The Exorcist's filmcraft still possesses the fearmakers of today

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      I scored a Blu-ray copy of The Exorcist a few months ago, but even though it includes the extended director's cut and "never-before-seen set footage", I haven't cracked it open yet. It's almost as if I'm afraid to peel off the plastic and let the extreme terrors of William Friedkin's 1973 blockbuster run rampant.

      Can you blame me? His adaptation of William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel of demonic possession scared the crap out of me, mostly because it was so damned well done and believable. And it's effects are still being strongly felt some 38 years after it turned the film world on its ear.

      Last month I flew down to L.A. to cover The Rite, the latest devil-in-a-girl horror outing, which stars Sir Anthony Hopkins as the main demon-banisher. During a news conference director Mikael Hí¥fstrí¶m explained that he loved The Exorcist when he first saw it as a kid, and watched it again before shooting The Rite. He felt that his film was different enough from Friedkin’s to stand on its own.

      “If it was a very similar story [to The Exorcist], I would definitely have backed away,” he said. “I would never put myself in a position to compete with this great movie; that would be silly. It’s a classic, and everybody knows it.”

      Then a couple of weeks ago I was on the phone with Vancouver native Patrick Lussier, who was chatting up his film Drive Angry 3D, the supernatural action-gore epic that opened in theatres yesterday. When I asked the director of such films as My Bloody Valentine and Dracula 2000 if he'd seen any scary movies that had blown him away lately, guess what he came up with.

      "You know, I rewatched The Exorcist again recently," he said, "because it's almost like the perfect film. It's amazing because it creates a world that is so real, and then turns it on its head. It's pretty incredible to watch the care and attention that was done through that storytelling. It's a great one to study."

      Back in 1993, when I was in the midst of a lucky 13-year run as Fangoria magazine's Vancouver correspondent, I interviewed Max von Sydow on the phone. He was in town filming Needful Things, a not-so-swift version of Stephen King's '91 novel. The Swedish actor, now 81, will probably be forever identified with The Exorcist's titular priest, who braves the torments of hell--not to mention gushes of green pea soup--to save possessed little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair).

      "The Exorcist is a very, very well made film," von Sydow told me at the time. "It has become some kind of a horror classic, and it really deserves that reputation. And it started a trend. It has been imitated many, many times since then. I haven't seen all those films, but I doubt that anyone has been able to really make as good a movie as The Exorcist. It dealt with a very unexpected subject--an evil child, which is a terrifying idea."

      As scary as The Exorcist was, von Sydow was surprised when he first heard the much-publicized stories about weak-hearted filmgoers running from theatres in panic and tossing their cookies in the aisles when the movie's nastier bits flashed on the screen.

      "The film became something else," he mused. "It became some kind of a mental test, where people went to see this film to find out whether they could take it without fainting, throwing up, or having nightmares for two weeks."

      You can follow Steve Newton on Twitter at twitter.com/earofnewt.

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