The Exorcist (1973)

Best movie ever!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I recently revisited this film on Blu-ray after some 45 years. It still rates as one of my favourite horror films, one of my top ten films and a masterpiece of film making. Beautiful photography, great locations, sets, special effects and acting. It still stands up as a great film today

I am a Christian and do not find this offensive. It's just a movie, and Satan is shown in a negative light. Despite a slow beginning, it is essential and the rest of the movie is the payoff. There are many scary scenes such as a scene where a girl must jab her groin with a crucifix(to which she says the above quote.) She spins her head, spider crawls backwards while vomiting blood, she vomits all over people, pees in front of house guests, and more. While I can't personally say it's the scariest movie I have ever seen, or of all time as my DVD case claims, it was definitely terrifying and made for a good horror movie. I say it's worth a watch.

What do you write about a movie that pretty much created modern horror? Sure, you can point to Night of the Living Dead and even Carnival of Souls as starting points, but from a mainstream blockbuster perspective, this is where the rules of modern supernatural horror begin.Inspired by William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel, which itself was inspired by the 1949 exorcism of Roland Doe ("The Pope's Exorcist" Malachi Martin claimed that he was the inspiration, a point that Blatty denied) the legends around this film - it was a cursed set, it's filled with subliminal messages - supersede a very simple fact: this movie is frightening as hell, even 40 plus years later.Do I even need to tell you the story of how Pazuzu finds its way into an Ouija board and into the soul of the daughter of an actress? Probably not. What's striking is that how long the movie takes to get there. Scenes of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) acting take precedence over the sad life of Father Karras, who has to deal with the death of his mother and his increasing lack of faith.When do we realize something is wrong? When it is too late. When Regan (Linda Blair) intrudes on one of her mother's boring parties, pisses on the floor and tells an astronaut "You're gonna die up there." Science can't solve these issues. Detectives cannot. Only the Church can help.What follows is a haunted house of scares that have been imitated ad nauseum (pun intended) so many times that we know the beats: head spinning, pea soup vomit, masturbation with a cross, blood, strange voices, levitation. A priest must show weakness before showing great sacrifice. And in the end, two old men find friendship in the aftermath.As for viewers today, they may be surprised at the sinister power that this movie still holds.

I'm long overdue for my review of The Exorcist. Brilliantly conceived by William Peter Blatty, a graduate of Georgetown University, he knew how to research and write the perfect exorcism motion picture. The acting is superb. The drama unfolds with artistry. The music is poignant, simple, sparse. The effects are proper, never over the top, and convey absolute terror. Two favorite moments occur between Max von Sydow and Jason Miller. A presentation worthy of the novel that inspired it, The Exorcist has been referred to by my colleagues as the scariest movie they've ever seen. I concur. The nature of evil is identified and exposed, hope is offered. The Exorcist continues to speak thus, such fear and wisdom, to the generations.