BOOK: ‘The Exorcist’ and its terrifying 50-year legacy

The devil made them do it.

Working together, writers, directors, and performers not only created “The Exorcist,” one of Hollywood’s most frightening films, they started a franchise. And it survived half a century of often awful sequels, prequels, and spin-offs.

They’re still going, too, with another movie trilogy planned. The first installment, also called “The Exorcist,” opens this year, with Ellen Burstyn reprising her role as bedeviled mother, Chris MacNeil.

How did this scary story cast such a lingering spell over audiences?

Nat Segaloff’s “The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear” has some ideas.

His history begins with novelist William Peter Blatty. Born in New York, Blatty was the youngest in a large Lebanese family. His doting mother expected him to go into the priesthood, but “the notion of course was unobtainable and ludicrous in the extreme,” he joked later, “since with respect to the subject of my worthiness, my nearest superiors are asps.”

Instead, Blatty moved to Hollywood, where he eventually built a career writing comedies such as “A Shot in the Dark.” After a string of disappointments, though — including the enormous flop “Darling Lili” — Blatty decided it was time to turn to books.

Years before, while a student at Georgetown, he read a newspaper story about a priest performing an exorcism on a young Maryland boy. Not surprisingly, the story stuck with him. After some dogged investigation, Blatty finally tracked down the Jesuit who said he had cast out the malevolent spirit.

The priest told Blatty the Church had sworn him to secrecy. Still, he harbored no doubts that this had been a true demonic possession.

Inspired, Blatty drew on that story, reports of an earlier case in Iowa, and his fertile imagination. The resulting novel was packed with grotesque violence, graphic sexual abuse, Hollywood gossip (some suspected the heroine was a divorced redheaded Broadway and movie star), and the author’s search for meaning.

That last ingredient, Blatty’s stubborn struggle with belief, had driven him to write this story. It was everything else, though, that made it a phenomenal bestseller and hot movie property. Blatty soon sold the rights to Warner Bros, with the stipulation that he would produce and write the screenplay.

But who would direct it?

The studio had a list of potential directors. Unfortunately, none of them was interested. Arthur Penn passed. “Stanley Kubrick who generated and produced his own material… also passed,” Segaloff writes, “as did Mike Nichols, who didn’t want to attempt a film that would hinge on a child’s performance.”

Blatty had his own first choice, William Friedkin. Fresh off “The French Connection,” a major hit, Friedkin had a reputation as a smart director, if a tough collaborator. Blatty first met him years earlier when they discussed a potential project. Friedkin turned it down, telling Blatty his script was the worst thing he ever read.

The brutal honesty endeared him to Blatty.

“He stuck to his guns,” Blatty later said. “I never forgot that.”

After Friedkin signed on, casting began. Blatty wanted his neighbor, Shirley MacLaine, to play Chris, but she had a scheduling conflict. Later, she complained that he pilfered details about her personal life to create the character, and those details would give rise to crazy rumors that it was her daughter who was possessed. “Such negative energy in that film,” MacLaine grumbled.

Ellen Burstyn was soon signed to play Chris, and Swedish actor Max von Sydow — then only in his early 40s — agreed to put on old-age makeup to play the elderly Father Merrin. For the young, doubting priest, names floated included Jack Nicholson and Paul Newman. Blatty and Friedkin, instead, signed Jason Miller, who wrote the play “That Championship Season” but had never made a film.

Child actress Linda Blair landed the role as Regan, the child possessed, after beating out more than 500 other hopefuls. Blair could only start work once the studio and Blair’s mother received a judge’s ruling that the 13-year-old was stable enough to take on the harrowing role.

It was a difficult production, although not strictly because of the disturbing content.

At the time, computer-generated images were still unknown; most of the special effects were painfully physical. Massive air conditioners kept the bedroom set icy cold so that you could see the actors’ breath. When Burstyn had to be thrown across the room, a special harness pulled her (and badly injured her back). And the tyrannical Friedkin would do whatever it took to get a good performance, including slapping an actor before a take.

Some effects were close to magic tricks. The famous pea soup vomit was done with a hidden tube. That haunting moment when Regan’s head spins around was done with a mechanical dummy. To test it, an FX designer drove around Manhattan with the fake Regan propped up next to him. Whenever he caught someone looking at the lifelike mannequin, he pushed a button, and its head revolved.

As the shoot went on, rumors of a curse began to spread. One of the sets was destroyed in a mysterious fire. A giant prop statue went missing. Supporting actor Jack MacGowran died two weeks after filming; other cast members suddenly lost beloved relatives.

“There were a lot of very strange things that happened,” Burstyn said later. “We were calling on some very heavy energy… I don’t think you fool around with those kind of energy fields without having some kind of manifestation, and we had a lot.”

There was more bad publicity, too, as people jockeyed for credit. An on-screen double for Linda Blair began to claim she had done all the possession scenes. That was easy enough to refute. But when veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge said that her work dubbing the demon’s voice hadn’t been acknowledged, an onscreen credit was added to prints.

All those troubles were forgotten, though, once the money rolled in. Some people lined up for hours to get in; others ran up the aisles to get out or at least get to the bathroom. The biggest gross-out moment was not the pea soup scene but one of Regan undergoing a medical exam; the people most likely to bolt were men.

Although Blatty would win an Academy Award for his screenplay, “The Exorcist” wasn’t an Oscar favorite. Rather than even acknowledge its inventive special effects, the organization skipped the category entirely. “The Sting,” a family-friendly film, was that year’s big winner. But that didn’t stop “The Exorcist” from becoming a blockbuster.

And if there were a curse, it certainly left Blatty unscathed, who died in 2017 at 89, a very wealthy man. Nor did it harm Friedkin, who is still directing at 87, or Burstyn, who is still acting at 90.

“If there was, in fact, any ‘Exorcist’ curse, it settled on those cheeky enough to challenge its supremacy,” Segaloff concludes. “All three attempts to extend its legacy — ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic,’ ‘The Exorcist III’ and ‘Dominion’ — required extensive reshoots and re-edits that cost millions of extra dollars and still resulted in commercial and critical failures. Whether the same fate will befall the new trilogy, due to unfold in October 2023, is unknown.”

But are there diehard horror fans still looking forward to it and hoping?

Hell, yes.