The Exorcist (1973) - Episode 104

The Rewind Movie Podcast

“Mother? What's wrong with me?” Captain Howdy has told us to revisit William Friedkin’s indelible, near-mythical 1973 horror landmark The Exorcist.

Successful actor Chris MacNeil is living in a grand Georgetown apartment with her cherubic 12-year-old daughter Regan while she stars in a movie, but their idyll is short lived as Regan starts to exhibit some frightening behaviour - shocking insults barked in raspy, disturbing voices, lashing out in violent rages, and self-harming. Subjected to a battery of tests that fail to reveal the cause, a now-desperate Chris turns to the world-weary, skeptical priest Father Damien Karras about an exorcism.

A film whose legend precedes it as one of the scariest ever made, a ‘cursed’ production which allegedly claimed the lives of multiple people around the production, and the scene of some at-best-controversial, dangerous directorial techniques from the exacting Friedkin, we examine the story’s roots in the novel by the avowedly Catholic William Peter Blatty, who also wrote and produced, and discuss how that viewpoint was interpreted by the agnostic director in the film’s depiction of faith, good, and evil. We delve into the effectiveness of the horror, chat about Friedkin’s use of pacing and sound in building suspense, the unusual structure of the story, and recount our personal experiences with a movie whose inaccessibility in our youth only made this a more intriguing object to finally devour upon its eventual 1999 UK home video re-release.

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