The original audience reaction to ‘The Exorcist’ was off the charts

It was December 1973, and a rabid crowd of moviegoers stood in line within the sleet and rain for hours outdoors Manhattan’s Cinema 1 theater on Second Avenue. Some folks lit bonfires to maintain heat, whereas others threatened to storm the film home in the event that they couldn’t get in.

Some went a special route, providing bribes of multiple hundred {dollars} to leap to the entrance of the road.

The film they have been ready to see was “The Exorcist,” the horrifying story — primarily based on a reputed actual story — of a 12-year-old woman possessed by the satan.

The viewers response to it was so excessive, as writer Nat Segaloff describes in his new guide, “The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Concern” (Citadel), it may have referred to as for its personal exorcism.

The identical form of crazed scenes have been occurring nationwide at nearly two dozen theaters the place hundreds would prove for the premiere of what was being billed as one of the crucial scary horror films ever made — and precisely so.

As Segaloff places it, when the movie opened, “the bedlam started.”

On the Savoy Theater in Boston, “Individuals have been working up the aisles and into the foyer, a few of them making it out to the road earlier than vomiting, whereas others did it en route.”

“I couldn’t think about folks being affected like that. I simply stood round and watched the gang; that was a film in itself,” Tom Kauycheck, the supervisor of the theater chain, advised Segaloff.

“Ticket-holders ready in line for the subsequent efficiency would see the distressed faces of these leaving and pump themselves right into a frenzy even earlier than the lights went down.”

One critic, Stuart Byron, wrote in his assessment that “the movie had made him sick.”

Screenwriter and novelist William Peter Blatty recalled attending the primary public press preview in Manhattan, and later claimed to be “the one one who is aware of why folks bought sick.”

He watched as a younger girl got here up the aisle, and handed by him, saying, “Jesus, Jeeeesus.”

Blatty famous the purpose at which she fled the theater, and when “all people bought in poor health… It’s once they’re giving Regan the arteriogram and the needle goes within the neck and the blood comes out. THAT’S the second it’s all the time been.”

An usher on the Boston film home reported that 98 p.c of the “individuals who bought sick have been males.”

Worse, a couple of reportedly had coronary heart assaults, and one girl had a miscarriage.

Fifty years later, tens of millions have seen the movie, now thought of a traditional.

A few of the most scary scenes have since grow to be popular culture legends: Particularly, the pinnacle of the possessed youngster performed by actress Linda Blair, then 14, doing a 360-degree spin, or her spewing inexperienced stuff exiting from her twisted mouth, with a voice sounding like a sanding machine on full grind.

Whereas demonic possession is on the floor of “The Exorcist,” writes Segaloff, “Its emotional core is a mom’s need to guard her youngster. And on a extra metaphysical degree, whether or not we as people are worthy of strolling on God’s earth.”

It’s a narrative that has haunted the nightmares of generations of filmgoers and spawned two sequels, a prequel, and a tv sequence, and but none have matched the success of William Peter Blatty’s screenplay for the unique movie, says Segaloff.

At this time, “The Exorcist” often tops any checklist of the scariest horror films of all time.

The screenplay was primarily based on Blatty’s bestselling novel, “The Exorcist,” revealed in 1971.

Whereas a pupil at Georgetown College, in Washington, DC, Blatty had realized from certainly one of his lecturers that an exorcism had truly taken place years earlier than in a close-by Maryland suburb involving a teenage boy who had been possessed by the satan and freed throughout an exorcism.

“So the seed was sewn within the deeply spiritual Blatty’s coronary heart, soul, and creativeness,” writes Segaloff of the writer, who died in 2017 at 89.

“Right here ultimately was tangible proof of transcendence,” he quotes Blatty as saying.

“If there have been demons, there have been angels and possibly a God and a life eternal.”

Blatty determined to jot down a couple of fictional exorcism case, merging the results he realized from totally different exorcisms in to what would grow to be Linda Blair’s character, Regan, who leads a cheerful life as a Georgetown adolescent — till the satan intercedes.

“I didn’t got down to scare the hell out of individuals as you do with a horror movie. I got down to make a movie that might make them take into consideration the idea of fine and evil.”

Director William Friedkin

He acknowledged that his goal in writing the novel and the movie was to indicate that religion can conquer despair and he used possession by the satan to instill doubt in God.

In keeping with Segaloff, each Catholic parish has an exorcist, and the entire Popes have performed exorcisms, with even a faculty of exorcism throughout the Vatican that trains exorcists.

“In 2014, the Vatican formally acknowledged the Worldwide Affiliation of Exorcists, 250 monks in thirty international locations who liberate demons from the devoted,” he writes.

“Pope Francis himself was identified to have compelled 4 demons from a possessed man in 2013 by laying palms on the sufferer’s brow.”

“Each tradition has demons, each tradition has gods, and each tradition has possessions,” the acclaimed Irish folklorist Michael Scott advised Segaloff.

“However not each tradition deems possession to be evil. It’s actually solely the Christians who view possession to be evil, and we will lay that on the Church.”

“Catholics imagine it really works and subsequently for those who imagine it really works, it really works,” he writes.

The shock impression the movie had on the viewers, writes Segaloff, was all all the way down to director William Friedkin.

“I didn’t got down to scare the hell out of individuals as you do with a horror movie,” says Friedkin.

“I got down to make a movie that might make them take into consideration the idea of fine and evil.”

Nonetheless, Friedkin labored his Hollywood magic to make it as horrific as attainable.

He fired off handguns on the set to register extra shock on the actors’ faces.

He belted one actor within the face with the intention to get a extra reasonable take, and he even performed audio tapes of screams emanating from precise exorcisms.

And he added to the soundtrack the squealing of pigs being led to slaughter and performed backward for an excellent eerier impact.

And whereas Hollywood stars like Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson wished desperately to play the position of the exorcist, Father Karras, Friedkin, and Blatty wished and solid an genuine priest who additionally may act: Jason Miller, a 33-year-old Jesuit-educated actor-playwright who had lately gained a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for drama.

Within the closing scene, Father Karras threw himself out of Regan’s bed room window to fulfill his demise however saved the satan from killing Regan — concluding that Karras had gained the battle with the satan.

Blatty noticed this as a triumph of fine over evil, however Segaloff had a special take.

His analysis concluded that some fifty p.c of the viewers believed that the satan had triumphed.

“When The Exorcist got here out,” he writes, “it was only a film. Over the subsequent 50 years, it turned a legend.”

“With Devil, two thousand years of publicity have established him as actual to a whole lot of tens of millions of believers,” writes the writer. “Dracula can’t comply with you residence from the movie show. However Devil could also be ready for you when you open the door.”