The Exorcist

There’s a reason The Exorcist keeps resurfacing in conversations about the best horror films of its era: it simply refuses to be dated. You can tell a lot about a movie from its tagline, and “Something almost beyond comprehension is happening to a girl on this street, in this house…And a man has been sent for as a last resort. This man is The Exorcist.” gives away the game in the best way.

The story kicks off from a clean, almost deceptively simple place: When a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life. Ellen Burstyn anchors the film, backed by a supporting turn from Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow that adds real weight to the quieter scenes.

Beneath the horror scaffolding, The Exorcist is quietly working through some heavier material. There’s a clear preoccupation with based on novel or book here, and it’s paired with demon in a way that gives the whole thing more staying power than a plot summary suggests. You can also feel paranormal phenomena and possession working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

Part of what makes The Exorcist work is how comfortably it sits at the intersection of horror. Rather than picking one lane and staying in it, the film borrows tonal shifts from each label attached to it, which is exactly why it resists easy summary in a single sentence.

Watching The Exorcist, it’s clear William Friedkin had a specific vision for how each scene should feel, and that clarity carries the film through its slower stretches. The rest of the ensemble matters too — Jason Miller, Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb all get moments that push the story forward rather than just filling out the frame, which is more than you can say for a lot of films with casts this size.

The runtime, 122 minutes, is used efficiently — there’s very little fat on this one. Hoya Productions, Warner Bros. Pictures produced the film, and the polish shows in every frame. The economics alone are worth mentioning: a $11,000,000 budget turned into $430,872,776 in worldwide grosses.

If you’re the kind of viewer who gravitates toward horror films with something on their mind, The Exorcist earns a spot on the list. Love it or merely admire it, The Exorcist is hard to walk away from without an opinion — which, for a horror film, is exactly the point. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of The Exorcist, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good horror film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — The Exorcist is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and The Exorcist lands closer to the latter.