By Tristan Bishop
Picture the scene – a cinema in a seaside town. The year is 1998, and you are in the audience for a midnight showing of a film which has been virtually unavailable for the best part of 20 years. You’ve heard about this film, of course – the entire audience has. Most of what you have heard is hearsay, rumour, but that doesn’t matter – this is the stuff of legend. You’ve perhaps heard that the film was banned in the UK, forbidden by the Catholic Church. Perhaps you’ve heard reports of the hysteria that accompanied the original screenings – fainting, vomiting, people being rushed to hospital. Of course you want to see this – the film’s reputation as forbidden fruit precedes it. This is a midnight showing, and it’s sold-out, the audience visibly and audibly excited, ready to be scared within an inch of their lives.
But something unexpected happens. The audience quickly realise they are watching a film that is 25 years old. A film from the 70s – this audience is young, mostly in their early twenties, this isn’t for them – they laugh at the fashions, the hairstyles, the dialogue, and the effects. They came expecting shrieking terror, instead they got history.
It’s understandable, of course. Your average cinema-goer isn’t all that interested in film history, or placing a work in context, and there’s no reason that they should – they go for entertainment. But in the case of The Exorcist (as with most films from 20 or more years ago) a bit of background can really help.
We can really start in 1967, the Summer of Love. Hippie counter-culture was making waves across the globe, a whole generation was turning on, tuning in and dropping out, celebrating peace and love and togetherness. Of course, it didn’t last long – by the early days of 1970 the dream was over, killed off by Altamont, Vietnam and hard drugs, but the seeds of destruction had always been there – at the height of the hippie bloom an increased interest in occult and hermetic knowledge had resulted in a public which was more terrified than ever by the perceived threat of evil. The devil was waiting outside the door, and perhaps people were interested in inviting him in.
It was then that, alongside the incredibly prolific Dennis Wheatley, that a book by Ira Levine, entitled Rosemary’s Baby, became a massive success (selling over 4 million copies that year alone). As usual with a successful work of fiction, it was brought to the screen – the ever-canny William Castle purchasing the rights even before publication, and with his courting of Roman Polanski (at that time the darling of the arthouse crowd) as director, the film had a massive impact, a thrilling injection of real darkness at a time when horror films, still perceived as kiddie material, were still trying to claw themselves out of the 1950s. It’s no accident that Night Of The Living Dead was also released in 1968, a year zero for the ‘modern’ horror film.
Flash forward to 1971 now, and writer William Peter Blatty, already with 12 years of published writing under his belt, penned The Exorcist – based on a ‘real life’ case from 1949. Blatty changed the sex of the possessed child as the real case was a young boy, and amongst the expected artistic embellishments he added a prologue with Father Merrin, one of the main characters, uncovering a statue of the demon Pazuzu himself in Iraq. Interestingly enough, Merrin was based on General Lankaster Harding (Merrin’s first name is Lankaster), an archaeologist involved in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who was an acquaintance of Blatty’s.
The book was a huge hit, and of course was immediately optioned for a major film, with Blatty adapting it from his own novel. Unfortunately the production was not an easy one – and the producers approached Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, Mark Rydell, John Boorman, and even Stanley Kubrick to direct – all of whom turned it down because of the material or the challenge of working on a film hinging on the performance of a child. Boorman even went so far as to accuse the script of ‘cruelty to children’, although one wonders if he may have regretted this decision, as he went on to direct Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Eventually the job went to William Friedkin. Blatty had been a big fan of The French Connection (1971), citing the energy of that film as the reason he pushed for Friedkin to be onboard. Casting was equally difficult, with both Jack Nicholson and Stacy Keach considered for the role of Father Karras before the role eventually went to Jason Miller, after Friedkin spotted him in a play. The director also vetoed Marlon Brando for the role of Merrin, fearing his star power too great, and instead cast Max Von Sydow, best known then for his roles in Bergman dramas. The casting of the young girl Regan was equally fraught, but eventually went to the relatively unknown Linda Blair. With the cast and crew finally assembled, work began in earnest. The production was originally scheduled to last for 85 days, but, due mostly to Friedkin’s perfectionism and ‘unusual’ methods, ended up as 224.
The stories around the making of the film are legendary, from on-set fires causing the main sets to be rebuilt, to Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn both being injured after being pulled too hard in harnesses. Burstyn’s real screams of pain are left in the film (the scene where she is slapped by Regan), but Friedkin went even further to maximise his cast’s discomfort – he slapped Reverend Williiam O’Malley across the face before an emotional scene, let off a gun on set to unnerve Jason Miller, and even built the bedroom set inside a giant freezer so that the actor’s breath could be seen onscreen (an effect much easier to produce in these days of CGI!). The uneasy atmosphere caused by these occurrences lead many of the crew to believe the film itself was cursed, and indeed Jack MacGowran, who played Burke Dennings, died before the film was completed. Legend has it that the set was blessed by priests several times during production.
These were not the only techniques that Friedkin used. He hired veteran radio actor Mercedes McCambridge (previously seen in Jess Franco’s women-in-prison ‘classic’ 99 Women) to voice Pazuzu, his original technique of manipulating Linda Blair’s voice deemed not dramatic enough; this was a masterstroke, as the voice sounds genderless but powerful and threatening. He also pioneered the use of mixing layers of sound (apparently including slaughterhouse footage) to create unease, and, most controversially, the use of ‘subliminal’ images, such as the now-famous ‘face of Pazuzu’ scattered throughout the film.
Fittingly for a film so steeped in Christian lore, the film was released on Boxing Day 1973, and drew some extremely mixed criticism from the mainstream press. Stanley Kauffmann, Gene Siskel and Variety magazine all heaped praise upon it, whilst The New York Times called it ‘practically impossible to sit through’. My favourite piece of negative criticism comes from Jon Landau in Rolling Stone however – “nothing more than a religious porn film – The gaudiest piece of schlock this side of Cecil B DeMille”.
The mixed notices did little to harm the film however, with $66 million dollars in revenue for the original domestic release making it the second biggest grossing box office that year, next to The Sting (which, ironically, has become increasingly forgotten over the years). This was helped of course by reports of people fainting during the film, and ambulances being on standby outside theatres, although how much of this is truth and how much clever publicity has been difficult to gauge over the years.
With that success came, of course, came the imitators. The devil was out in force, and, as always, the Italians were first to jump on the bandwagon, releasing Beyond The Door in 1974, followed by a figurative projectile-vomit of Exorcist clones, such as The Antichrist, Eerie Midnight Horror Show and The House Of Exorcism (actually a hatchet-job on Mario Bava’s surreal and creepy Lisa And The Devil, re-edited and with added ‘Exorcism’ scenes). Blaxploitation take-off Abby also turned up in 1974, and was quickly buried under litigation from Warner Bros, although it’s worth watching for the only ‘disco exorcism’ on film. Even the Turkish got on board with Seytan (also 1974), an oddly Islamic slant on a very Christian idea. The Exorcist even paved the way for the equally successful devil movie the Omen (1976) and attendant sequels.
There were official sequels too, although each appeared only after long gaps of time. First came Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1979, directed by the aforementioned John Boorman, which is an unholy, occasionally hilarious mess of a film, and not recommended unless you want to watch Richard Burton hitting rock bottom. The Exorcist 3 (1990) was much better – Blatty took the directorial reigns on this one and proved himself the right man for the job, using brave cinematic techniques such as uninterrupted long shots to heighten the sense of unease. Unfortunately in 2004 the usually excellent Paul Schrader made a prequel entitled Dominion, which studio execs hated. Though completed, his project was shelved, and Renny Harlin (of all people!) was brought in to make a more commercial prospect entitled Exorcist: the Beginning, which, predictably, was universally panned. The studio eventually gave in to public pressure and released Schrader’s version of the film. Unfortunately this also went down like a lead balloon, despite having the slight artistic edge.
Contrary to popular misconception The Exorcist was never banned in the UK. There were protests by the Christian group The Festival Of Light, who also objected to such enduring works as The Devils and Straw Dogs, but it was released – surprisingly uncut – with an X certificate by the BBFC. Stephen Murphy of the BBFC was quoted at the time as saying “It is a powerful horror movie. Some people may dislike it, but that is not a sufficient reason for refusing certification” (a rare example of the pre-2000 BBFC making an informed, balanced decision there!)
Much of the film’s ‘banned’ legend status instead came with the advent of home video and the subsequent ‘video nasties’ debacle. The film was briefly available in the lawless early days of home video, but after moral panic set in Warner Bros decided not to resubmit it for video classification. It’s probably testament to the power and reception of the film on release that the general public assumed a ban had occurred. However, the UK cinema re-release at the end of the 20th century proved that there was money to be made, and then finally we could see the film in the comfort of our own homes.
So, there are few horror films with such convoluted history and production as the Exorcist. In many ways it can be seen as the victim of its own hype, success, and, for some time, unavailability, with scenes like those at the start of this article played out on its re-release across the UK. However, Friedkin’s film stands on its own merits, as a well-made, visceral shocker, and remains the benchmark against which the devil’s works are judged.