The Exorcist
[related: Pazuzu, Tubular Bells]
A wildly popular and notoriously controversial 1973 experimental Occult film centering on the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl by the demon Pazuzu. The film's unprecedentedly graphic content and Satanic undertones [ex. a prepubescent child masturbating with a bloody crucifix] caused a sensation upon its release. Numerous reports of induced panic attacks, psychotic/ schizophrenic breaks, and miscarriages among theater-goers were reported in the film's opening week, leading to the more common adoption of the X-rating for non-pornographic films. Massachusetts and Mississippi both successfully blocked public viewing of the film on a state level, and the film was intermittently banned throughout the UK and in various European territories. In certain theaters, tickets were purchased by patrons for sold-out shows in order to observe the reactions of audience members exiting the theater (often covered in vomit). In what would later become known as "Pazuzu's curse", a series of tragedies and strange occurrences plagued The Exorcist's filming and release. Jack MacGowran, playing the chain-smoking and tragically murdered director Burke Dennings, died of undiagnozed influenza before the film's release. Vasiliki Maliaros, cast as Father Karras' mother, died mysteriously of "natural causes" days later. Black Crows flew repeatedly into a circuit box and burned down the original set for Reagan's family home - strangely the only surviving room was the chamber where the exorcism was to have taken place. Eventually, the crew was forced to hire Thomas M. King, a Jesuit priest, to bless the set daily. Despite the priest's efforts, a bolt of lightning struck the church opposite the cinema on the film's opening night in Rome.
Director William Friedkin, a dictatorial and, by all accounts, sadistic autere, employed a number of questionable tactics while making the film. He was physically abusive to Father William O'Malley [1] [Father Joseph Dyer IRL] on set. After demanding he "pledge his loyalty to the film", Friedkin slapped Dyer across the face and forced him to jump from a second story window despite his age and ailing health [2], later spewing rotten, maggot-infested pea soup into Dyer's face without warning. Subsequently, a number of Catholic crew members walked off the shoot in protest. Additionally, lead actress Ellen Burstyn's lower spine was fractured following Friedkin's insistence on less visible harness support straps. Careening against a brick wall at blinding speed, Burstyn screamed in excruciating pain upon impact - Friedkin later insisted the actual footage [including audio] be used in the film's final cut. The opening sequence of The Exorcist was shot on location in Iraq the site of ancient Hatra, an area in what was once Upper Mespotamia, in 120° degree heat without proper cooling centers or the standard "golden hour" filming schedule, leading to umpteen instances of heatstroke. Throughout shooting, Friedkin was known to fire blank rounds at random to keep both cast and crew on edge. His questionable tactics extended to treatment of the film's audience - he insisted that the temperature in theaters screening the film be gradually turned down, despite its heart-of-winter release date. Perhaps most irresponsibly, Friedkin was accused and later convicted of inserting subliminal audio and imagery into The Exorcist; bedposts purposely shaped like penises, skulls superimposed on cigarette exhalation puffs, and scientifically verified single frame appearances of Pazuzu-related imagery.
The film was originally scored in abstract by Lalo Schifrin, who later revealed he was too frightened to actually view the film. Friedkin rejected the score [3] for being only "mildly terrifying" - the musical material was later reappropriated for The Amityville Horror, a soundtrack that quickly came to define 1980's horror scoring. Friedkin, instead, leaned on pre-existing music from the second Viennese school and its acolytes, primarily Anton Webern, Krysztof Penderecki, and George Crumb, whose string quartet Black Angels: Night of the Electric Insects was inexplicably left off the commercial soundtrack. Strangely, what is now commonly considered the "Theme from The Exorcist" is the piano-based melody that opens Tubular Bells from the debut release of Mike Oldfield, a little known English progressive rock musician. A Catholic by birth, Oldfield attempted repeatedly to block the use of his music in the film, but was overturned via the might of the [major film] studio and his money-hungry record label. The Exorcist's sound design is also notable: field recordings of (allegedly tortured) dogs, hamsters, and pigs were layered into the voice of Pazuzu throughout the film. All medical scenes in The Exorcist were cast using [re: non-actor] licensed physicians, including Dr. Paul Bateson [4], who talked Linda Blair through the infamous "angiography scene" in which blood violently spurts from her twelve-year-old neck. The segment was later dubbed the film industry's "most irresponsibly violent scene" despite being praised in physician circles for being "the most realistic depiction of an emergency medical procedure in the history of cinema"[5].
- ↑ An actual Jesuit priest and Fordham University professor of theology at the time.
- ↑ Students of neighboring Georgetown University charged $10 admission to watch the priest plummet.
- ↑ Allegedly throwing the tapes away in a studio parking lot. The tapes were later stumbled across by an elderly security guard named Clarence Nightingale in a white golf cart.
- ↑ Dr. Bateson was convicted of murdering a journalist four years after filming.
- ↑ As evidenced by the fact that the scene is now commonly employed as a training film for radiologists throughout the UK.