Linda Blair as the possessed Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist. Photo / Supplied
Listen to the screams, horror films are bigger than ever — terrifying a new generation at the cinema and on Netflix.
If the actor Robert Shaw could have stayed sober it is possible nobody would ever have heard of The Exorcist. Shaw — Henry VIII, Martin Luther, eaten by a big shark in Jaws — was due to be a guest on The Dick Cavett Show one night in June 1971 but was, to put it politely, incapacitated. Cavett’s booker had a problem. In desperation he called a promising author, William Peter Blatty, at the tail-end of a 26-city promotional tour that hadn’t gone well. Could he come on at short notice? Blatty could. Then, when the first guest proved dull, Blatty ended up discussing religion, the supernatural and occult practices with the host for 45 minutes. An audience was, fittingly, entranced. Cavett later described Blatty as one of the best guests his show ever had.
The Exorcist became a bestseller and then that rare creature, a Hollywood horror with a significant budget and Oscar recognition. It was picked up by Warner Bros and attracted the interest of a director, William Friedkin, who had recently been honoured for The French Connection. That cost US$1.8 million to make; The Exorcist about ten times more. Having invested so wildly, Warners was worried that the project had attracted no big stars. They shouldn’t have been. The final gross takings worldwide rested at US$441.3 million.
And 50 years on from its 1973 release, The Exorcist — an everyday tale of demons, possession and revolving heads — will scare again. Later this year a sequel will be released, directed by David Gordon Green, who previously rebooted the Halloween franchise. Ellen Burstyn, now 90, will reprise her role as Chris MacNeil, in what Green is planning as a trilogy. It would appear horror is having a moment.
“Horror is a genre that has always evolved, maintained commercial appeal and helped to introduce new film-makers to the world,” Shawn Robbins, a chief analyst at boxoffice.com says. Young people have long been drawn to watch horror, but since the pandemic ended another generation has flocked to the cinema. “We’re in the middle of horror’s new golden age,” Robbins says.
Yes, another one. In every cinematic cycle there comes a point when it is decided this is horror’s time, and here we are again. M3gan, a witty sci-fi-slash-horror film about an AI doll, has grossed more than ten times its US$12 million budget worldwide; the Carrie-like Piggy triumphed at festivals in Europe and The Evil Dead and Scream will join The Exorcist in getting either 2023 sequels or entire franchise reworkings.
And that seems appropriate, half a century on from a vintage year for the genre: 1973. Not just The Exorcist but the cult classic The Wicker Man, which originally appeared as the B-movie in possibly the greatest horror double bill of all, supporting Nicolas Roeg’s beautiful, unnerving Don’t Look Now. A symmetrical resurgence, or just a continuation? Horror is the genre that, like its greatest monsters, demons and cleaver-wielding psychos, never dies.
M3gan may have ended her screen debut in pieces, but she’s back for a sequel already — M3gan 2.0, coming to a cinema as quickly as her android legs and her producers at Blumhouse can carry her. Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, the latest Halloween reboot: Blumhouse’s founder, Jason Blum, knows when the public mood is ripe for exploitation, and M3gan, with her freaky TikTok-friendly dancing and the mining of a pervasive primal fear — inanimate objects with a life force — is going to run and run.
What made The Exorcist special? Location. Like much of the best horror — Rosemary’s Baby, Paranormal Activity — Blatty framed the action where we should feel safest. Normal house, normal suburban street, recognisable faces all around. The film’s poster didn’t show a supernatural image at all, but the mundane: a well-dressed man standing in silhouette, illuminated by a streetlamp. No demons, no levitations, no clue at all to the wickedness within. (The first-edition cover of Blatty’s book, a close-up of a ghostly face, is far more direct in its imagery.) The Exorcist’s location in comfortable Georgetown, Washington, was key to its sense of terror. M3gan is a home invader too. So was Ring’s Sadako Yamamura, terrifyingly entering via that most commonplace household object, the television. Finding horror in the safest of places made The Exorcist a phenomenon.
M3gan has done wonders at the box office but no horror film has ever made the impact of The Exorcist. On release, there were huge queues for admission and cinema chains offered sick bags for those suffering a visceral reaction. There were reports of protests, tears, fainting and vomiting, and Blatty was moved to write a two-page response when America, a magazine published by the Jesuits of the United States, devoted an entire edition to his film.
Meanwhile, in the same month in the UK, a horror of no inferior standing was released. The Wicker Man immediately plunged into comparative obscurity, however, cursed by an impoverished British film industry — Christopher Lee, its big-name star, worked without pay, and the studio, British Lion, was bought by EMI before release — and its B-movie status.Yet within four years Cinefantastique, an American magazine specialising in the horror and fantasy genre, compared it to Citizen Kane.
Look, it’s not Citizen Kane. What it is, however, is a masterpiece of folk-horror that has influenced everyone from The League of Gentlemen to the makers of The Blair Witch Project and the highly regarded Cornish director Mark Jenkin, whose Enys Men was shot on 16mm and won plaudits at Cannes last summer. Lee thought The Wicker Man was his finest film. Edward Woodward, the lead, insisted it had the best ending of any film, ever. Accept no substitutes, no remakes. If Nic Cage’s name appears in the titles you’re watching the wrong one (also if anyone mentions bees).
The original Wicker Man is a horror without a single jump scare, without blood, guts or suspenseful strings. When Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack — mixing original material with traditional themes, from the earliest surviving Middle English melody to The Rigs O’Barley, a ballad by Robert Burns — was rereleased it inspired a folk revival. The film’s director, Robin Hardy, liked to tell the crew and cast they were working on a musical. It’s not a musical either. The soundtrack, however, is essential to creating a feeling of pagan otherness that pervades from the opening scenes to the terrible end. Yet while The Exorcist was box-office gold from the day of its release, The Wicker Man languished unloved until it was reborn as a cult classic. These days the acclamation is close to universal, and imitators mine its masterly one-two punch: the accumulation of foreboding before the unleashing of a shattering denouement. Like The Exorcist, it also pitches Christianity against the strange and occult. And in this age of revival it is now being turned into a television series, by Andy Serkis’s Imaginarium Studios.
For if horror is enjoying a moment anywhere, it is taking place on your TV screen, via a streaming service. Before streaming television pretty much ignored horror. Yes, it bought horror films. It introduced a new audience to Vincent Price once in a while, but there was no BBC horror department in the way a commissioner existed for comedy. A ghost story at Christmas sometimes, a theme night, usually around Halloween; but ITV’s Hammer House of Horror, which ran for 13 episodes in 1980, was very much the exception.
No longer. Many of the most-watched shows in recent years are horror-related. Since the phrase “elevated horror” was used to describe films that aspired to more than slash-and-burn, a lot of projects have placed a foot in more than one camp. Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story falls into the category of true crime, but cannot escape its horror influences. The same with The Last of Us, a zombie drama based on a video game, with more than a nod in horror’s direction. Its first episode was watched by more than ten million HBO subscribers in the first two days of release. This is arguably the real horror renaissance, introducing the genre to a new generation, who will then take their shivery fascination into the multiplexes.
And on it goes. Westerns may have a moment in our modern world. Marvel superheroes will come and go, but the screaming never really stops. Indeed, the timeline suggests that in years of hardship horror becomes ever more relevant, reflecting our daily struggle against overwhelming forces. Could be a mechanical doll, could be a demon, a wicker man, a dwarf in a red mackintosh. Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right; or maybe it’s not.
Written by: Martin Samuel
© The Times of London
Robyn Malcolm's acclaimed TV drama is to air in the UK.