Cast: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb
Director: William Friedkin
Running time: 132 mins
Rating: R16 (horror scenes and offensive language)
Opens: Thursday, Village, Hoyts and Berkeley cinemas
Review: Peter Calder
Revisiting the film widely touted as the scariest ever made is an odd experience, particularly as I remember
William Peter Blatty's novel - which kept me riveted until the small hours, then flesh-crawlingly awake until dawn - as more terrifying than the 1973 film.
The transition from printed page to screen seemed oddly to drain the story - about a teenager possessed by the Devil - of some of its horror, as if no film image could equal the excesses of the human imagination - though the swivelling head brought a shiver for years.
Still, the original was a huge and horrifying hit, nominated for 10 Oscars (though winning only two, for Blatty's screenplay and for sound design) and earning more than any film before it, except The Godfather.
This new version which bills itself variously as "the director's cut" and "William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist" adds 11 minutes to the original two-hour running time, including a chilling early sequence of medical tests (the more impressive for having dated so much that the technology looks almost medieval) and Blair's fabled spider walk - both of which are unremarkable, even effective.
But, objectionably, it elongates the closing scene with a conversation between Lee J. Cobb's detective and the Jesuit Father Karras (Miller), which is intensely disruptive. For the rest, filmgoers reared on the Alien films or battered by the excesses of Wes Craven's Freddie Kruger may find little here that chills the blood. Many moments seem hammy now, and once von Sydow's Father Merrin begins his godly work, the film hits high gear and stays there.
What does impress is the film's early command of suspense (Hitchcock knew we were always more frightened of what might be about to happen in a movie than what did). It seems slow to get going (Merrin does not arrive at the house until well into the second hour), but the malevolence simmering beneath the calm exterior is truly nasty.
Whether it still lives up to its billing as "the most terrifying movie ever made" is, 27 years on, a moot point; Polanski's Repulsion, seems to me one of several more serious contenders. But, if nothing else, the re-release underlines the achievement of the original, one of the American cinema's true landmarks.
