The Exorcist

What’s the Story?

Linda Blair plays Regan MacNeil, the bright 12-year-old daughter of successful actress Chris (Ellen Burstyn), who can afford to raise the girl in a nurturing atmosphere with live-in cooks and nannies (Regan's absentee father is written off as self-absorbed and oblivious). The first signs of trouble include Regan playing with a Ouija board and claiming she's communicated with a ghost she calls Captain Howdy. Then the girl begins behaving abnormally, urinating in front of party guests and foretelling death for Chris' film-director boyfriend. While Regan suffers grueling medical exams and gets progressively worse, the story line simultaneously follows Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a Greek-American Catholic priest with some doubts about his religion. When medical science fails to cure the howling, obscenity-spewing, uncontrollable Regan, doctors point Chris to Father Karras, whose background in psychology includes the now-rare rite of exorcism. Karras summons another priest to help, the wiser and older Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow), and together they begin to do battle with Regan's occupier.

Is It Any Good?

Thanks in part to Linda Blair's wrenching, Oscar-nominated performance, The Exorcist was a huge hit, earning back 10 times its $10 million budget (a then-lavish sum, outrageous for a "mere" horror flick). Movie historians cite it (along with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) as the conclusive end of old-school spook shows featuring Dracula and Frankenstein and bobbing rubber bats. If you think your teen is ready for this shocking film, keep in mind that audience members in the '70s reportedly fainted and, in some extreme cases, required psychiatric care after seeing Dick Smith's grisly makeup effects on Blair and director William Friedkin's matter-of-fact way of presenting them. Also, the moans, snarls, and profane utterances from Regan (most are actually the dubbed-in voice of a well-known older actress, Mercedes McCambridge) amount to some of the most chilling audio ever done for film.