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The Ultimate Terror
Today marks the 34th anniversary of possibly the greatest horror movie of all time, The Exorcist. The movie opened in theaters in 1973, on the day after Christmas and the theatrical movie experience shocked and terrified the world.
The origainal trailer was one of the most effective movie trailers ever. It gave you just enough that you wanted more and still scared the shit out of you. Here is the original trailer.
The movie was unlike anything anybody had ever scene. It wasn’t your traditional horror movie, with the big over-sized creatures or a fantastical story that you couldn’t relate to. It was real. It was based on a real life story of a small child who was possessed by something evil. It was a movie that had an everyday regular family, real life situations and it made you feel like this could happen to you.
The movie let you briefly grow into the family and made you genuinely like Regan. You start to relate to the family, they are just like you and your family and friends. Then once they sucked you, the evil starts to take over. At first, you didn’t know what was happening or why. The evil though, begins to get more intense and unexpected and by that point you are scared to death.
The setting seemed real, the actions seemed real, and the evil was the most terrifying thing that had ever appeared on the big screen. Linda Blair, who was only 14 at the time The Exorcist was made and she was incredible. The sweet lovable Regan produced some of the most vial, distributing, disturbing acts ever put on the screen, even to this day.
The movie is still terrifying. It sticks with you and makes you think about what you just watched, hours after seeing it. The images are stuck in your brain forever and the horror still seems real. There were many people that couldn’t make it through the movie and walked out, because they were to scared or disgusted by what they were seeing. Some people tried to make it through the whole movie, but never made it because they passed out in horror. Alot of other threw up during the movie. Here is the ending of an E! channel special, of footage of people leaving the theaters in 1973, after just seeing the movie.
The Exorcist still has an effect on the horror movies made today. People are still trying to recreate the feeling the movie-goers got when watching this, but the fail miserably. Sequels and prequels are still being made and the theme is a staple of every ghost show on T.V.
The movie has also been the source of several parodies. This one from French & Saunders At The Movies, is my favorite.
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3 Responses to “The Ultimate Terror”
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Here here. Just a bad ass movie that still holds up and shames just about everything else out there today. So well done, so thoughful, so well acted, perfect casting, thought provoking, delightfully subversive and subversively sublime. It’s the perfect storm of movies.
Well said Eric, well said.
Excellent post; terrific clips.
Medavidson has it right - a perfect storm of a movie.
I wish it would happen more than once every 30 years, though.