film "says that [it] is the true faith, feared by the Devil, and that its rituals can exorcise demons.

[188] The Christian Century, the leading voice of mainline Protestantism, likewise denounced the film as "hardcore pornography [that to Protestants offers] a completely impossible solution" to evil.

In February 1974, Roy Meacham, a television critic in Washington, D.C., who had praised the film, wrote that he had heard of a girl being taken from the theater in an ambulance, even though his station regularly warned against letting children see it.

[229] In a Christian Century article, theologian Carl Raschke connected the "psychodramas of the American soul" resulting from "the cynical mood of our age [arising] by default from the wreck of traditional religious as well as social values.

"[It] almost sneers at the politics of the ’60s", he writes, noting Chris dismissing her film's take on student protest as "the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story".

"When her body changes, Regan becomes someone else; someone sexual, whose desire is a dark visitor" writes Jude Ellison Doyle in Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power.

"The Exorcist is a depiction not of ecclesiastical Catholicism but of folk piety", which he also describes as extra-ecclesiastical religion, pursued by the lay masses, "incorporat[ing] beliefs about divine or supernatural intervention in the realm of everyday experience", as tolerant of Ouija boards and practices from other spiritual traditions as it was devout in its Catholic faith.

Composers of original music for those films adopted some avant-garde techniques, like dissonant intervals such as tritones, sound massing and tone clusters, to create unease and tension.

[248] In 1998, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote when criticizing the nation's apparent indulgence of President Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions: "[P]eople are saying things so bizarre they could have come out of Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

"[261] British Baptist minister Peter Laws has credited the film with persuading him to abandon atheism and become a Christian, since "it suggested ... that God might be the only truly effective answer to evil, that [He] might be real and the church might sometimes be filed under 'solution', not 'problem'".

Blair and Burstyn as Regan and Chris MacNeil.
The image of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that inspired Friedkin to cast von Sydow
Miller and von Sydow as Karras and Merrin
The " Exorcist steps" , looking north, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Several scenes were shot in the basement of Fordham's Keating Hall .
The scene where Regan levitates, with the actors' breath visible in the chilled air as the priests chant "The power of Christ compels you!"
The Regan dummy
Scene where possessed Regan masturbates with a crucifix, her head rotates, and Burstyn suffers her broken tailbone
The angiography scene
A line to see The Exorcist in Omaha, Nebraska , after its release there
The Saenger Theater in Hattiesburg, Mississippi (pictured in 2011), was raided by police after its first showing of The Exorcist in 1974.
Horror novelist Stephen King describes The Exorcist as a social horror film
Commemorative plaque on the "Exorcist steps"
Paul Schrader in 2009