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Still Turning Heads

An Interview with 'The Exorcist' director, William Friedkin

FOR millions, director William Friedkin's chilling '70s shocker, The Exorcist , represents the ultimate movie bogeyman. More than 30 years after its original release, it still has the power to force grown men and women to peer under their beds once they've seen it.

In 1998, to celebrate the films 25 th anniversary, Warner Bros saw fit to release it to a fresh audience in its original form. For those who saw and were terrified by it in 1973, it was an opportunity to test their mettle again. For modern filmgoers, either curious about its content or reputation, it was a chance to see a film banned from UK home videos since 1985.

The Exorcist , more than any other film, falls into the "must see" bracket. Its reputation, based on its premise of a young girl possessed by an ancient demon, is so overwhelming, the word-of-mouth so compelling, that many will want simply to see what all the fuss is about. Some will be as frightened as those who saw it in 1973, when the hysteria over the film prompted the religious Right to picket theatres across America and the UK. Influential evangelist Billy Graham petitioned it. Some cinemas refused to screen it. Others will not be as easily impressed.

Seen today, The Exorcist seems ponderous, its plot slow to get going. Some of the acting seems laboured. Even the most talked-about sequences - the child-demon vomiting green muck over the priest, turning its head 360 degrees and speaking in a skin-crawling croak - seem clichéd. Yet the scenes of the possessed child, convincingly played by 12-year-old Linda Blair, retain their power to shock. The majority of the film, however, appears not to stand the test of time.

But in 32 years The Exorcist has never been topped as the benchmark horror film of the modern era. Perhaps Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist came close, in 1981, but even then it lacked the chilling, claustrophobic nature of those scenes in The Exorcist when an elderly, sick priest stares into the face of a little girl and sees only the baleful eyes of a demon.

For director William Friedkin the film remained the one he set out to make. He had no intention of amending it, restoring so-called "lost" footage of the child walking like a spider down a set of steps, or remaking it for a new audience. Nevertheless, that's exactly what he did in 2000 with the release of the so-called ‘director's cut', which re-introduced 11 minutes of previously unseen footage.

Speaking in 1998 he said: " The Exorcist has not lost its power to move me after 25 years. I still find it very intense and very powerful. This is the only film of mine in which I wouldn't change a frame. I love the performances. The actors really embody their characters, and I wouldn't have any other actors play any of these roles if I could reach back into history.

"The spider scene was over the top. There was so much going on in the film in terms of the apparition and special effects, that I just felt that that was one too many. There were four or five other scenes, which I will not be re-integrating into the film.

"I don't feel that the film requires them. I didn't at the time. I cut them either for reasons of redundancy or, in the case of the spider walk, because it was not necessary. Nothing was cut for censorship."

The film was based on a real-life incident in Maryland in 1949. It involved a boy, but by the time author William Peter Blatty got round to writing his best-selling novel, the possessed had become a girl. Though the movie was a firm favourite at midnight cinema shows, it had not been available on video in the UK since 1985, when it was withdrawn following the "video nasty" clampdown.

James Ferman, former head of the British Board of Film Classification and the man who pulled the film out of circulation, explained why. "The problem with The Exorcist is not that it's a bad film, it's a very good film. It's one of the most powerful films ever made," he told the BBC's Exorcist documentary The Fear of God .

"The child losing control is terrifying. You really feel she is being lost in the course of the film because everybody else - the priest, her mother - is losing the ability to intervene. The fact is that you are importing it into children's homes and now, probably, into children's bedrooms as more than 50 per cent have a television in their bedroom, and many of them have a video as well. So it could become a very private experience that they have in the dark, in bed watching something, in the old-fashioned sense, 'coming to get them'."

Friedkin has his own thoughts on the UK ban. "I think it should be up to the public to decide if they want to see the video or the film, I don't think the Government should dictate that to people. I'm aware of the concern over young children seeing it, but again I think that's a parental responsibility, or should be, more than a responsibility of the state.

"The controversy has always surprised me. I always felt that the film was powerful and intense, but why it spurred so many emotions, both positive and negative, still escapes me."