The painful screams of Blair and Burstyn are real - they were being yanked all over the set by stunt harnesses which caused both injuries and pain. He slapped some actors right across the face before important scenes. He fired guns into the air to get a frightened reaction. It’s what is not seen that is most interesting, such as the old Hollywood directorial tricks William Friedkin used to get a reaction. And in the end, two old men find friendship in the aftermath. A priest must show weakness before showing great sacrifice. What follows is a haunted house of scares that have been imitated ad nauseum (pun intended) so many times that we know the beats: head spinning, pea soup vomit, masturbation with a cross, blood, strange voices, levitation. When Regan (Linda Blair) intrudes on one of her mother’s boring parties, pisses on the floor and tells an astronaut “You’re gonna die up there.” PS - Want to know more about that guy? Then you should watch The Ninth Configuration. When do we realize something is wrong? When it is too late. Scenes of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) acting take precedence over the sad life of Father Karras, who has to deal with the death of his mother and his increasing lack of faith. What’s striking is that how long the movie takes to get there. Inspired by William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, which itself was inspired by the 1949 exorcism of Roland Doe (“The Pope’s Exorcist” Malachi Martin claimed that he was the inspiration, a point that Blatty denied) the legends around this film - it was a cursed set, it’s filled with subliminal messages - supersede a very simple fact: this movie is frightening as hell, even 40 plus years later.ĭo I even need to tell you the story of how Pazuzu finds its way into an Ouija board and into the soul of the daughter of an actress? Probably not. What do you write about a movie that pretty much created modern horror? Sure, you can point to Night of the Living Dead and even Carnival of Souls as starting points, but from a mainstream blockbuster perspective, this is where the rules of modern supernatural horror begin.
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