The Truth Behind the Hidden Demon in ‘The Exorcist’

I had seen The Exorcist before, but it was an even more disturbing experience to watch it frame by frame. That’s what my friends and I did in the early 1990s, when we were high school students working on a class project about the history of subliminal messaging in media.

We adjusted the levels on the most sophisticated stereo we could find to isolate that part at the very end of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” where a distorted voice supposedly says, “I buried Paul.” A generation before us, that short clip of audio fortified conspiracy theories that Paul McCartney (still with us today) had actually died in 1966. We studied a 1973 book called Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key, about how covert messages could be deployed as sales tools. The five of us struggled to find the nude figures he claimed were hidden in the ice cubes of old liquor ads. (And some of us were really looking.)

We also went to the video store to rent a copy of The Exorcist, which had long been rumored to contain subliminal imagery aimed at disturbing viewers in ways they could never fully comprehend. We tried to go frame by frame through the 1973 demonic-possession film, or at least moment by moment, as painstakingly as the crude tech of pausing and unpausing a VHS player would allow.

Then we found something. The young priest Father Karras (played by Jason Miller) has a dream about his recently deceased mother descending the steps into a subway station with an agonized expression on her face. We Catholic school kids understood what that represented—a descent into hell, no doubt. But that was symbolism, not subliminal-ism. In the midst of that sequence, however, comes a split-second flash followed by the momentary appearance of a horrid white face, sneering with decayed teeth, eyes pooling in red sores. It’s terrifying—but barely perceptible.

The face appears for only a handful of frames, and while that might be enough for a viewer to briefly register the image, it’s not long enough for one to actually grasp it. Moviegoers in 1973 would have been left unsure about what, if anything, they had just seen, creating fertile ground for terror. We counted that as proof that there really were subliminal techniques at play in The Exorcist.

While that pallid demonic face is unnerving, it’s also clearly a person in makeup, deliberately slipped into the edit. But as we continued to parse the movie, we found something our minds couldn’t explain as easily.

It happens about 49 minutes into the film, when the possessed young girl, Regan (played by Linda Blair), thrashes on her bed as a team of doctors visit her home. Her eyes roll back and her throat bulges grotesquely (both effectively creepy makeup effects). Then she vaults onto her feet, hauls back her hand, and knocks one of the approaching doctors across the room.

There are a lot of rapid cuts in the sequence, and as we paused and unpaused, looking for hidden images, we saw the young girl’s face suddenly distort. Her eyes became fathomless black pits, her hair appeared to curl into horns, and her face suddenly became more stoic and imposing. We halted on the image, staring at those empty sockets.