Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [51]
The Exorcist actually was different. Its stars were trained actors of European cinema and Broadway, and its tone and style had a solemnity that was out of place in the world of Vincent Price and Wes Craven. The poster was understated. Its mood of dread was as modest as it was eerie. The colors were somber. This was a film that took itself seriously. That doesn’t mean it didn’t resort to traditional horror tactics.
Regan’s head spinning made no sense (how would it not pop off?) but was so startling that few critics cared. The sexualizing of a twelve-year-old girl pushed taboos. This movie mixed shock and awe. William Castle and Herschell Gordon Lewis would have approved of the publicized reports of fainting in the aisles and audience anger. At the same time, Warner Brothers sold the supernatural drama as an unblinking portrait of real life which itself was a familiar strategy of low-budget horror producers.
The Exorcist was a marvel of coordinated message marketing. The first deeply reported feature article about the making of the movie set the tone for the coverage. It appeared in The New York Times after the first day of shooting began in a hospital on Welfare Island in New York. The flattering piece highlighted extensive quotes by William Friedkin meant to frame the movie as something, anything, other than a work of fantasy. He emphasized this was not just a silly movie about the Devil. It was based on a real story in a fiercely modern style. The writer played along. The father of the possessed child was described as a member of the Ku Klux Klan (shorthand for evil, of course) before converting to Catholicism. He even describes a conversation with the aunt of a boy (Blatty changed the gender of the child for the novel) by telephone; she tells of a levitating bed. “I intend to do it very realistically,” Friedkin said. “It’s a realistic story about inexplicable things and it’s going to take place in cold light with ordinary people on ordinary streets.”
Friedkin stayed on message for the rest of the publicity campaign, which included talks with horror movie magazines, interviews with authors for books, a college speaking tour. He built up a series of minor deceptions and exaggerations to increase the hype of the movie, promoting the idea that the set was haunted, describing strange tragedies hitting cast members and designers. Much was made in the industry press about a fire that burned down a set and a death in the family of the star Max von Sydow, who played Father Merrin. Of course when you consider that the production took over an entire year, such tragic events seem less like examples of a sinister curse than the ordinary accidents and tragedies of life, but that didn’t stop the speculation.
The director obfuscated when asked about the artifice of the moviemaking. Friedkin said that Linda Blair, who played the child Regan, did all the vomiting scenes, which eventually led to a suit by the teenager who performed as her double. He also told a horror movie magazine that the levitating bed hung in the air because of “magnetic fields” rather than special effects. In fact, cutting-edge makeup artists Rick Baker and Dick Smith were producing some of the most revolutionary effects in Hollywood history, replacing trick camerawork with latex contraptions to allow Regan’s head to spin without any cutaway shots. The movie inverted the old exploitation formula. Instead of selling the shocks and delivering the same old tricks, The Exorcist sold tasteful, moody drama, and hit you over the head with brutalizing special effects.
Some perceptive critics who had read the novel noticed that the context for the possession,