This film will scare the Hell out of you and the Heaven into you... literally...if you have been brought up as religious as I was. (I am a Catholic right from the cradle and am a former Alter Boy.) If you are religious it will frighten you as it did me. If not, that's okay, too and you'll find it an entertaining entry in the "demonic possession," genre. The film, allegedly based on facts, (that alone made it seem even more frightening at the time of its release) was calculated to keep your stomach in knots and to give you goose pimples as large as the measles or chicken pox all over your body from start to finish, and it succeeds in every way due to the direction, art, staging, and acting of the principals involved. If you do watch it, you'll be riveted to your seat throughout this film as my friend and I were. It all starts as a childish game of playing with an Oui-Ja board, through which little Regan (Blair) accidentally conjures up the devil (an altogether real possibility while playing with Oui-Ja boards) and subsequently becomes possessed by the devil (also a real possibility, because that's, allegedly, how the actual child came to be possessed in real-life, inspiring the book and subsequent film). After all Hell breaks loose in the house, Regan's mother (Burstyn) takes her to a local church, and the pastor calls in the Exorcist (von Sydow) to (hopefully) save her daughter. Will he succeed or will the devil kill little Regan and drag her soul to Hell? Watch and find out. At the time of its release, the film was billed as the most frightening film ever made, and it was. (You gotta remember...this was the early '70s when censorship was still going strong and films didn't show much on-screen, nor did they infer very much in the dialog, either except in "X-rated" films, which this wasn't. It was "only" rated "R".) If you watch this film, don't do it alone. I watched this film in 1973 at the age of 17 at a local theater with a friend (a fellow Alter Boy like myself) when it was first released because our local church banned it (or, rather us Catholics from watching it) and we wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. Anyway, at the theater, they were handing out sickness bags at the door, which I think, but am not sure, was a gag, intended to frighten us even more. Gag or not,it sure frightened us, alright. (Well, ME anyway.) Watch this film, but if you do, be sure to keep your sickness bag handy...you just might need it.
Review of The Exorcist
