DREAMING OF A WHITE-KNUCKLE CHRISTMAS
The Year That Satan Crashed the Holiday Party
The stories aren’t just legend. Some people did actually become ill in their seats. Others did actually pass out. In December 1973, moviegoers were having a devil of a time getting through screenings of a new film called The Exorcist.
Forty-five years ago this month, the demonic-possession drama based on the 1971 William Peter Blatty novel shook up both the crowds and the box office. And it went on to become one of the most influential and popular films of the decade.
But oh the horror.
Ellen Burstyn starred, portraying a mother confronting the reality that her 12-year-old daughter Regan (newcomer Linda Blair), whose recent bizarre behavior is at first thought to be connected to a medical disorder, is a victim of satanic possession. In desperation, she takes counsel from a local Jesuit priest (Jason Miller), wracked by his own emotional demons, who agrees to help her. He enlists the aid of a fellow priest (Max Von Sydow) with experience in the occult. The two take to the girl’s home to do battle with and cast out the evil spirit inside her, in a protracted and graphic — and ultimately deadly — exorcism ritual. (Technically, the battle is not with Satan but with Pazuzu, a mythological king of demons.)
Blatty was said to be inspired by a 1949 case he’d heard about while a student around the same time at D.C.’s Georgetown University, in which a 14-year-old Maryland boy was the subject of an exorcism. (The Jesuit priest who assisted in that was the basis for the role in the film played by Miller.) The book was a best-seller, and a film version was a given. The author himself would write the script, but some major directors of the day, among them Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn, were said to be dubious about tackling the intense material. Enter William Friedkin, who’d just won an Oscar for The French Connection, with his vision for what became a disturbing mix of intense psychological drama (nearly everyone in the film is fighting a demon of some kind) and shockingly violent imagery.
The latter was aided by make-up and special-effects techniques that showed 12-year-old Regan’s deteriorating physical condition and, at one point, her wracked body actually levitating above her bed while in another scene showed her head rotating a full 360 degrees on her shoulders. (The now-infamous “spider-walk” sequence, in which Regan is seen crawling backwards headfirst down the stairs of her home, was cut from the 1973 release and reinserted for a 2000 reissue.)
Equally if not more disturbing in The Exorcist was the sound of the demon itself spewing shocking vulgarities from Regan’s lips. Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge, a raspy-sounding actress who began her career in radio, spared Blair that chore by providing its voice, for which she prepared with heavy use of whiskey and cigarettes — and for which recordings Friedkin had her tied to a chair to affect the sound of a fight against restraint. (Willingly uncredited at first, McCambridge later fought for and received billing — and infamy — for the performance.)
Two years before Jaws re-invented the term, The Exorcist was a box-office blockbuster, with crowds of excited hopefuls lining up around theater blocks in the December cold for often sold-out screenings. Inside theaters, it was another matter. The intensity of the primal fight on-screen between good and evil — and even the invasive medical tests young Regan is seen having to undergo early on — proved too much for some. There really were reports of fainting and vomitings. (Some theaters provided sick bags with admission.) Local news crews were dispatched to cover reactions on scene. So were paramedics. Two Chicagoans were reported to have sought psychiatric treatment in the wake of seeing the film.
Presumed during production that it would get an X-rating (it ended up with an R), the film also courted religious controversy for its themes, as well as for young Regan’s blasphemous language and behavior, including one graphic scene of her abusing a crucifix. (Likely not helping: the film’s day-after-Christmas release date.) But audiences couldn’t get enough. The Exorcist became 1973’s top grossing movie, eclipsing not only all the male-superstar-led titles released during a crowded holiday season (Papillon, The Sting, Serpico, Magnum Force, The Last Detail) but also hits from earlier in the year like American Graffiti and The Way We Were.
It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture (a first for a horror movie), Best Actress for Burstyn (her first of five), Best Supporting Actress for Blair (who’d lose to even younger Paper Moon star Tatum O’Neal), Best Supporting Actor for Miller (in his film debut, he also who won a Pulitzer that same year for his stage-play That Championship Season), and Friedkin (bested by George Roy Hill for Best Picture winner The Sting). It did win for its ominous Sound Design and for Blatty’s adapted script. The film’s incorporation of music from the then-recently released Tubular Bells, from British musician Mike Oldfield, made that album a Top Ten hit, if forever signaling terror ahead.
A cultural phenomenon that launched both homages and parodies (“Your mother sews socks that smell!”), The Exorcist further inflated a zeitgeist balloon begun by the success of Rosemary’s Baby five years earlier, paving the way for other big-budget horror film successes to come, such as The Omen and Carrie, as well as for a rasher of TV-projects that cashed in the country’s thirst for the supernatural in the early 1970s. It also created a cottage industry of its own, with multiple theatrical re-issues throughout the decades as well as four big-screen sequels, plus a stage adaptation and a TV series. None of the follow-ups matched the success of the now 45-year-old classic.
Decades later, even as film wizardry has enabled all manner of more realistic on-screen horror, The Exorcist, its story striking a visceral chord of personified evil in the bedroom upstairs, is still hailed as the most frightening film ever made. In 2010, it was named to the National Film Registry.
What it did for the pea-soup industry is part of a whole other list.
