The Exorcist is a land-mark horror movie. 

It was the first horror movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. (It lost out to The Sting, but won the Best Adapted Screenplay award). Plus, its success ushered in a slew of big budget supernatural horror movies from major Hollywood studios (notably The Omen and The Amityville Horror).

The movie is certainly a phenomenal achievement by director William Friedkin (hot off his Best Director Oscar for The French Connection), but it makes for an uncomfortable view. Its not so much the gross-out sequences involving projectile vomit and spinning heads (shot in a frighteningly realistic way) which got me, but the over-arching sense of dread that runs though the movie – heightened by the use of subliminal images of the demon to further disorientate viewers. Its perhaps not suprising that the movie allegedly provoked vomiting and fainting fits in theatres!

I saw The Exorcist in the cinema on a re-release after I had seen the much-derided sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic – which must rank as one of the worst sequels to a major movie in history. It is a bizarre mish-mash of African tribal rituals, swarms of locusts, and Richard Burton over-acting –  just garbage really, and best forgotten.

Author William Peter Blatty must have thought so because he subsequently wrote and directed Exorcist III as an alternative sequel, which totally ignored the events in The Heretic. It is notable for a couple of very effective jump scares set in a psychiatric ward.

These images are from a batch of 6 Italian ‘foto-bustas’ for Friedkin’s original movie. I have written elsewhere that these are not my favourite format, but collected they do give a good overview of the key events in the movie.

I sold the fotobustas a while back. But for good measure, here’s one of a small selection of French lobby cards I still have, showing a confrontation between Father Merrin and Regan.