Nat Segaloff's 'The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear' marks the anniversary of a classic by harking back to how real the horror felt to audiences.
) is at her wit’s end after cycling through a series of doctors who trot out rational diagnoses to explain what might be wrong with poor Regan. In this sense “The Exorcist” isn’t at all fantastical. It’s as lean and blunt as that newspaper headline, or a hard backhand delivered by the demon’s tormented human host.
In his dutiful, soup-to-nuts book about the movie and its legacy, Segaloff, who was publicity director for a Boston theater chain where the movie showed during its original run, addresses the question of what made so many “Exorcist” viewers throw up. The obvious assumption is that it was the projectile pea soup, or the bloody cross, or the spinning head. Not so, insisted Blatty, who claimed to have posted up at the back of a theater to watch the nauseous flee.
In other words, according to Blatty, it was the realistic depiction of a flesh-and-blood medical procedure that made most viewers lose their lunches, rather than any devil play. Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the story speaks to the idea that the movie’s sense of realism is its most disturbing quality. Friedkin is a believer, or at least he sees the advantages of playing one. As Segaloff details, in 2017 Friedkin made a documentary called “
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