The weeks leading up to Halloween are the most popular time of the year for horror movies, so it was only natural that I would choose one for this week’s Yesterday’s Hits column. But which one? Horror is a popular and relatively profitable genre, in large part because horror movies are generally not too expensive to produce, making it easy for them to turn a profit. Yet there are surprisingly few flat-out blockbusters in the genre. Since 1939, only four movies that might be labeled “horror” have placed among the top five box office hits of their respective years. Two of these were Psycho and Jaws, both of which remain classics not merely of the genre, but of cinema in general. And I wrote about the most recent of the bunch, The Sixth Sense, back in June.
This leaves only The Exorcist. But while William Friedkin’s film has been endlessly parodied over the years, it remains one of the most-watched horror movies of all time, a perennial Halloween favorite. In other words, it’s not what I normally look for in my Yesterday’s Hits selections. So, for the obvious reasons, I’ll be skipping over my usual question of what happened to The Exorcist’s popularity because, well, it never really went away.
What made The Exorcist a hit?: Prior to writing The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty had published several novels without achieving much commercial success, and eventually began writing for movies and television. But The Exorcist changed his fortunes immeasurably. Based partly on an actual exorcism that took place in 1949, Blatty’s novel became a publishing sensation with its no-holds-barred portrait of a young girl’s possession by the devil, and the efforts of her mother and a pair of priests to make her better. Given its critical and popular acclaim, it quickly became clear that The Exorcist would become a major motion picture.
With the newfound power afforded him by his bestselling-author status, Blatty was able to sign on as producer of the Exorcist adaptation. Despite a number of alternative choices on Warner Brothers’ part, Blatty insisted on William Friedkin, a recent Oscar winner for The French Connection, in the hope that he would turn the novel into a serious prestige picture rather than a run-of-the-mill horror movie. In turn, Friedkin jumped in with both feet, bringing the book’s most chilling set pieces to life using state-of-the-art makeup and special effects, which sometimes even endangered the safety of his actors. In addition, the relaxed rating standards of the day allowed Friedkin to make the film more visceral than any big-budget Hollywood production to date. Once word got around that the filmed version of The Exorcist was every bit as horrifying as the novel, audiences turned out in droves, making it the biggest hit of 1973 and one of the top-grossing horror movies of all time.
Does The Exorcist still work?: Yes, although not always in the obvious ways. For one thing, despite its reputation as a classic horror movie, The Exorcist really isn’t all that frightening. There are a handful of eerie moments and memorably macabre images, such as the desecration of a church altar. But by and large, the scares to be found in The Exorcist are of a crude and obvious kind, like Regan (Linda Blair) being tossed around by an unseen presence while lying in bed. Scenes like this are shocking to see once, to be certain, and the level of pre-CGI cinematic trickery is certainly impressive, but they don’t really burrow under your skin in the way the best horror movies do.
However, the movie is successful in a number of other ways, like the way it becomes a story about the limits of science. In the early 1970s, science was making progress to exploring every nook and cranny of the human body, both physically in the case of medicine, and psychologically as well. But in The Exorcist, all of the medical and psychological experiments that are performed on Regan prove futile, and in the end, the only recourse for Regan’s mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), is religion. In our enlightened age, there’s something undeniably unsettling about the idea that there are still things that lay outside the realm of science, and while Friedkin and Blatty don’t come out explicitly in favor of religion, there’s no denying that it works in the film in ways the medicine does not.
But most compelling of all is Chris’ character arc, which the movie actually takes seriously rather than simply using it to mark time until the next big shock. Chris is a successful actress and a divorcee, and the only thing that’s really permanent in her life is her little girl. So when Regan begins to exhibit her alarming symptoms, Chris finds herself grasping at any possible solution to make her better, usually to no avail. Despite the fact that she’s not religious, she ends up turning to Father Karras 
(Jason Miller) for help. In perhaps the most affecting moment in the film, Chris pleads to him, “I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there's nothing wrong with my daughter, except in her mind. You tell me for a fact you know an exorcism wouldn’t do any good.” Due in no small part to Burstyn’s performance, Chris’ storyline and her relationship with Regan make for such a fascinating chamber drama that it’s almost disappointing that the movie ends up resolving itself with visual trickery and mystical gobbledygook.
At the end of the day, The Exorcist isn’t remotely the scariest movie ever made. However, it still works as the prestige picture that Blatty and Friedkin wanted it to be. Sure, Friedkin might have been a pain in the ass while making the film (literally, in Burstyn’s case), but the story and performances work well enough that the end result was worth the effort. If only the film’s sequels had kept this same balance of drama and supernatural horror, The Exorcist might have been the first installment in a classic series, instead of a hugely popular original that spawned three inferior knockoffs. But no matter- it stands on its own just fine.