The Exorcist Review

The first hour is the reason this outlasted everything it inspired. Friedkin shoots hospital corridors, arteriograms and psychiatric interviews with the same documentary flatness he brought to his previous picture, so by the time anything supernatural is undeniable the audience has already exhausted every rational explanation alongside Chris MacNeil. Owen Roizman lights the Georgetown house in cold blues and refrigerated air you can almost feel. Ellen Burstyn plays a mother's terror without a single false note, and Jason Miller's Father Karras, a priest whose faith has already gone before the assignment arrives, gives the film its actual subject.

Mercedes McCambridge's voice work is a genuine performance and was disgracefully uncredited at first. Linda Blair carries an impossible role. The film is less frightening than it is oppressive, and a few of the effects, the head turn in particular, now read as technique rather than horror. What has not dated at all is the theology, a story about a man who has stopped believing being asked to save someone anyway.