Few films in Hollywood history have shaken audiences the way The Exorcist did in 1973. When it opened in theaters on December 26th of that year, people lined up around the block in freezing temperatures just to get a seat. What they experienced inside left many of them pale, shaking, and sick. Some theaters reportedly handed out vomit bags. Paramedics were called to screenings. The film was, by any measure, unlike anything audiences had seen before.
The story behind the film goes back further than Hollywood. Author William Peter Blatty based his 1971 novel — which the screenplay was adapted from — on a real case of alleged demonic possession. The subject was a young boy known publicly by the pseudonym Roland Doe. In 1949, a series of deeply disturbing events were reported in connection with this boy in the Washington, D.C. and St. Louis areas. Priests performed a formal exorcism. Blatty, then a student at Georgetown University, read about the case in a newspaper and never forgot it. Years later, he wrote the novel. Director William Friedkin then took that material and turned it into one of the most talked-about films ever made.
Friedkin was known for his gritty, realistic style — he had just won the Academy Award for Best Director for The French Connection in 1972. He brought that same raw approach to The Exorcist. He wanted everything to feel real, not theatrical. That meant pushing his cast and crew hard, building elaborate sets, and using practical effects that required serious technical skill and physical commitment from the actors.
Twelve-year-old Linda Blair was cast as Regan MacNeil, the young girl at the center of the possession. Blair had limited acting experience, but she delivered a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Much of what she did on screen required extreme physical endurance. She was strapped into a mechanical rig that shook and jerked her body violently for the film’s possession sequences. She wore heavy prosthetic makeup that took hours to apply each day. For the scenes where Regan’s voice takes on a demonic quality, actress Mercedes McCambridge provided the voice, recorded separately and dubbed in during post-production.
Ellen Burstyn played Regan’s mother, Chris MacNeil. Burstyn also endured physical hardship during filming. In one scene where Chris is thrown across the room by an unseen force, a stunt harness yanked Burstyn backward so hard that she injured her tailbone. The scream heard in the film during that take is real — it’s the sound of her in actual pain. Friedkin kept the take.
Max von Sydow played Father Merrin, the elder priest brought in to perform the exorcism. Von Sydow was only 44 years old at the time of filming, but the role required him to appear as a much older man. The makeup department aged him significantly for the part. His scenes in the film are some of the most iconic, particularly the opening shot in Iraq and his arrival at the MacNeil house — a still image that became one of the most recognizable frames in film history.
Jason Miller played Father Karras, the younger priest wrestling with a crisis of faith. Miller was primarily a playwright, not an actor, and The Exorcist was one of his first major film roles. Friedkin chose him specifically because he wanted someone who carried a genuine sense of inner conflict. Miller’s portrayal earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
The production was filmed primarily on location in Washington, D.C., with key interior scenes shot on meticulously built sets at Ceco Studios in New York. The famous bedroom set — where most of the possession scenes take place — was refrigerated to extremely low temperatures so that the actors’ breath would be visible on screen. Temperatures on set reportedly dropped to well below freezing during filming. Cast and crew wore heavy coats between takes and rushed back under the lights to stay warm.
The Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. served as the real-world location for the MacNeil house exterior and the now-famous stone staircase where one of the film’s most shocking moments unfolds. Local residents were both frustrated and fascinated by the months-long production in their neighborhood. The house used for exterior shots still stands today at 3600 Prospect Street NW.
The special effects work on The Exorcist was groundbreaking for its time. Dick Smith, one of Hollywood’s most respected makeup artists, was responsible for Regan’s possessed appearance — the cracked, blistered skin, the yellowed eyes, the grotesque transformations. Each stage of her deterioration required a different makeup design and hours of careful application. Smith’s work set a new standard for horror makeup in cinema.
The vomit projectile scene — one of the most notorious moments in the film — was achieved using a mechanical pump system. A tube was concealed near Blair’s face, and a mixture was pumped through it at high pressure, directed at Jason Miller. The effect worked so well that it has been replicated and referenced in films and television for decades since.
The bed levitation scene required a complex mechanical platform built beneath the mattress. Blair was strapped down while the platform lifted, all while she performed her lines and reacted physically to the priests trying to hold her down. The effect was seamless enough that audiences debated for years how it was done.
Friedkin was notorious on set for his unconventional methods of getting authentic reactions from his actors. He fired a gun near actors without warning to capture genuine shock. He slapped crew members before takes. He pushed everyone around him to their emotional and physical limits in pursuit of performances that felt real rather than acted.
The film’s production was plagued by accidents and strange occurrences that fed a reputation for being cursed. A fire broke out on set and destroyed much of the interior except for Regan’s bedroom. Several people connected to the production died during or shortly after filming. Actor Jack MacGowran, who played Burke Dennings, died of influenza shortly after completing his scenes. Linda Blair’s grandfather also died during production.
The head rotation effect — Regan’s head spinning a full 180 degrees — was achieved using a combination of a mechanical dummy head and careful camera work. The dummy was built to rotate on a mechanical axis and was detailed enough to pass for Blair on screen. When intercut with close-up reaction shots of the priests, the effect was completely convincing to audiences who had no frame of reference for how such a thing could be faked.
Makeup artist Dick Smith worked closely with a full team to maintain consistency across months of shooting. Because filming was not done in chronological order, the makeup department kept detailed records and photographs of every stage of Blair’s transformation to ensure each scene matched seamlessly in the final cut.
The film’s score and sound design played a massive role in its impact. Composer Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” became permanently associated with the film after Friedkin selected it for the opening and closing sequences. The sound team also created a deep, subsonic rumble — a tone pitched too low for the human ear to hear consciously — that was mixed into several scenes. Audiences felt a sense of unease without knowing why.
Cinematographer Owen Roizman shot the film with a deliberately understated visual style. Rather than relying on dramatic camera angles or flashy lighting tricks, he kept the photography grounded and naturalistic, which made the supernatural elements feel even more disturbing by contrast. The audience was given no visual cues that this was a fantasy world — it looked like real life.
Blatty served as the film’s producer in addition to writing the screenplay, and he remained deeply involved throughout the entire production. His Catholic faith shaped his approach to the material. He viewed the story not primarily as a horror film but as a serious statement about the reality of evil and the power of faith. That conviction runs through every scene of the finished film.
Warner Bros. released the film just after Christmas, a choice that proved wildly successful. The studio had been nervous about the material. But the film earned $441 million worldwide against a production budget of $12 million, making it one of the highest-grossing films of all time at that point. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning two — Best Adapted Screenplay for Blatty and Best Sound.
The casting process for Regan was long and careful. Friedkin and Blatty auditioned numerous young actresses before landing on Blair. They needed someone who could deliver disturbing, intense material with total believability while also being a child. Blair’s natural expressiveness and physical commitment to the role made her the clear choice once she read for the part.
The Iraq prologue — shot on location in the ancient ruins of Nineveh near Mosul — was filmed before the main production began. This sequence, showing Father Merrin at an archaeological dig where he uncovers a demonic artifact, serves as a quiet, ominous opening that contrasts sharply with the chaos to come. Friedkin traveled with a small crew to shoot it, working in intense desert heat that was as demanding on the crew as the frozen New York sets would later be.
The film’s editing was handled by Bud Smith and Evan Lottman. Friedkin was obsessive in the editing room, cutting and recutting sequences to control the rhythm of fear. He famously made a single-frame cut — a subliminal flash of a pale demonic face — that appears so briefly that most viewers don’t consciously register it, but feel disturbed by it all the same.
The mechanical effects team spent months designing and building the rigs used for the possession sequences. Every jerk of Regan’s body, every shudder of the bed, every flying object in the room was carefully engineered and rehearsed. Wire work, pneumatic systems, and carefully timed crew movements from off-camera all contributed to effects that looked spontaneous and terrifying on screen.
Von Sydow’s aging makeup took several hours to apply each morning. The process involved building up layers of foam latex pieces across his face, neck, and hands to add wrinkles, age spots, and the gaunt look of a man in his seventies. He bore the discomfort without complaint through months of shooting, delivering a composed, weighty performance despite the hours of preparation required before each day’s work.
Behind the cameras, the crew working on the refrigerated bedroom set wore parkas and gloves between setups. Lighting had to be adjusted carefully to compensate for the moisture in the cold air. Cables, equipment, and even the actors’ microphones had to be monitored constantly because the extreme cold caused equipment to malfunction. It was one of the most physically unpleasant shooting environments that many of the crew members had ever worked in.
The production required Friedkin to manage an extraordinarily complex shoot — practical locations in Washington, exotic locations in Iraq, and highly technical studio sets in New York — all while maintaining a consistent tone and vision across months of work. He was demanding, controversial, and at times difficult, but the final film is a testament to how completely his vision was realized.
Stunt coordinators worked closely with Blair throughout filming to ensure her safety while still achieving the violent, aggressive movements required by the script. Despite the precautions, Blair did suffer a back injury during production from the mechanical rig work. The injury required medical treatment and remains a notable footnote in the film’s troubled production history.
The film’s poster — featuring Father Merrin standing beneath a streetlight outside the MacNeil house, a beam of light cutting through the darkness — was itself a carefully composed piece of art. The image, photographed by Bill Gold, captures the film’s tone perfectly: something powerful standing at the edge of overwhelming darkness. It became one of the most iconic movie posters ever printed.
The combination of source material rooted in a documented real-world case, a director committed to absolute realism, groundbreaking practical effects, and performances that crossed into genuine physical suffering produced a film that continues to be studied by filmmakers, critics, and historians. The rare behind-the-scenes photographs in this collection document all of it — the cold, the craft, the chaos, and the people who made one of cinema’s most enduring films.
There is not a SINGLE FUCKING CAPTION on any of these shots to tell us who or what we are looking at. No story, no information, no nothing. Which is a damn shame ’cause it seems like an interesting collection.
Freaky! The scene with the Pazuzu silhouette in the bedroom is so supernatural that it never occured to me that the statue was actually in the bedroom set as they filmed it. I really thought it was an superimposed optical effect.
Awesome to see this.