Flashback: ‘The Exorcist’ Gets a Face Full of Pea Soup Vomit
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In the most memorable scene from The Exorcist, the demon inside preteen Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) taunts Father Karras (Jason Miller), telling him that his recently deceased mother was in hell with it. “If that’s true, then you must know my mother’s maiden name,” Karras tells her, smirking. “What is it?” The answer wasn’t so much a word as a growl and maybe a gallon of green, sticky vomit. From his reaction, that wasn’t her maiden name.
“Over the years, everyone refers to the vomit here as pea soup, but it was really porridge with pea soup coloring — it had a much better texture than pure pea soup,” director William Friedkin, who died Monday, explained in a 2008 interview with DGA Quarterly. “We used a very thin plastic tube that ran from the side of Linda’s mouth underneath her nightgown right down to the floor, where a special effects technician was stationed with a jerry-rigged pump and a hand crank. On cue, she would tilt her head the right way and he would pump the stuff up through the tube and, seemingly, out of her mouth. The consistency of the porridge is what determined the speed at which it would move through the pump.”
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“I think the vomit has such power because it come as such a surprise,” Blair said years later in a film about the making of the movie. “Why would anybody think that all of a sudden this green bile would come out of this person, and it’s the most disgusting thing you can do. People don’t like to be spit on, let alone vomited on in such a way. And of course, it’s the Devil’s way of really trying to degrade both priests.” Behind-the-scenes footage shows the special effects team testing out different kinds of vomit apparatuses to see just where the puke would land.
Almost as soon as the movie came out in 1973, the scene became iconic. Saturday Night Live parodied it in its first season, in 1975, with Richard Pryor playing the Karras role and Laraine Newman playing Regan. (Pryor ended up getting a bowl of literal pea soup in the face.) In Repossessed (1990), a spoof with Leslie Nielsen and Blair, the priest (Nielsen) preps to do battle by drinking pea soup. And in Scary Movie 2 (2001), there’s a role reversal. Shrek even got in on the fun in 2010 with a short called The Shreksorcist. (You’ll never guess who spits what in that one.)
Friedkin later explained why he felt people could find humor in the scene. “When I set out to create the illusion of all this stuff happening, I had no idea if it would ever work or whether an audience would laugh,” Friedkin said in the behind-the-scenes featurette on the movie. “And on many occasions, an audience would laugh at some of the most extreme effects because laughter is a reaction to something that you can’t really let in or tolerate. Very often an audience reaction is ‘Ha ha ha, that doesn’t really bother me, I could laugh that off.'”
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