‘Rarely does a film cause national hysteria’: The Exorcist turns 50
For horror film fans it looms large like the Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument. An official city plaque announces that a precipitous stone staircase in Georgetown, Washington DC, will forever be known as the Exorcist steps. It marks the spot where “Father Karras [the actor Jason Miller] plummets the seventy-five steps to his death” at the movie’s climax.
Related: The Exorcist review – Friedkin’s head-swivelling horror is still diabolically inspired
Joggers who work out on the steps might get some company on Tuesday from Exorcist devotees savouring a milestone: the 50th anniversary of the release of a movie that prompted reports of fainting, vomiting, epileptic fits and audience members charging the screen waving rosary beads.
If even a fraction of such stories are true, this was a cultural earthquake at the end of 1973, a year in which Washington witnessed the Watergate hearings, the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam and the supreme court’s Roe v Wade ruling that enshrined the constitutional right to abortion (albeit only temporarily).
The Exorcist centres on the movie actor Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), a 12-year-old-girl who, possessed by a satanic force, shouts obscenities, spews green vomit and swivels her head a full 360 degrees. Two Jesuit priests try to perform an exorcism, incanting “the power of Christ compels you!” Father Karras eventually hurls himself through a window and down the steps to save Regan.
Half a century on, there have been several sequels and countless imitators but none has recaptured the shock and awe – or controversy – of the original directed by William Friedkin, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his novel and accompanied by Mike Oldfield’s catchy and spooky Tubular Bells.
Julie Blatty, the widow of the author, lives in Bethesda, Maryland, about 10 miles from the famously eerie staircase, which the novel describes as “a precipitous plunge of old stone steps” that “fell away to M Street far below”. The former professional child actor, singer, dancer, model and American football cheerleader went to see The Exorcist on the day it came out in just 24 cinemas nationwide: 26 December 1973.
“Never having stood in line for anything before or since, my father and my best friend and I stood in line for 45 minutes in the cold in Chicago waiting to get in to see the movie,” Julie, now 70, recalls in a phone interview. “We were just blown away by it – absolutely loved it.
“There was all of the gasping and the fainting. I didn’t see anybody throw up or pass out. As we were leaving, we heard people talking about someone having passed out. I don’t know if that really happened or not but everybody was shocked and it was pretty novel at the time to see something like that, so it was very shocking.
“As we were leaving and the other people were waiting who hadn’t seen the movie yet, they were looking at us with great trepidation because everybody looked a little bit shellshocked as we were coming out. My best friend hit me in the car on the way home and said, ‘I’m going to have to sleep with a night light for the rest of my life!’”
Regan’s head rotation has been much parodied but did not make much impression on Julie. “The head spinning was the least interesting thing to me. It was really more the psychological terror: there was so much tension and a fraught mother whose child was in dire straits was just very agonising to watch for me. I was incredibly impressed by the heroism of the priests.”
Years later, Julie met Blatty on a blind date in Beverly Hills, California. The devout Catholics dated for three years, married and in 2000 moved from Santa Barbara, California, to Bethesda for their sons’ education. Naturally one of their first stops was the Exorcist steps in Georgetown, where they encountered tourists including a Japanese family with a camera.
Julie recalls: “They were taking pictures and then they asked my husband, not knowing who he was, if he would take a picture of the parents of the two children at the top of the steps. Of course he did and I just couldn’t resist and so I told them, believe it or not, the man taking your picture is the man who wrote the novel and the screenplay.
“They were absolutely blown away. They were so excited. Bill was so embarrassed because he would never do something like that but I thought they would get a kick out of it and of course they did.”
She adds: “Maybe two years before Bill passed away, the Washington DC city council voted – as the mayor said, the only time they’ve ever voted unanimously on anything – to make October 30 Exorcist Day in Washington. They had a ceremony and put a plaque at the bottom of the steps. There were tons of people lined up to meet Bill and Billy [Friedkin] and it was lovely.”
When Blatty died in 2017 at the age of 89, every headline identified him by his most famous work: William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist. Obituaries said how he got the idea for the novel from a Washington Post report about an exorcism performed on a 14-year-old boy in Prince George’s county, Maryland, in the 1940s.
Julie recalls: “He was gobsmacked by the reaction. He said many times he never set out to scare anybody. It wasn’t his intention to write a scary book or a scary movie. He was writing what he said was a metaphysical mystery story so for him it was more the faith aspect of the film.
“It’s a very Catholic film, and that was really more what his emphasis was, so he was surprised that people thought it was so scary. He didn’t he didn’t really write it to be scary or think it was scary, but he was wrong so that’s too bad.”
She laughs: “I kept telling him, ‘You’re wrong, sorry!’”
Blatty’s book spent more than a year on the New York Times fiction bestseller list and eventually sold more than 10m copies. The film adaptation topped $400m worldwide at the box office, among the highest at the time for an R-rated picture. It was nominated for 10 Oscars and received two, for best sound and Blatty’s screenplay.
Friedkin died in August aged 87, but The Exorcist goes on making headlines – a recent New York Times example was “Still turning heads after all these years” – and generating fresh literature. Among the latest books is The Devil Inside: The Dark Legacy of the Exorcist by Carlos Acevedo, describing it as one of the most divisive, discordant and disturbing films ever released.
“Rarely does a film cause national hysteria, but that’s what The Exorcist essentially achieved when it was released in December 1973,” Acevedo says from Brooklyn, New York. “Because it was an A-film based on a hot property, which was the book by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist featured an insane marketing blitz that brought the movie to the attention of a middle-class audience that would never have driven their station wagon to see The Last House on the Left or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“That explains some of the first reactions to the film. The fact that it was rated R instead of X also left audiences unprepared for what they saw: they were basically sandbagged or bushwhacked. The final thing here is that The Exorcist came out during the new Hollywood era, that time from the late 60s to the late 70s when the studio system was in flux and allowed more permissive films to be made.
“Little by little the new Hollywood stripped away taboos: language, nudity, violence, sex – but it had done so in every genre except horror. Only Rosemary’s Baby, which to me is closer to black comedy, qualified as a horror film. Here comes The Exorcist amped at 10 and violating some of the last taboos remaining in America – those involving children and blasphemy.
“These are really shocking elements for a mainstream audiences. Of course the initial reports of fainting, vomiting and walkouts only made the film more alluring and gave it an air of a happening, an endurance test: can you sit through this movie?”
There was a swift backlash from some, bit not all, religious conservatives. Acevedo continues: “There was a sense of offence and outrage from some of the priests and some of the clergy. Not all of them: some were definitely excited to see Satan put in his place or the battle between good and evil. But it was definitely a film that people picketed and some theatres slapped an X rating on it despite the R rating.”
The journalist Lawrence Knutson once described Washington as “a city of inspiration and spite, of spring bloom and eternal ambition, a low-rise marble capital that tourists honor and critics malign”. But it has also starred in films such as All the President’s Men, Broadcast News, Independence Day, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, No Way Out and The Pelican Brief. Although the MacNeil residence interiors were filmed at a studio in New York, The Exorcist would not be the The Exorcist without its atmospheric shots of the Georgetown University campus (300 students and staff served as extras) and other autumnal sites in the capital.
Acevedo comments: “Georgetown University was the first Jesuit university in America and so it has a unique feel to it, and the idea that these demonic happenings can take place in a religious area makes the theme stronger. [The demon] Pazuzu was not just invading somebody in Iowa or Los Angeles but a stronghold of the Jesuit faith.”
A staple of Washington movies – the townhouse dinner party – is subverted by public urination, a loudmouthed film director drunkenly accusing a Swiss servant of being a Nazi and Regan warning an astronaut: “You’re gonna die up there.”
Acevedo adds: “The streets are beautiful. The federal-style housing and Georgian housing are all very cinematic. I don’t think would have worked in downtown Manhattan or Los Angeles; I can’t imagine Jason Miller walking around all hangdog down Sunset Boulevard.”
In 1973 New York Times critic Vincent Canby dismissed The Exorcist as a “chunk of elegant occultist claptrap”. But it has grown a fiercely loyal following in the decades since. The British critic Mark Kermode has seen it 200 times and regards it as the greatest movie ever made, its success due in part to the creative tension between Blatty and Friedkin.
Acevedo argues that its lack of camp distinguishes it from most horror films. “To say this is not a lighthearted film is an understatement,” he notes. “Its seriousness, its straightness underscores its power.
“Some critics have written the film off as schlock – and there is an element of schlock in it because it’s 50 years later and things look a little funnier to us now than they did back then. Horror films are not meant to be subtle. In dealing with extreme situations and emotions, a horror film is often justified in going over the top, and Friedkin made sure he did that as often as possible in The Exorcist.
“It’s that kind of intensity that keeps people talking about it, whereas they don’t talk about contemporary horror films from that time like The Mephisto Waltz or The Possession of Joel Delaney. These movies are all forgotten and The Exorcist is still remembered.”
The film lives on for a new generation of cinephiles, touching them in unexpected ways. Marlena Williams, 31, is a writer from Portland, Oregon, and author of a new essay collection, Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist, a mix of film criticism and memoir. Her interest in the movie stems from her mother, who was 14 when she saw it on its release and banned Williams from watching it.
Speaking from New Orleans, Louisiana, Williams says: “She always told me the story about seeing The Exorcist and how it absolutely terrified her. I remember her saying how cold the theatre was and how she could see her breath. She told me about the head spinning, the pea soup [Regan’s vomit] and how it haunted her and gave her nightmares.
“It was like an offhand story my mom was telling me but it loomed large in my mind. I was terrified of the movie before I ever even saw it. It had this mythological place in my life as a kid trying to learn about my mom.”
Williams continues: “My mom died when I was 18 and, in a very weird part of the grieving process, I finally decided to go to a theatre and watch the movie in its entirety and try to figure out, why did this movie scare my mom so much that, 20 years after she had seen it, she was still telling her little daughter never to see it?”
Williams went to a Halloween screening of The Exorcist at a small, sparsely attended cinema in Portland. “I was blown away by what a well-made movie it is and how much is going on other than the story of the possessed little girl. There’s the plot with the priest, Father Karras, who’s having a crisis of faith and whose mom dies and he is engulfed in grief after that.
“There’s the story of Regan’s mom, who’s an actress trying to figure out what’s going on with her daughter. Especially for the early 70s, it was rare to see a movie centred around a mother and daughter, who received just as much screen time as the two leading men. It’s about the closeness in their relationship and then how it devolves and turns fraught and monstrous.”
Williams felt she could relate to that aspect of the story. “When I was a teenager my mom and I fought a lot and the incredible closeness and intimacy that we had when I was a kid was torn apart,” she adds. “It made me emotional seeing a movie that, in my mind, dramatised that to such extreme effect.
“That’s not without its problems but I was strangely moved, as well as very impressed with the quality of the film-making and the quality of the story as a whole. I walked away not scared but like, ‘Wow, I want to watch the movie again so I can get to the bottom of it.’”
