![]() ![]() ![]() It’s never surprising to see The Exorcist crowning countdowns of all-time scariest films. ![]() But somewhere there’s also an evil that feels real, like a cold hand reaching out from the screen to clutch our hearts. Partly it’s the brutality, the music and editing. Partly it’s the performances: Linda Blair’s innocence morphing into monstrosity, Ellen Burstyn’s motherly anguish. I saw it recently at a small cinema in Pittsburgh: at the back was a group of intoxicated students who laughed for the first half hour, but when the horrifying stuff started happening, they went silent, and you could feel the film’s power to terrify coursing through the room. ![]() It’s a legacy that detractors of The Exorcist say the film fails to live up to, pointing at religious dogma and dated special effects. As they pile up, the impact of that first film, released in the US on Boxing Day 1973, begins to feel more and more like history: the audience faintings, the priests outside cinemas helping people come to terms with what they’d experienced, the decade-long banning by British censors. Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty delivers a horror sequel in earnestĭemonic spirits being expelled from young bodies is now a genre in its own right, though it’s a beige swathe of mostly pale imitators. ![]()
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