Category: The Exorcist

In advance of The Exorcist: Believer this week, the ‘legacyquel’ from David Gordon Green, I decided over the weekend to throw on William Friedkin’s The Exorcist for the first time in some years. This time, I got something new from it.

My history with The Exorcist isn’t necessarily legion (no pun intended, for all you William Peter Blatty fans). It wasn’t a film I grew up with, not to the degree of The Shining from Stanley Kubrick. I might first have become aware of it thanks to The Blair Witch Project in 1999, and how the Cannes reaction to that seminal found footage horror mirrored the legendary reports from showings of The Exorcist in 1973 where people threw up, fainted or stormed out in terror. Many comparisons, fairly or not, were drawn at the time.

It took me many more years to watch The Exorcist, for some reason, despite always being a sizeable fan of horror. Perhaps it was accessibility, or just simply the fact during the 2000s I engaged much less with cinema on a general basis. I had also little relationship with Friedkin or 1970s cinema at this point, both of which I have since worked to remedy. I’ve flirted with podcasting about 70s movies. I have a hankering to write about them more. But I wasn’t there. I wasn’t born until the 80s and I sometimes think that matters, in terms of perspective, not just nostalgia.