'The Exorcist': The real-life horror stories behind the making of William Friedkin's 1973 horror classic

Whether spinning cinematic yarns about New York cops or a South American convo, the late William Friedkin prized authenticity above all things. That even applied to scenarios that seemed beyond the realm of reality. Fifty years ago, Friedkin unleashed The Exorcist on the moviegoing masses, and horror movies have never been the same. The director's methodical approach to the supernatural is part of the reason why that film continues to stand tall amid its many imitators and inferior sequels — including the just-released, The Exorcist: Believer.

Of course, Friedkin was well-aware that he wasn't directing a documentary at the time. "Blatty made it all up," the filmmaker told Yahoo Entertainment in 2018, referring to author William Peter Blatty, who wrote the 1971 bestseller that begat the 1973 blockbuster. It's worth noting that Blatty was inspired to write the book after hearing about a real-life exorcism — the 1949 case of "Roland Doe," who received multiple Catholic Church-administered exorcisms.

But Friedkin said that Blatty conjured much of his story out of whole cloth. "He could not get information from the Church about it. And I had never seen an exorcism before I did that movie." [Blatty died in 2017; Friedkin passed away in August.]

That lack of firsthand knowledge proved to be a benefit, as it emboldened Friedkin to stage heightened scares that were grounded in realistic settings and relationships, specifically the intense mother-daughter bond dramatized by Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn as Regan and Chris MacNeil, respectively. "The Exorcist is a powerful film even if one were to remove the supernatural element," agrees Syracuse University professor and pop culture expert, Kendall Phillips. "At its heart, this is a story about family and abandonment and the prospect for redemption. One of the reasons the supernatural scenes are so potent is they way they often explode into otherwise highly realistic scenes of social drama."

Phillips singles out the infamous crucifix scene as The Exorcist's scariest moment, specifically because of the way it's rooted so strongly in the realism of the relationship between Regan and her mother. "Chris is visibly panicking and then the noises from Regan's bedroom led her upstairs where the supernatural explodes onto the screen. It's the tension created by the quiet scenes that make the cacophony of the horror sequence so powerful."

Scenes like that are also why The Exorcist has defined what an exorcism looks like in the popular imagination for five decades and counting. In fact, when Friedkin released an actual exorcism-themed documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth, in 2018, it notably bore very little resemblance to the green vomit-spitting, spider-walking, head-spinning version that Regan endured at the demonic hands of Pazuzu. But it was still convincing enough for the filmmaker. "I believe I saw an exorcism," he said matter-of-factly. "I can’t tell you with absolute certainty, but what I saw was definitely a serious procedure to give aid to a woman who was in great need of it."

Behind the scenes, though, The Exorcist's cast and crew struggled with Friedkin's intense demands during the course of the movie's famously strenuous shoot. Over the years, some of those war stories have been shared in books such as Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which included tales of Friedkin firing guns on set to provoke reactions from actors, and slapping an actual priest — Father William O’Malley, who appears in the film as Father Dyer — across the face before a take.

And Burstyn has a physical reminder of her hardest day on the set, when she hurt her back in the middle of a take while being pulled backwards onto the floor — a moment that can be glimpsed in the finished film. Speaking with the Oscar-winning actress in 2018, Burstyn told Yahoo Entertainment that her memory of that scene is "preserved in my back."

"I’m very well aware of exactly where I landed on the floor — I can feel it," continued Burstyn, who reprises her role as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist: Believer. "A massage therapist was just working on it today, and I was telling him about it. It’s a permanent companion.”

The scene in question occurs a little over an hour into the film, when Regan is in the full throes of possession and her mother, Chris (Burstyn), enters the girl’s room to find her stabbing herself with a crucifix. After a struggle, Regan punches Chris and she goes flying back across the room. In the 1998 making-of documentary, The Fear of God, Burstyn described having a rig placed around her midriff with a wire that a crew member would pull to give the impression that she was being knocked back with great force.

After one take, she alerted Friedkin that she was being pulled too forcefully. "Billy said, 'Well, it has to look real,'" Burstyn remarks in the documentary. "I said, ‘I understand, but I’m telling you I could get hurt. And the stuntman was standing there listening to this and Billy said to him, 'OK, don’t pull her so hard.' But as I turned away, I felt them exchange a look."

On the next take, the crew member (identified in the documentary as special-effects artist Marcel Vercoutere, who died in 2013) pulled harder, and Burstyn landed badly on her lower back while the cameras rolled, giving an all-too-real cry of pain. Rather than call "cut" immediately, Burstyn remembered Friedkin directing his cinematographer, Owen Roizman, to focus in on the actress. "I was so furious and said, 'Turn the effin’ camera off!' Because I couldn’t stand that he was willing to just get a quick shot of it before they called the ambulance."

"Friedkin’s set has become legendary for his efforts to keep the actor’s on edge and the results are definitely there on the screen," Phillips says about what it's like to watch The Exorcist now knowing that piece of history. "The scene where Chris is flung across the room still feels very visceral and knowing now that her anguish was real makes it even more uncomfortable.

"Indeed, the more we hear about the way actors, often women, were treated in films like The Exorcist or The Shining, the more complicated the viewing experience becomes," Phillips continues. "Burstyn’s commitment is notable and impressive. But those older tactics of shocking and abusing actors has led Hollywood to be more conscious of respecting the actor as a person, not just a role."

In our 2018 interviews with Burstyn and Friedkin — which were conducted separately and weeks apart — both the director and star of The Exorcist made it clear that there was no ill will on either side about that incident. "I was very impressed with Billy’s work," Burstyn remarked at the time. "He does sometimes go a little further than is safe for the actors, and I would caution him to hold back on that, but he was a great director, and I loved working with him."

For his part, Friedkin acknowledged that Burstyn was hurt during the scene but declined to characterize it as an injury — emphasizing that the actress didn’t require any time off from shooting and that no insurance claims were ever filed. "If I hadn’t let the stuntman do that with the force that he did it, she would have had to do it over and over and over again," he says. "I would rather have had one [take] that risked hurting her a little, not injuring her. Yeah, she was hurt. There’s certain things you cannot act, like that sort of hurt."

"In those days, we did what we had to do to get the performance," Friedkin added. "I used that moment. I obviously did not think it was wrong. What she did was she achieved the desired effect."

Reflecting on the scene decades later, Burstyn confirmed that she was furious in the moment, especially when Friedkin kept filming while she was clearly in pain. "I got so angry at him for that; I shouted foul words and told him to turn the camera off." At the same time, she didn't feel the director was out of line to include that take in the film. "I don’t think he asked me, and I don’t know that he had to. It’s not like they’re causing it to happen, but as long as it happened and the camera’s on…"

— This post was originally published on Oct. 24, 2018. It has been updated to reflect recent events.

The Exorcist is currently streaming on Max.