The Exorcist
1973
Action / Horror

The Exorcist
1973
Action / Horror
Plot summary
When a charming 12-year-old girl takes on the characteristics and voices of others, doctors say there is nothing they can do. As people begin to die, the girl's mother realizes her daughter has been possessed by the Devil. Her daughter's only possible hope lies with two priests and the ancient rite of demonic exorcism.
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
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Still a powerful film, more than thirty years on...
One Genre Renewal movie: The Exorcist - Horror with no Crime, instead Horror with Spirits
Two terrible sequels and one irrelevant remake were never replaced with the original, the 1973 version of The Exorcist; and no other version will never be any more. Written for the screen and produced by William Peter Blatty, both The Exorcist movie and the novel are incident driven basis of the actual happenings from 1949.
Looking at the most remarkable movies of 1973, there are 3 other important ones that the history of cinema will remember: -- A slow and touching movie from Ingmar Bergman "Cries and Whispers" -- Bernardo Bertolucci's depressive movie, a study of love "Last Tango in Paris" -- A crime story with Redford and Newman "The Sting". Among all and all the other movies that are produced in this year, The Exorcist stands one step further than the rest for its uniqueness on genre renewal. It's not the first movie that features the Demon in its content, yet in the Exorcist the Demon is introduced in the human level. The idea of being possessed by a spirit is used for the first time ever on the silver-screen. Horror genre featuring spirits didn't need to refer to Crime any more like it used to be in Hitchcock ages. Thus crime became a separate genre, and mostly acted conjointly with thrillers from now on.
This uniqueness profits from its sound mixing, great lighting techniques and of course a perfect screenplay. Director William Friedkin was lucky to find his producer Blatty, being also the novel-writer and the idea creator. The plot and the story development goes very smoothly: From Father Merrin's encountering with the Demon Pazuzu in Iraq; to Ellen Burstyn looking for the cure for her daughter's disease, going for visits to every type of doctor... From the noises in the attic, to Regan's peeing on the rug... From decoding the Demon's speech of speaking English in reverse, to the arriving of Merrin... Both the editing and directing gave high qualities to this film.
The 25th Anniversary edition DVD is in my movie collections. It's a must to have for horror fans. Either you have this version of DVD or the year 2000 version; you should check out the special features that reveals the real-life 1949 incident, the missing and the deleted scenes including the Spider-walk scene, sound mixing and sound effects tests show how they created the demon's voice and the BBC documentary: The Fear of God, all in the special features.
Blood Curdling...
In the life of most girls there will come a big moment, when the hormones kick in during monthly decent, it can have strange effects, as if life has been wrecked, the result may be seen, through taunting and torment. Here Regan's mother bears the full fronted force, as her daughter's possessed by a demonic source, that rages and screams, nightmares born from dreams, converses with words that are vulgar and coarse. So a priest is summoned to curtail the big flood, to stem all the streams of this thing that's not good, put it back in the box, to seal up and to lock, halt the flows of Beelzebub's Kafkaesque blood.
It's all down to 1970s interpretation.