The Exorcist (1973)

The setup

A famous actress living in a rented house in Georgetown notices her young daughter changing: odd noises at night, violent mood swings, a body that no longer behaves. Doctors run test after test and find nothing they can name. As medicine runs out of answers, the mother turns to a priest who has lost his own certainty. The film spends most of its length on the ordinary, clinical and human side of the crisis, which is exactly why the rest of it lands so hard.

Context

William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist as a novel first, published in 1971, and it was partly inspired by a 1949 exorcism associated with the Jesuit priest William S. Bowdern. The book reportedly sold poorly until Blatty went on The Dick Cavett Show and talked about whether the devil exists; after that it climbed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Studios had shown little interest before the book became a hit. Warner Bros. bought in, Blatty adapted his own novel and served as producer, and he insisted on William Friedkin as director because of Friedkin's work on The French Connection.

Friedkin and Blatty did not always agree, and the friction shows in how the film was made and cut. Blatty's script follows the novel closely but compresses the timeline and makes the girl's condition less ambiguous than it is on the page. Friedkin, coming off a gritty crime picture, approached the material like a documentary: real hospitals, real procedures, a cast chosen for faces rather than glamour. The result is a story about a demon told in the visual language of a medical drama.

Why it matters

The Exorcist changed what a horror film was allowed to be in the eyes of the mainstream. At the 46th Academy Awards it became what is widely described as the first horror film nominated for Best Picture, earning ten nominations in all and winning two: Best Adapted Screenplay for Blatty and Best Sound. Before it, horror was largely a drive-in and matinee business. After it, studios saw that a serious, expensively made frightening film could be a national event.

It also set the pattern for the modern possession story. Many later films about children, priests, rituals and household evil borrow its structure: a skeptical first act, a medical dead end, a reluctant clergyman, and a long confrontation in a single bedroom. Even films that try to avoid its shadow are measured against it. For readers exploring the genre, it is the central example of the supernatural horror subgenre reaching a mass audience.

What to look for

• A slow first act that spends real time on Chris MacNeil's career, her friendships and her daughter, so the later damage means something.
• An Iraqi archaeological prologue that has almost no dialogue and seems unconnected to the main story until the film is well under way.
• Medical scenes, including an angiography sequence, that are filmed with cold precision and are arguably as upsetting as the supernatural material.
• Sound design that mixes animal noises, buzzing, leather and silence into a voice and a house that never feel safe.
• A shortage of music, with only about 17 minutes of it across a two-hour film, and a taste for modern classical pieces over a conventional horror score.
• A central question about faith: what a person believes when evidence and doubt both pull hard.

From novel to screen

Blatty's path to the screen was not smooth. After the novel's success, the studio route went through several possible directors. According to accounts of the development, names that came up included Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman and Peter Bogdanovich before Warner Bros. hired Friedkin at Blatty's urging. A co-production arrangement with another producer had already fallen apart, and Blatty ended up as the film's own producer as well as its writer.

The casting process was almost as eventful. Ellen Burstyn, who played Chris MacNeil, was reportedly not the studio's first preference, and several better-known actresses were considered or declined. Jason Miller, who had trained for the priesthood and was better known as a playwright, won the part of Father Damien Karras after a screen test, and Friedkin bought out the contract of Stacy Keach, who had been hired first. For the elderly priest Lankester Merrin, Warner Bros. wanted Marlon Brando; Friedkin held out for Max von Sydow instead, reportedly after seeing a photograph of the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Casting Regan

Finding the girl was the hardest job. Many young actresses were considered, and the part went to Linda Blair, who arrived at an audition without an appointment, accompanied by her mother, Elinore. After test scenes with Burstyn she got the role. The film asks an enormous amount of a very young performer, and it relies on a group of people working together: Blair for the human girl, a stunt double, and a voice actor.

The demon's voice was supplied by the actress Mercedes McCambridge, and not by Blair. Friedkin wanted a sound that was not clearly male or female, and he had decided that Blair's own altered voice would not do it. Initially the studio did not credit McCambridge; after Screen Actors Guild arbitration, her name was added to prints. Eileen Dietz, the stunt double, also appears in the demon's face in a few frames. How much of the performance belongs to whom has been argued over for decades, and the argument is a reminder of how many hands lie behind a single effect.

A famously hard shoot

Principal photography began on August 14, 1972. The budget was first set at about $4.2 million, and the plan was 85 days of shooting. The production reportedly ran past 200 days and cost around $12 million. The opening sequences were filmed in and near Mosul, Iraq, including the ancient site of Hatra, in heat that reached well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which forced the crew to work at dawn and dusk. The rest of the film was shot largely in New York, with interiors for the MacNeil house built in a Manhattan studio and exteriors in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., where the famous steps near Healy Hall are a pilgrimage site for fans.

The most remarked-upon set was Regan's bedroom, which was refrigerated so the actors' breath would be visible on screen. A cooling system reportedly cost $50,000 and brought the room to roughly minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cold meant the crew could only film for short stretches at a time. A fire destroyed most of the house sets, apart from the bedroom, and delayed work for several weeks. Stories of a cursed production grew from this; one historian has argued that the studio encouraged them, while Blatty blamed Friedkin's relentless schedule instead.

Makeup, effects and sound

Dick Smith, one of the great makeup artists in American film, handled the transformation of Regan and the aging of Max von Sydow, who played a priest of advanced years. Smith spent about four hours applying von Sydow's makeup each morning. For the girl, he designed the facial changes as wounds that she appears to inflict on herself, which gives the transformation a grim, physical logic. The film's most talked-about effects were done live, without digital help: a life-size latex dummy for the head turn, and rigs that made the bed shake and objects move. This craft belongs to the lineage described in our body horror entry, where the body itself is the site of horror.

The soundtrack deserves equal attention. The sound team mixed bees, dogs, hamsters and pigs into the demon's voice, and a twisted leather wallet supplied the noise of the head rotating. Most of the picture runs without any score. Friedkin used pieces by Krzysztof Penderecki and Anton Webern, music by Jack Nitzsche, and a short extract of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which he found in the studio library. The Oldfield piece became so closely tied to the film that many people still hear it as the movie's theme. A score by Lalo Schifrin was recorded and then rejected. For a larger look at why sound is so central to the genre, see our piece on how horror uses sound.

Release, lines and controversy

Warner Bros. opened the film in the United States on December 26, 1973, using four-wall rentals, in which a distributor leases a theater directly, a method not previously used by a major studio. Audiences lined up in cold weather. Newspapers reported viewers fainting or vomiting, and some cities tried to ban the film or keep children out. Because the rating board gave it an R and not an X, critics accused the system of going easy on a studio picture. The first run lasted 105 weeks. The initial theatrical run reportedly earned about $193 million in North America, and reference works put the lifetime total, with re-releases, at around $441 million.

Religious groups were divided. A Catholic film office classed it as suitable for adults, with reservations. Billy Graham and Protestant critics condemned it, while some priests complained about its theology. In Britain the film arrived in March 1974, drew protests, and was banned by a few local councils. After the Video Recordings Act 1984 it became unavailable on British video for a time; all copies were withdrawn in 1988, and a certificate for uncut home video came back only in 1999.

Versions and restorations

Friedkin's first cut ran about 140 minutes, and the studio asked him to bring the film down to two hours. He removed roughly ten to twelve minutes over Blatty's objections, including the film's original ending, which later turned up as a bonus feature on home video. A 70 mm re-release in 1979 widened the frame. In 2000, Warner released an extended version, billed as the version you had never seen, which restored material, including a sequence in which Regan descends a staircase on her hands and feet. Footage of that scene had been cut before the premiere, and the critic and author Mark Kermode reportedly found it in the studio archives in the mid-1990s.

Newcomers face a real choice. Most critics consider the 1973 theatrical cut tighter and more disturbing because it withholds. The extended cut adds explanation and extra incident in places. The Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry in 2010, calling it culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. Watching both is useful for understanding how much a few minutes can shape the way a film asks you to feel.

Reading the film

Critics have read the movie in almost every direction. Peter Biskind described it as a male nightmare of female puberty, linking the child's changes to adult fear of a girl's growing independence. Barbara Creed argued nearly the opposite, that the possession exposes how medical and religious men try to control a female body. Stephen King, writing about horror, put it among films that channel social fear and read the girl as a symbol of youth in revolt during the Vietnam era. Joseph Laycock, a scholar of religion, sees an image of folk piety, more than an official Catholic position.

None of those readings cancels the others. The film arrived after the upheavals of the 1960s, when authority of every kind, from parents to government to church, looked shaky. Chris, a secular and successful woman, has no rituals to rely on; her daughter is failing in front of her; doctors speak a language of tests and numbers. The priest she finds is a psychiatrist in a collar who has doubts about his own vocation. The supernatural frightens, but the social picture of helpless modern institutions is what makes the story feel larger than a haunted-house tale.

Influence and sequels

Success bred imitation. The Omen, The Sentinel, Audrey Rose and The Amityville Horror all followed in its wake, and horror began to attract well-known actors who had previously avoided the genre. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), directed by John Boorman, was among the first times a studio turned a major hit into a sequel it had not planned. The third film, The Exorcist III (1990), was directed by Blatty from his own novel Legion. A television series ran from 2016 to 2017, and the 2023 film The Exorcist: Believer tried to restart the story.

Within the library, the film sits near several others in revealing ways. Its 1973 release date is the same year as The Wicker Man, a very different study of belief. It follows the mood of earlier quiet shockers such as Rosemary's Baby (1968), which also placed evil inside a domestic setting, and it prepares the ground for the cold, ghostly dread of Ringu, where an unseen force enters an ordinary home. To see a purely psychological alternative, compare it with Psycho, and for the broader timeline, see our short history of horror cinema.

How to watch it

Begin with the 1973 theatrical cut if you can find it, and give the first hour your attention; it is where the film earns its authority. Notice how little the camera tells you in the Iraq prologue, how plainly the Georgetown scenes are lit, and how the medical sequences treat the body as something that can be scanned and measured. Then watch how those clear, ordinary images start to fail.

Afterward, try the extended version for contrast, or follow the genre thread outward. For a later film that also grows from a feeling of helplessness in a modern house, go to Halloween. For a film that treats supernatural force as a puzzle with a deadline, go to Ringu. The library's psychological horror pages offer a different path for viewers who find that the most frightening part of this film is the doubt rather than the demon.

Verified details

• The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won two: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.
• It is widely described as the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
• Principal photography began on August 14, 1972, and the opening scenes were shot in and near Mosul, Iraq.
• The planned 85-day shoot reportedly ran past 200 days, and the cost rose from about $4.2 million to about $12 million.
• Mercedes McCambridge supplied the demon's voice, and her name was left off the earliest prints until a Screen Actors Guild arbitration.
• Dick Smith's makeup aged Max von Sydow by roughly thirty years on screen.
• Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells reached a mass audience through the film, but only a short extract is used.
• Warner Bros. opened the film on December 26, 1973, and its first run lasted 105 weeks.
• The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2010.
• The Fox television series based on it ran for two seasons, from 2016 to 2017.

Connections

• Subgenre: Supernatural Horror.

Sources and further reading

• The Exorcist (film), Wikipedia
• Night of the Living Dead, Wikipedia (for 1968 context)
• National Film Registry, Library of Congress
• Ring (1998 film), Wikipedia (for comparison)