This review was updated on September 21, 2024
Voted the greatest horror movie ever by Time Out’s expert panel of filmmakers, horror icons and enthusiasts, William Friedkin’s full-throttle adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel works because it fuses the extreme and the everyday, taking a potentially absurd tale of demonic possession and placing it in an ordinary suburban home, incorporating some of the most extreme imagery ever devised but shooting it like straight drama.
It’s also a deeply unusual movie, opening with a lengthy, near-wordless prologue in Iraq which seems to exist purely to invoke a sense of otherworldly dread, before switching abruptly into what could almost be a domestic comedy-drama about a movie-star Mum (Ellen Burstyn) and her cute, comically outspoken 12-year-old daughter, Regan (Linda Blair).
It’s perhaps the most upsetting single image in a Hollywood film
The horrors start fairly subtle – a shaking bed, a spot of memorably foul language – before increasing spectacularly in intensity; the crucifix masturbation that arrives roughly halfway through remains perhaps the most upsetting and transgressive single image in a Hollywood film. It’s notable, however, that in a movie crammed with outrageous supernatural horrors – revolving heads, levitation, buckets of pea-soup vomit – the scenes that hit hardest are those in hospital, as the confused and helpless Regan is subjected to a series of invasive procedures, all under the gaze of Friedkin’s implacable camera.
A box office phenomenon on first release, leading to widespread reports of fainting, puking and audience members experiencing cases of what was dubiously termed ‘cinematic neurosis’, The Exorcist was banned in the UK for decades and only issued on home video in 1999. And despite a veritable cottage industry in exorcism movies and domestic horror, it remains genuinely unnerving to this day – ridiculous in places, faintly despicable in others, but gorgeous to look at and possessed with a sense of absolute, ruthless gravity.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
The Omen (1976); Exorcist III (1990); The Witch (2015)