• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 744 0

the explanation that the Devil was targeting the skeptical priest, was deleted. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau wrote that the morality of the book had been removed and replaced with a single-minded fixation on gore. There had been such on-screen violence before, but not in a major blockbuster. It was so far ahead of its time technically that it prompted one daily paper reviewer to comment that it was a “new low for grotesque special effects.” A new high in grotesque special effects was beyond the writer’s comprehension. In interviews, Blatty and Friedkin explained that they showed violence to confront the audience and to comment on the real world. This enables the movie to indulge in graphic gore while maintaining the moral high ground, a strategy pioneered by Wes Craven in The Last House on the Left. The difference is that this time, actual men of God were doing the public relations. “It shows that obscenity is ugly,” said Father O’Malley, a priest who worked as a consultant on the movie, in the Times. “Not acceptable ugly like ‘Goldfinger’ but vicious ugly like trash and the Vietnamese news.”

The Exorcist made studio executives rethink their attitudes about horror. The movie was not previewed for critics and opened in only thirty theaters. Warner Brothers didn’t think it would be such a huge hit. The Exorcist didn’t open in South Central Los Angeles, but the movie proved to be incredibly popular in the African American community. “We didn’t anticipate that,” says Joe Hyams, who handled publicity. “That created a problem for Warner Brothers because it’s playing in lily-white theaters in Westwood and all of a sudden the merchants are seeing huge numbers of African Americans coming to their enclave. We needed to open up theaters in black neighborhoods.”

The broad appeal of the movie had an impact on the artists in Hollywood as well. Up until The Exorcist became the must-see movie of 1973, stars generally avoided horror movies unless, that is, their careers were failing. Serious directors also went to great lengths to explain that their scary movie was anything but a horror film. That soon changed as producers moved quickly to capitalize with elegant films like The Omen, which returned to the theme of a woman who gives birth to the Antichrist. Abby gave the possession movie a blaxploitation spin before Warner Brothers pioneered the now inevitable horror sequel. This had yet to become standard practice. Rosemary’s Baby had no sequel at the time. There was no follow-up to Night of the Living Dead or Targets or The Last House on the Left. American International Pictures and Hammer pumped out endless movies with Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, but these small operations were the exceptions.

The Exorcist II opened in 1977 and makes a forceful claim to the title of the worst movie ever made. Richard Burton hammily played the role of a tortured priest hired by the church to figure out what really happened on that fateful night to Regan, now all grown up and weirdly chipper. John Boorman, who directed Deliverance, stages these scenes leadenly, not helped by his actors reciting their windy dialogue with little care about sense or sensibility. An awkward Linda Blair makes the line “I was possessed by a demon” sound like she’s talking about the weather. In another subplot, James Earl Jones, who had recently finished Star Wars, put his Darth Vader voice to use playing a Satanic character who at one point dresses up in a bee suit.

Friedkin and Blatty refused to have anything to do with the movie. The sequel indulged in more gore and special effects than the original. But its beefed-up plot ended the mystery of what happened to Regan. Any trace of Pinter vanished. Much of the first half hour of the movie features speculation and debate among priests and religious figures over the true source of, as Burton puts it, “eeeeevil.” The $14 million production bombed, but it proved that Hollywood was committed to horror. William Castle’s prediction of the genre’s death seemed like a lifetime ago. Now every studio wanted to get in on the action.