This Movie Review Brought To You By: Rim Chiropractic And Prime Properties
There is little doubt that 1973’s The Exorcist is one of the most frightening movies ever made. When the movie was originally released almost fifty years ago, there were stories of people fainting and even having miscarriages from watching the movie, creating an immense buzz about this groundbreaking film.
Interestingly, as scary as the movie is, many of the accounts of audience members fainting didn’t always have to do with the movie’s extreme horror elements. In the movie, when Regan’s mother Chris becomes concerned about her daughter’s strange behavior, she takes her to a specialist. Regan is given a cerebral angiography, a painful procedure that involves inserting a catheter into the femoral artery. The scene was shot at NYU Medical Center with a real life radiographer playing the specialist in the movie and was so realistically presented, complete with copious amounts of blood, that many audience members ended up passing out.
I would argue, though, that it’s the film’s performances that actually make The Exorcist such a riveting experience. After all, if the characters you are watching onscreen seem genuinely terrified, that translates to a sense of fear in the audience members as well. The Exorcist, through its talented cast, managed to raise that level of intensity to previously unseen levels.
Yet, if the film studio had had their way, the movie could have turned out very differently. Warner Brother wanted Janet Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis to play young Regan, Stacy Keach to play Father Karras (even signing him before production started), and Marlon Brando himself to play the older Father Merrin. However, director William Friedkin, hot off the success of The French Connection (1971), nixed those choices, claiming that having Marlon Brando in the movie would turn it into a “Marlon Brando movie” rather than the kind of movie he wanted to make.
Instead, Friedkin chose a fairly unknown actress at the time named Ellen Burstyn for the part of Chris, a playwright named Jason Miller who had never acted before in a movie to play Father Karras, and total unknown Linda Blair to play young Regan. You could argue that by having actors who were not familiar movie stars added to the film’s sense of realism, and its gritty, documentary-like atmosphere was enhanced in the process, as if these events were actually happening to real people.
Meanwhile, Mercedes McCambridge may have given the film’s best performance even though she doesn’t ever actually appear in the movie. Entrusted with providing Regan’s possessed demon voice, the talented actress went to astonishing lengths to create a truly unsettling vocal performance. A recovering alcoholic, McCambridge consciously chose to drink large amounts of whiskey and chain-smoked to give her voice the gravelly sound as if having gargled on sulfuric acid. She also had herself physically bound to a chair for the scenes where Regan is tied to her bed to give an authentically restrained aspect to her chilling performance. Director William Friedkin has been quoted as saying watching McCambridge contort and abuse her body to deliver her terrifying performance was far more frightening than anything he actually put in the movie.
Director William Friedkin was also notorious for pushing his actors to extremes to elicit the kind of performance he wanted. When non-actor (and real life priest) William O’Malley wasn’t responding with enough emotional intensity for Friedkin’s satisfaction, the director slapped the priest across the face. He then shot the scene with O’Malley visibly emotionally shaken, capturing exactly the performance Friedkin wanted. Meanwhile, in another scene Friedkin fired a gun off right near Jason Miller’s ear to achieve the startled look on Miller’s face he wanted, angering the actor in the process.
Even events beyond Friedkin’s control contributed to the intensity of the movie’s performances. When a harness used to pull Ellen Bustyn dramatically backwards yanked her too hard, Burstyn fell onto the floor sharply, permanently injuring her coccyx and the look of pain on her face was genuine. A scene where Linda Blair was screaming as the bed shook violently beneath her was a genuine emotional reaction as well, as at one point, the hydraulics malfunctioned, and Blair was indeed injured in the process. Meanwhile, a scene where Regan vomits into Father Karras chest (using a store-brand pea soup) was technically misjudged, and it hit Jason Miller in the face instead, creating such a genuine look of shock on Miller’s face that Friedkin decided to keep the shot in the movie.
As a result, all these elements brought The Exorcist an unprecedented degree of realism to such old school elements of horror movies like the supernatural and frightening monsters. The result became a movie sensation, and even today ranks, when adjusted for inflation, as one of the top ten most successful movies of all time. It’s within those terrifying performances that help make it one of the quintessential horror movies of all time.
The Exorcist is playing for one night only at Blue Jay Cinema as part of its Classics Series on Wednesday, October 9th.