The Exorcist and why demonic possession taps into our darkest fears

However, when it comes to demonic possession in modern pop culture, there is one ur-text: the late, great William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist, which turns 50 in December. One of the undisputed masterpieces of cinema, horror or otherwise, it is based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. Like the book, it tells the story of Regan, a young girl in Washington DC who is possessed by a demon and saved by Catholic priests. Alongside its anniversary celebrations, meanwhile, comes this week’s release of David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer, the latest in a line of legacy sequels (or requels) seeking to restart a powerful horror property afresh (Gordon Green has experience in this area, having previously rebooted the Halloween franchise with great commercial success).

The Exorcist: Believer shares little with its predecessor, bar the name and Hollywood legend Ellen Burstyn’s brief reprisal of her role as Chris MacNeil, the mother of Regan in the original, who is now a celebrated author and exorcism expert. It follows the distraught families of two girls, Angela and Katherine, who dabble with spiritualism and become possessed by an unnamed demon (maybe the franchise’s on-running demon Pazuzu, maybe not). Angela’s father, played by Leslie Odom Jr, carries most of the film, his anguish at the suffering he observes in his daughter mirroring that of Chris watching Regan’s thrashing and suffering.  

A truly shocking phenomenon

When it was released in the US in 1973, The Exorcist was more than a film, it was a true cultural phenomenon. Perhaps that was because of the society it was born into, one where religious faith was on the downslide, and there was distrust in a government plagued with scandals like Watergate. There was a collective crisis of faith and an anguished desire to find a culprit, and the devil was as great a scapegoat as any. What’s more, with the advent of the hippie movement of the 60s and early 70s, there was a real cultural divide between generations opening up – so the idea of a young person possessed by dark forces would have resonated with many older audience members who saw their children become alien to them.

“It’s very easy to underestimate how something so novel could capture the zeitgeist,” filmmaker Alexandre O Phillippe, director of Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (2019) tells BBC Culture. “It’s a film about love, guilt and very powerful human emotions. What do you do when your child becomes possessed by something you do not understand, and your’e helpless in the face of that.”

When the film opened in the US on Boxing Day 1973, there were huge queues of patrons, with one New York Times article reporting that in New York scalpers were selling tickets for $50, and a security guard was receiving offers of $110 (that’s around $768 in today’s money) to skip to the front of the queue. It reported, too, that there had been audience members vomiting, passing out, experiencing convulsions and even, allegedly, suffering a miscarriage.