Face to Face: William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ Gave Us the Scariest Shot in Movie History

The Exorcist has two reputations. First, it’s one of the greatest horror movies ever made — one of the greatest movies ever made period — and a landmark in the New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, a movement in the shadow of which intelligent American filmmakers have been laboring ever since. Second, it convinced not only its viewers but even people associated with the film (particularly, rumor has it, Warner Bros. PR) that its connection with the darkness was powerful enough to call down an actual curse on the production. That same perceived connection led to something approaching mass hysteria upon the film’s release, causing an uptick in interest in the occult and Satanic worship that would feed the eventual Satanic Panic. Without the images provided by The Exorcist, it’s reasonable to conclude many people simply wouldn’t have known what to panic about. 

To a certain extent, I get it. Like countless movie lovers, the news of the death of the movie’s director, the fearsomely intelligent genre filmmaker William Friedkin, moved me to revisit The Exorcist that night. I found it to be what I always find it to be: sublime.

I really mean that, in the quasi-religious sense of the word. When we watch young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) levitate off her bed in cruciform shape before the eyes of the two desperate, shaken priests trying to save her, the effect is monumental, transcendental, like we’re witnessing the unveiling of some terrible ancient idol. It’s a glimpse into the preternatural power of the anti-divine — a small-scale photonegative of David Bowman’s journey beyond the infinite in 2001. 

Watching it again last night, even though I’ve seen it, god, dozens of times perhaps, it moved me to tears from sheer awe. It is transcendent filmmaking. Small wonder people thought they were seeing something connected to the real deal. Such is the power of cinema. Like I said, the film has its reputation for a reason. 

I was aware of that reputation the first time I watched The Exorcist in my parents’ basement as a high-school sophomore many years ago. A surprisingly timid teenager given my later interests, I was just dipping my toes into the world of “serious” horror films. Though my young life revolved around monsters of all kinds — from Godzilla to the Universal Studios gang to Greek mythology to Jabba’s palace — and though I’d already gotten into Stephen King novels in middle school, the thought of sitting down in the dark to watch something that was out to scare me really badly, on purpose, had been too much to contemplate. For crying out loud, the cover art for the horror movies at the video store freaked me out badly enough as it was. 

So I spent that first viewing in a pretty much constant state of rapt, panic-tinged terror. Drawn into the film’s strange alternating rhythms — periods of disorienting silence followed by segments of equally disorienting cacophony, the bright lights of a desert archaeological dig or a well-lit Georgetown townhouse trading eights with the shadows of a lightless attic and the blue-white corpselight of pure evil glowing in the darkness — I was primed to be receptive to every move Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty (adapting his own novel) made to frighten me. 

At the same time, the suite of tremendous performances — Linda Blair as the sweet and tormented child Regan MacNeil; Ellen Burstyn as her famous, no-bullshit, increasingly desperate mother Chris; Jason Miller as the byronic, guilt-ridden, doubt-stricken priest Father Damien Karras; Max von Sydow, playing a man decades his senior (he was actually 43 years old, under incredibly effective age makeup) in Father Lankester Merrin, marching inexorably to his own doom — made this not just a technical achievement in a film’s ability to frighten, but what Boogie Nights would refer to as “a real film, Jack.” These people were as complex and alive as anyone in contemporary films by Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, and the rest of the Hollywood upstarts. This, too, is actually somewhat ruthless on Friedkin’s part: The great horror directors know you need real people, not dolls you move around from one kill to the next, to make your movie work real dark magic.

The darkest moment of that magic, however…this I was not prepared for.

It happens in a dream. Passed out drunk while mourning his impoverished mother’s death and crippled by guilt because he wasn’t there for her when she died, the psychiatrist priest Fr. Karras has a sinister dream. Some parts are easy enough to contextualize: His mother’s muted descent into a subway station despite Damien’s desperate pleas represents her death and his guilt.

Other elements cannot be rationally explained. He sees a dog, an echo of the scene from the opening sequence where wild dogs growl and tear at each other as Fr. Merrin confronts the statue of the demon who will come to possess young Regan. He sees the pendulum from the clock in Merrin’s office, somehow. He sees his own Saint Joseph’s medal — the same kind of medal buried with a miniature of that demonic idol dug up by Merrin — falling through the air to the ground; this medal, we will learn, is a ward against evil, a ward he will tear away.

And he sees this. And I saw this. And I just about lost my mind from fear.

If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

The closest thing I’d experienced to it before was actually very similar: the initial shot of the two murdered little girls in The Shining, the other horror masterwork I used as my intro to the genre. (I jumped right into the deep end as you can tell.) Like the Face, the “Twins” appeared first in the mind of the protagonist before we saw them for real; they were motionless; they were silent; they were here and gone in a flash, faux-subliminally. 

In both cases, though I lacked the language to describe it yet, they made me feel like the story, the film, even reality itself had been hacked, by malevolent forces not of this world. As with the transmission that reveals the arrival of the title character in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which I wouldn’t see until deep into adulthood, the characters receive these broadcasts as a dream, but it is not a dream. “What you are seeing is actually occurring.” 

These images were darkness leaking into the world, that’s how I felt. It’s how I’d feel years later when I first encountered the supernatural horror present in David Lynch’s work, too: Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return. Friedkin, Kubrick, Lynch: They tapped into the void, the true black. My encounter with that darkness was the awakening of the Horror Person inside me all along. When I rewound the dream to see the Face again even though I was scared worse than I’d ever been by anything I’d ever watched, I was chasing that high. I had to mainline it.

I’ve since come to learn that I’m not alone in having done this kind of thing. Last week, before William Friedkin’s death, I was coincidentally asking around on social media if anyone else had ever instantly rewound and rewatched something that had badly frightened them. The results were conclusive: Yes, this is a thing. People cited images from Psycho, The Ring, The Thing, The Blair Witch Project, Mulholland Drive, Under the Skin, Hereditary, Unedited Footage of a Bear — a murderer’s row of the best horror movies ever made. 

M. Night Shyamalan actually worked the phenomenon into his horror film Signs. The character played by Joaquin Phoenix character is so terrified by videotaped eyewitness footage of an alien that he leaps from his chair, hand covering his mouth in shock…then watches again as the footage is promptly rewound and shown once more. This isn’t just a jump scare, the movie says, though it is that, too. This is something that should not be, and yet there it is, and you’re going to feast your eyes and glut your soul. 

The same can be said about the Face, a jump scare with few of the attributes we associate with the technique. No loud noises. No long buildup. No tension-building music from the score, or slow movements through darkened corridors toward a dreadful destination by the characters. It’s just something that appears in Father Karras’s head, and which from that point forward never left mine.

Sadly, some viewers of the film over the past twenty-odd years have been denied this experience. In a cut alternately billed as “Extended, Director’s” (it was actually approved by William Peter Blatty, who adapted the screenplay from his novel), or “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” our first glimpse of the face is moved up to an earlier scene, and it doesn’t work at all. The new shot lasts a little too long, the Face is a little too lively (revealing that it’s just someone in fright makeup, which the pseudo-subliminal briefness of the original shot helps to hide), and it’s removed from the disorienting context of a drunken, faithless priest’s dream, instead appearing in the cold light of an exam room at a hospital. It even shows up a couple of times after the dream, clumsily superimposed on dark surfaces in Chris and Regan’s home. It’s all wrong.

But back in 1973, William Friedkin got it right. The late director spent his career wedding his absolutely ruthless proficiency as a genre filmmaker to material that drew the darkness out of those genres and held it up to the flickering light. (Run, don’t walk, to To Live and Die in L.A. if you want to see a cops-and-robbers crime thriller that feels so corrupt it might devour itself as you watch.) This one brief shot is a crystallization of all his skills as a filmmaker. It’s his millisecond masterpiece.

As I mentioned above, in his characteristically irascible fashion, Friedkin was not nuts about how the shot caught on, nor how you can now just look at it at your leisure. But if that long-ago me could have spoken to him, he’d have told Friedkin not to worry. I rewound and rewatched not to defuse the image’s power with familiarity, but to confront it. I was Merrin, standing on that rock, staring down the statue. I was Karras, locked in battle with the evil that assuaged his doubts about the world beyond even as it assaulted his mind in the world of flesh and blood. I forcing myself to confront the dark numinous — to touch the transcendent, terrifying though that prospect may be. William Friedkin gave all that to me, with one shot.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.