Original audience reaction to ‘The Exorcist’ was off the charts

It was December 1973, and a rabid crowd of moviegoers stood in line in the sleet and rain for hours outside Manhattan’s Cinema 1 theater on Second Avenue. Some people lit bonfires to keep warm, while others threatened to storm the movie house if they couldn’t get in.

Some went a different route, offering bribes of more than one hundred dollars to jump to the front of the line.

The movie they were waiting to see was “The Exorcist,” the horrifying tale — based on a reputed real story — of a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil.

The audience reaction to it was so extreme, as author Nat Segaloff describes in his new book, “The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear” (Citadel), it could have called for its own exorcism.

The same kind of crazed scenes were happening nationwide at almost two dozen theaters where thousands would turn out for the premiere of what was being billed as one of the most frightening horror movies ever made — and accurately so.

As Segaloff puts it, when the film opened, “the bedlam began.”

At the Savoy Theater in Boston, “People were running up the aisles and into the lobby, some of them making it out to the street before vomiting, while others did it en route.”

“I couldn’t imagine people being affected like that. I just stood around and watched the crowd; that was a movie in itself,” Tom Kauycheck, the manager of the theater chain, told Segaloff.

“Ticket-holders waiting in line for the next performance would see the distressed faces of those leaving and pump themselves into a frenzy even before the lights went down.”

One critic, Stuart Byron, wrote in his review that “the film had made him sick.”

Screenwriter and novelist William Peter Blatty recalled attending the first public press preview in Manhattan, and later claimed to be “the only person who knows why people got sick.”

He watched as a young woman came up the aisle, and passed by him, saying, “Jesus, Jeeeesus.”

Blatty noted the point at which she fled the theater, and when “everybody got ill… It’s when they’re giving Regan the arteriogram and the needle goes in the neck and the blood comes out. THAT’S the moment it’s always been.”

An usher at the Boston movie house reported that 98 percent of the “people who got sick were men.”

Worse, a few reportedly had heart attacks, and one woman had a miscarriage.

Fifty years later, millions have seen the film, now considered a classic.

Some of the most frightening scenes have since become pop culture legends: Namely, the head of the possessed child played by actress Linda Blair, then 14, doing a 360-degree spin, or her spewing green stuff exiting from her twisted mouth, with a voice sounding like a sanding machine on full grind.

While demonic possession is on the surface of “The Exorcist,” writes Segaloff, “Its emotional core is a mother’s desire to protect her child. And on a more metaphysical level, whether we as humans are worthy of walking on God’s earth.”

It’s a story that has haunted the nightmares of generations of filmgoers and spawned two sequels, a prequel, and a television series, and yet none have matched the success of William Peter Blatty’s screenplay for the original film, says Segaloff.

Today, “The Exorcist” regularly tops any list of the scariest horror movies of all time.

The screenplay was based on Blatty’s bestselling novel, “The Exorcist,” published in 1971.

While a student at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, Blatty had learned from one of his teachers that an exorcism had actually taken place years before in a nearby Maryland suburb involving a teenage boy who had been possessed by the devil and freed during an exorcism.

“So the seed was sewn in the deeply religious Blatty’s heart, soul, and imagination,” writes Segaloff of the author, who died in 2017 at 89.

“Here at last was tangible evidence of transcendence,” he quotes Blatty as saying.

“If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.”

Blatty decided to write about a fictional exorcism case, merging the effects he learned from different exorcisms in to what would become Linda Blair’s character, Regan, who leads a happy life as a Georgetown adolescent — until the devil intercedes.

“I didn’t set out to scare the hell out of people as you do with a horror film. I set out to make a film that would make them think about the concept of good and evil.”

Director William Friedkin

He stated that his purpose in writing the novel and the film was to show that faith can conquer despair and he used possession by the devil to instill doubt in God.

According to Segaloff, every Catholic parish has an exorcist, and all of the Popes have conducted exorcisms, with even a school of exorcism within the Vatican that trains exorcists.

“In 2014, the Vatican officially recognized the International Association of Exorcists, 250 priests in thirty countries who liberate demons from the faithful,” he writes.

“Pope Francis himself was known to have forced four demons from a possessed man in 2013 by laying hands on the victim’s forehead.”

“Every culture has demons, every culture has gods, and every culture has possessions,” the acclaimed Irish folklorist Michael Scott told Segaloff.

“But not every culture deems possession to be evil. It’s really only the Christians who view possession to be evil, and we can lay that on the Church.”

“Catholics believe it works and therefore if you believe it works, it works,” he writes.

The shock impact the film had on the audience, writes Segaloff, was all down to director William Friedkin.

“I didn’t set out to scare the hell out of people as you do with a horror film,” says Friedkin.

“I set out to make a film that would make them think about the concept of good and evil.”

Still, Friedkin worked his Hollywood magic to make it as horrific as possible.

He fired off handguns on the set to register more shock on the actors’ faces.

He belted one actor in the face in order to get a more realistic take, and he even played audio tapes of screams emanating from actual exorcisms.

And he added to the soundtrack the squealing of pigs being led to slaughter and played backward for an even eerier effect.

And while Hollywood stars like Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson wanted desperately to play the role of the exorcist, Father Karras, Friedkin, and Blatty wanted and cast an authentic priest who also could act: Jason Miller, a 33-year-old Jesuit-educated actor-playwright who had recently won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for drama.

In the final scene, Father Karras threw himself out of Regan’s bedroom window to meet his death but kept the devil from killing Regan — concluding that Karras had won the battle with the devil.

Blatty saw this as a triumph of good over evil, but Segaloff had a different take.

His research concluded that some fifty percent of the audience believed that the devil had triumphed.

“When The Exorcist came out,” he writes, “it was just a movie. Over the next 50 years, it became a legend.”

“With Satan, two thousand years of publicity have established him as real to hundreds of millions of believers,” writes the author. “Dracula can’t follow you home from the movie theater. But Satan may be waiting for you when you open the door.”