On Halloween Day, Cinema Flashback - The Exorcist, 1973

So you’re standing in line at the movie theater. It’s 1973 and you’ve decided to see a film based on a best-selling book about a little girl who is possibly possessed by a demon. Maybe you haven’t read the book, but you’ve seen the trailer and you’re definitely interested.

You’ve been standing in line a long time, and now you’ve bought your ticket and you’re entering the theater lobby. There’s a lot of commotion going on and, curious, you notice a crowd of people are watching a team of paramedics attending a woman passed out in a chair. Then you see some others who are exiting the theater, and they’re upset, crying, completely freaked out. An usher races past you, dragging a mop and bucket and you hear his boss tell him that several people have thrown up inside the theater.

How totally excited are you to be seeing The Exorcist for the first time?

What an amazing scene it must have been, a display of theatrical showmanship of blockbuster proportions. How many people, do you suppose, saw these things going on and simply got out of line and went home, missing the chance to see what would become by many accounts cinema history’s foremost horror film? And this was all for a movie that opened in December! Merry Christmas, moviegoers; here comes Pazuzu down your chimney.

See an example of what I’m talking about and read more about The Exorcist phenomenon after the jump.

Here’s the ending credits sequence from an E! True Hollywood Story about The Exorcist, focusing on the reactions of moviegoers in 1973:

That’s a great, raw piece of video, and even though Warner Bros. probably created it for publicity purposes, it still stands in such stark contrast to the glossy, scripted hype machines of today.

The Exorcist was not an easy movie to make. Assembling the team of filmmakers and actors took a very long time, with casting for the part of Regan MacNeil including the auditions of thousands of girls - and the part was even offered to Brooke Shields and Dana Plato! Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson all turned down roles. Alfred Hitchcock turned down the offer to direct, as did John Boorman, Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick. And once film did start rolling, it was a grueling 10 months in the making in which William Friedkin employed a number of crew-annoying tactics to keep his actors on edge and trapped within the atmosphere of the film.

But when the movie is that hard to put together and The Exorcist is the result, you can pretty much claim that you knew what you were doing all along.

Of course we know that it would go on to find massive success, becoming the biggest R-rated blockbuster of its time and earning 10 Academy Award nominations (and winning two, for Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay). In the 33 years since its release, The Exorcist’s cultural impact is still being felt. It’s spawned a number of sequels and of course two different versions of a prequel - none of which have really endured - countless parodies and tributes and it’s still discussed regularly today. Take a look at just a handful of the sites you’ll find when you Google the phrase “exorcist steps” and you’ll get an idea of the level of fascination with even just one element of this amazing film.

It’s a shame that we can’t go back in time and see The Exorcist in the theater, alongside the 1973 movie audiences who would be screaming and puking and fainting and generally going bonkers around us. But if you haven’t recently, and if you’re at a loss for something creepy and scary to do on Halloween night, take another ride along the profanity-laden, pea soup-splattered road to insanity that is The Exorcist.

And here’s where I’ll ask you - again - even though I know how you like to stay in the anonymous quiet that is the Burbanked Readership of Several: what’s your Cinema Flashback? What’s the movie that you would travel back through time to see in its original environment, in a packed theater of that era?

Thanks for reading. Go see more movies in the theater!