-The Exorcist - The Horror Of Production

I often find the stories of a film's production to be just as interesting as the film itself. Such is the case with The Exorcist, a film which would go on to redefine horror filmmaking, influence hundreds if not thousands of subsequent films both in and out of the horror genre, and would prove to be one of the most successful films of all time. But let's take a step back to 1971. William Peter Bloddy had just published a novel, The Exorcist, and it was an immediate success. Although several very important details were changed, it's based on the allegedly real story of Ronald Doe, a 14-year-old boy who was allegedly possessed. The story goes that furniture would move, vases would fly around the room, he would speak in tongues, words appeared carved into his chest, and the religious family sought help from a local priest who performed an exorcism. While this happened, the bed shook and the boy finagled his way out of his restraints to attack the priest. Now, this is a fascinating story and made for an excellent book, one that everybody was reading. It stayed as the number one bestseller for 17 weeks and remained on the New York Times bestselling list for over a year. Now, naturally, Hollywood wanted to capitalize on this and had William Peter Bloddy adopt his own novel into a screenplay and sign director William Friedkin, whose most recent film, The French Connection, had just won five Oscars. Despite that, Friedkin wasn't their first choice, nor was he their third. Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols had all turned down the project for various reasons. Producers were hoping for the movie to be huge and were willing to invest a lot of money into it. However, trouble started to arise once casting began. Friedkin wanted to use a cast made up of mostly unknown actors, or at least unknown to an American audience. Meanwhile, the studio wanted to cast Marlon Brando as Lancaster Marin, but Friedkin felt it would turn into yet another Brando project. The same could be said about Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, and Anne Bancroft, who were all instead replaced by talented but up-and-coming actors. This ultimately amounted to nothing, but production didn't start out on a very strong foot, and things only got worse once cameras started rolling. The film was supposed to shoot for 105 days, but production lasted over twice that long. Shooting began in Iraq. For a sequence that lasts a little less than 10 minutes of the film's runtime, the shooting had a dramatic impact. Much of the crew became very sick, and illness spread around the production, eventually causing nine of the film's crew members unfortunate deaths. Production was naturally delayed with this terrible setback, but after the overseas production wrapped and Friedkin came back to the United States, the problems only continued. First, the film faced quite a bit of backlash from religious groups. Linda Blair, the actress playing Reagan at the time, a 14-year-old, received so many death threats that for the entire production and for six months after the film was released, the studio paid for bodyguards and private security for her. Let that sink in for a minute, a 14-year-old. Things were so bad on set that the story goes that Friedkin hired a real priest to perform an exorcism on the set. Unfortunately, the film's exorcisms proved to be more successful than the real one, and things continued to go wrong. Mercedes McCambridge was chosen to provide the voice for the demon. Originally, it was going to be Blair, but Friedkin felt that it would be best to create a separate voice entirely. Have this be two separate entities. She said, I should swallow raw eggs. I should smoke cigarettes constantly. You got to give me some booze, which is going to make me nuts, and I'm getting off the wagon to do this. She also wanted to be tied up and bound, much like Reagan was, to try and get into the right mindset of the demon. It was an extreme level of dedication for a role for which she didn't even want to be credited at first. Friedkin himself was just as extreme. As aforementioned, his most recent film was The French Connection, a film in which he and cinematographer Owen Roizman strapped a camera onto a car and had it drive into oncoming traffic. He took a similar approach of trying to capture realism in the exorcist. During scenes like this where characters fly, he used an elaborate system of pulleys and levers which would violently pull the actors sideways, backwards, or in some cases, both. These screams are authentic. And Alan Bernstein seriously injured her back during the filming of this scene. And yes, again, that is her real scream. I screamed in horrendous pain and I was so furious and said, turn the effing camera off. The breath that can be seen in Reagan's room is real. The set was built into a freezer and lowered to below freezing temperatures to capture the breath on the air. He would randomly fire blanks into the air to get authentic looks of shock and fear on the actors' faces right before film began to roll. He employed a similar tactic where he slapped Father William O'Malley, who played Father Dyer, right before this take and told Jason Miller that the fake vomit was going to hit him in the chest instead of, well, in the face. So, what was the point of going to these extreme measures? Well, in 1993, Thomas B. Allen did an investigative report into Ronald Doe, the boy who the story is based on, and found all of it to be false. He suggests that Doe was a mentally disturbed young man who went to the extreme, going so far as to carve words into his chest for attention. And it made a fascinating story, one that was just wild enough that if you believed in possession, it could be believable. And Friedkin tried to take this impossible and make it real. He put his actors through literal hell, and the result was a film that feels like the characters are being dragged through hell. There's a reason that 45 years later, The Exorcist is just as scary as the day it was released. And that's because not only does it feel real, it is real. I'll leave you with this one thought. Think about how much of the film says that it's fake. There's reason that so much of the film revolves around literal filmmaking. It's a filmmaker who was murdered, Chris works as an actress, and the reason that she and Reagan are in Baltimore is because of her career. Or take this from the opening scene. After Father Maron discovers the statue of Pazuzu, he takes this ominous looking capsule out of his pocket, only for it to be revealed to be a tin of mints. Here's my interpretation of what Friedkin did here. He begins by telling us it won't be real, it's just a film, look there's a camera, you can literally see it. And don't be afraid, there's nothing demonic, it's just a tin of mints. And both of these signs happen in the first 20 minutes of the movie. After that, almost everything is real. This is a real reaction, this led to a real injury, and here he is a real reverend. He lets down our guard of what is real and what isn't, and he doesn't let us hide behind the excuse of it's just a movie. Because although Ronaldo was never possessed, The Exorcist is more than just a movie. So this video is made possible because of Patreon. I'm trying to make my content the best that it can be, and trying new things is definitely going to be a part of that. If you want me to try more experimental comments, please let me know. If you want to be a part of this new wave, feel free to support me on Patreon and get some of the bonus content I put up over there. There's a link on screen if you're interested. There's also a link to my last video in which I looked at Clint Eastwood's Two Arcs of Redemption, so check that out if you're interested, and thank you for watching.