We’re on Day 3 of our 30-day horror challenge, and the subject of today is “Your All-Time Favorite Horror.“
I often have a hard time coming up with my favorite -anythings- because I always tend to overthink the question, or second-guess my thoughts, and I almost never have a single favorite thing in a list. I don’t have a favorite color, favorite dinner, favorite book or favorite band but yeah, I DO have a favorite horror movie and it’s “The Exorcist.”
This was only the second modern horror movie I had ever seen, and in fact it was only my third rated R movie (Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” was my first). I had never heard of this movie, I was ten, maybe eleven. My dad asked if I wanted to watch it with him, as it was playing on this new thing called Home Box Office (we were the first house on our street to get the service). I said “sure.” I definitely had no idea what I was getting myself into.
My dad mentioned something about a connection he had with this movie, and was even in one of the scenes. My dad was in academia, and he seemed to have connections to a bunch of showbiz people. I don’t recall the exact connection he claimed, but my mom told me he tended to exaggerate some details of his life, so I have to take all claims with a grain of salt.
What I DO know is that he had no qualms about sitting his ten-year-old son in front of the TV, turning off all the lights and putting on The fucking Exorcist! I would never do that with a ten-year-old of my own, and I am terribly happy that my father didn’t share these reservations that I have, because this movie is a BANGER!!
We were a Catholic family, it was the late 70’s, there’s no internet, I had no access to most things that would season a mind to the things I would witness on The Exorcist. I was afraid of “dark rides” at the fair. I was particularly afraid of severed heads in art and in movies. I believed in God and in the Devil and in ghosts and fucking Santa Claus, I was afraid of (but terribly attracted to) most things that go bump in the night.
I was not prepared for The Exorcist.
My earliest experiences with horror movies was watching “Chiller Theatre” on New York’s WPIX. Every Saturday, an old black-and-white horror movie would be aired on Chiller Theatre. Creature from the Black Lagoon type stuff, mostly royalty-free stuff from the 50’s and early 60’s. I really liked those, but they didn’t compare with modern horror efforts.
My mom expected me to have nightmares, but the actual result was just a son who wanted to watch MORE horror movies! Serious, hard-core horror like THIS one! It was an intense experience, and one I had no intention of letting go.
Still, I always wondered why my dad thought this would be a good idea! I mean we’d watch some movies with mature content, and his plan was basically to stand in front of the television when a scene with boobs happened. Did he do that during the scene with Reagan bloodily violating herself with a crucifix while screaming to “Let Jesus fuck you!”? Nup. Just stayed in his chair. I don’t know that I fully grasped a lot of scenes like this one, I only remember being grossed out by the vomity parts.
Up until 2017 The Exorcist was the highest-grossing R-Rated horror film (adjusted for inflation), and it almost didn’t get that rating! The MPAA wanted to give it an X rating, which would have doomed the movie’s commercial success, but they were convinced to be reasonable and not wreck the prospects of a movie that went 100% over time budget (because of the director’s incessant re-shooting and re-re-shooting of scenes) and 300% over budget. It was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and in 2010 the Library of Congress selected The Exorcist for preservation in the National Film Registry as being culturally significant.
The other random bit of trivia about this movie are friggin’ insane. For starters, the director had the room refrigerated to as cold as -40F, so that the breath would be nice and steamy this required a $50k refrigeration unit (a quarter million bucks today), and it broke down all the time, so it took half a year to film the exorcism scene. There were plenty of injuries on set, including back injuries that both Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair still suffered from throughout their adult life, a missing finger for a set designer, and a missing toe for another. Early in the filming a bird flew into the electrical system, causing a fire that burned down the set. A man acting in the radiology scene would be convicted of murdering a film reporter six years later. The director would frequently slap actors or fire a gun in the air to get the startled reaction he was looking for. The voice of possessed Reagan was played by a voice actress who achieved this sound by chain-smoking, swallowing raw eggs, and drinking whiskey (despite being a recovering alcoholic). What else… oh! The use of subliminal messaging inserted into the film to make it more scary. Sure, there’s that white scary face, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Various sounds would be layered into the sound effects, such as bees buzzing and actual pigs squealing as they’re slaughtered. Images of skulls would be superimposed into backgrounds, and a variety of words were superimposed and displayed for fractions of a second.
I don’t think my claiming this as my All-Time Favorite horror is a terribly landmark choice, this movie is widely considered one of the best horror movies ever made, and it retains that position more than 50 years after its creation, and a schmabillion copy-cat Exorcist knock-off movies would be created to cash-in on the original.
Nowadays I live just a short drive from where the movie was based and much of it filmed. The Georgetown stairs that Kerras tumbled down were renamed “The Exorcist Stairs,” and a plaque naming them as such was placed there in 2015. The neighboring house served as exterior shots of the MacNeil house.