The Exorcist (1973)
★★★ — The Exorcist (1973)
Few films have lodged themselves so firmly in the cultural memory as The Exorcist. Released in December 1973 by Warner Bros. Pictures, William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel arrived at a moment when American cinema was in the middle of a remarkable creative and commercial upheaval, and it proceeded to blow almost everything else out of the water. Based on Blatty's own 1971 novel, which was itself loosely inspired by a real reported exorcism case from 1949, the film centres on a young girl whose disturbing and rapidly worsening behaviour leads her desperate mother to turn, as a last resort, to the Catholic Church. It was not the kind of subject Hollywood had touched with quite this degree of seriousness before, and audiences in 1973 were genuinely unprepared for it. Reports of people collapsing, fleeing cinemas, and queuing round the block became part of the folklore surrounding the release. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, which remains a rare distinction for a horror film even now.
Friedkin arrived at the project on the back of The French Connection (1971), which had won him the Best Director Oscar just two years earlier. He was, at that point, one of the most sought-after filmmakers in Hollywood, and he brought to The Exorcist a gritty, almost documentary seriousness that sat in deliberate tension with the film's supernatural subject matter. The production was notoriously troubled, running well over schedule and beset by accidents and illnesses on set that fed the rumours of a curse, rumours that have followed the film around ever since. Blatty himself produced, which gave the adaptation an unusual degree of fidelity to the source material. The result, at 122 minutes, is a film that refuses to behave like a conventional horror picture, taking its time with character and atmosphere in a way that would be commercially unthinkable in most studio horror releases today. Friedkin went on to make a number of other films worth knowing, including Cruising (1980) and, much later, Killer Joe (2011), but The Exorcist remains the centrepiece of his legacy.
The cast assembled here is, on paper, formidable. Ellen Burstyn (who later delivered an extraordinary performance in Requiem for a Dream (2000)) plays Chris MacNeil, the mother at the heart of the story, and she gives the role a raw, exhausted credibility that anchors what could easily have become pure spectacle. Linda Blair, just thirteen at the time of filming, plays her daughter Regan, and the demands placed on her were, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary. Jason Miller brings a quiet, careworn quality to Father Karras, a priest grappling with his own crisis of faith, while Max von Sydow, despite being only in his mid-forties, was aged up convincingly to play the veteran exorcist Father Merrin, lending the role a weight and gravitas that the film needed. Lee J. Cobb rounds out the principal cast as the detective investigating a death connected to the MacNeil household, a polished but unremarkable role that mostly serves the plot. Between them, they give the film a dramatic seriousness that separates it from the more lurid end of the horror genre, for better or worse depending on what you come looking for.
There’s no denying the cultural significance of The Exorcist. It’s a landmark film. One of the most influential horror movies ever made, and the blueprint for almost every supernatural, religiously charged scare-fest that followed. The story of a young girl’s possession and the priests who try to save her didn’t just shock audiences in 1973; it terrified them. People fainted, walked out, claimed it was cursed. It wasn’t just a film, it was an event. But watching it for the first time around 2003, over thirty years after its release, the experience was… different. I was about 14, primed for something truly terrifying, and honestly, it didn’t deliver the way I expected. It’s slow, deliberately paced, more like a psychological drama than a horror film for long stretches. The build-up is methodical (almost too much so) with long scenes of worry, medical tests, and quiet dread, before we even get to the full-blown head-spinning, green-ooze moments most people remember. And by modern standards, it’s not really scary in the way today’s horror is. No jump scares on loop, no relentless gore. The horror here is more about violation, helplessness, and the collapse of rationality. The famous effects still hold up surprisingly well, and there are moments (like the crucifix scene) that carry real shock value. But overall, it feels more like a solemn, disturbing ritual than a film designed to frighten you moment to moment. It’s important. Absolutely. Groundbreaking without question. But as a standalone horror experience today, it’s more fascinating than frightening. One you appreciate more for its legacy than its ability to keep you up at night.
That tension between a film's reputation and the actual experience of watching it is something I keep coming back to with The Exorcist. The weight of fifty years of cultural myth is a lot to carry into any viewing, let alone a first one. For me, the film works best when you stop waiting for it to scare you and let it do the stranger, more unsettling thing it is actually trying to do, which is make you feel the fragility of the rational world the characters are trying to hold onto. It is not a comfortable watch, but comfort was clearly never the point. Whether that makes it worth your Friday evening is a fair question, and one only you can answer. But it is, without doubt, a film that earns the conversation it still starts.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1973 | Watched: 2025-07-29
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from William Friedkin: Cruising (1980) · To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) · The French Connection (1971) · Killer Joe (2011)
More with Ellen Burstyn: Requiem for a Dream (2000)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
