Posted by William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) was the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: it received 10 nominations and won 2 Oscars. Filming, planned for 85 days, took over 200 amid fires, accidents and deaths, which earned it the reputation of a cursed film. Many, including author William Peter Blatty, believe the “curse” was mostly a publicity stunt.
The Exorcist is one of the most acclaimed horror films ever and was the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, with 10 nominations in total. It won two: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.
The strange incidents on the set of The Exorcist
Given its subject, it is a film that still scares people, and many claim it is cursed. Filming, which was supposed to last 85 days, took over 200, and the film cost Warner Bros. $12 million, almost three times the initial budget. But is it only the fact that it tells the story of an exorcism that makes people believe it is cursed, or is there something more?
The number 666
According to one of the most famous legends about the film, the house chosen for filming was at number 666. Not a good omen, I would say, and indeed it is said that many crew members claimed to see objects moving by themselves. Director William Friedkin then asked for an exorcism from Father Thomas Bermingham, the film’s technical advisor, a Georgetown University professor who also played the university president, but he refused.
The fire
Shortly after filming began, a bird flew into a circuit breaker and started a fire that destroyed all the house interior sets except Regan’s room, delaying production by six weeks. Later another set was badly damaged by the sprinkler system, and the 3-meter statue of Pazuzu was mistakenly shipped to Hong Kong instead of Iraq. Bermingham then decided to bless the cast and crew: a real exorcism, he believed, would only make everyone more anxious.
The McCambridge family tragedy
Mercedes McCambridge is the actress who voiced the demon Pazuzu in the film. To make the voice as frightening as possible she ate raw eggs, drank whiskey and chain-smoked. In November 1987 her son John Markle, a futures trader who had been fired after opening a secret account in his mother’s name by forging her signature, killed his wife and two daughters and then took his own life.
Accidents and deaths
Another strange accident involved Ellen Burstyn, Regan’s mother, in the scene where her possessed daughter throws her backward: the cable pulling her made her fall violently and she fractured her coccyx. She was unable to work for two weeks, spent the rest of the shoot on crutches and still suffers the consequences. The scream you hear in the film is the actress’s real scream of pain, and the director chose to keep that very take. Linda Blair, who played Regan, also fractured her lower spine because she was strapped too loosely to the shaking bed, and later developed scoliosis. A carpenter lost a thumb and a lighting technician a toe.
As if all this were not enough, several people connected with the film, or their family members, died during production. Jack MacGowran, who played director Burke Dennings who falls down the steps, died a week after finishing his scenes. Vasiliki Maliaros, who played Father Karras’s mother, died like her character before the film was finished. The night watchman, the technician running the refrigeration of Regan’s room, Linda Blair’s grandfather and Max von Sydow’s brother also died, while one of Jason Miller’s sons was hit by a motorcycle and nearly died.
The future killer
In the scene where Regan undergoes a cerebral angiography, the radiology assistant is played by Paul Bateson, a real radiology technician: Friedkin had seen him at work the year before and decided to recreate the scene exactly as it was. It later emerged that Bateson was a murderer. In 1979 he was convicted of killing journalist Addison Verrill. Police and prosecutors also linked him to a series of unsolved murders of gay men in Manhattan, which he reportedly boasted about in jail, but he was never charged with those crimes. He was paroled in 2003 and died in 2012. The case inspired Friedkin’s film Cruising.
Lightning from the sky
The strange coincidences do not end here. It is said that something disturbing also happened in Italy on the day of The Exorcist premiere in Rome. The queue to see the film was long and many people were waiting outside. A heavy storm broke out and lightning struck an iron cross on the roof of a nearby church, knocking it down into the square. Many people, frightened, gave up on the film and went home.
A carefully crafted curse?
Friedkin himself said in an interview that he believed in demonic possession after everything he had seen on set. But according to British film historian Sarah Crowther, the curse rumors were spread by the studio as a publicity stunt, and most of the problems were the result of the director’s relentless methods, as he constantly reshot scenes and fired and rehired the crew.
William Peter Blatty, author of the novel, agreed: in his view it was Friedkin who started the story, blaming “devils” for the delays. After all, he said, if you shoot a film for a year, people get hurt and people die. In 2000 he joked that there was no Exorcist curse, because he was the curse.
Are all these mere coincidences or is “The Exorcist” really a cursed movie?
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