Hacker Cinema
The Exorcist
1973 · Film · 122 min
Part of The Exorcist Collection
Directed by William Friedkin
When a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.
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24 comments on Hacker News
I always remember a quote I read when I was way younger about Halloween or The Exorcist : "the film's score is a character in its own right".
Well I think it's ironically mimicking The Exorcist or one of those movies so makes sense.
Ah, the Robots movie meets the Exorcist.
The Exorcist is the worst film I have ever seen, bar none. I was not surprised to find out it was hopelessly behind schedule and over budget. I was surprised to learn it was (still is) incredibly popular.
Sorcerer (1977) directed by William Friedkin (known for The Exorcist and The French Connection) is adapted from the same novel and is also great.
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
Last movie I saw in theaters was The Revenant in 2015, and before that ... maybe the first Hobbit? Agreed that current movies suck, mostly Marvel crap and rehashes ... Local to me we have: Taylor swift movie, a new Saw movie, a new Exorcist movie, a new Paw Patrol movie. Lame.
Yes you’re right for new movies. People are bored of the formulaic crap. Alamo replays a lot of popular movies, and those have been much busier. Kubrick and Christopher Nolan movies. The recent Dune. Rerelease of The Exorcist. Etc.
> But that was “The Exorcist.” A film. (Maybe?) An old movie, at least. The “Transformers” franchise, which has grossed more than $5 billion across six films, was more like … I.P. (Michael Bay, the “Transformers” producer, declined to comment on Dr. Howard’s decorating choices or the neighbors’ reaction.)
I imagine at USD 25k a pop, he has the whole IP thing squared away.
Not revising a film "based on modern sensitivity" is one thing, but what about films being released in a multitude of different versions right from the start? It annoys me when I discuss a film with someone else who's seen it and I find that some of the scenes in the version I saw were not in the version they saw, and vice versa. If you see a recent film on TV you can be pretty sure that you're watching a version that was specially edited to be shown on that TV channel in that country at that time of day. Sometimes you can look at the Wikipedia pages about a film in different languages and see wildly varying running times.
Not a recent film, but a while ago I finally got round to watching "The Exorcist" (1973) because it was on UK television. The "spider walk" scene was omitted in that particular edit!
> Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023
-- NOT OP --
In the general case, no, but consider the cases of:
1. "Altered media" e.g. (1) Star Wars, (2) THX 1138.
2. "Remixed media" e.g. (1) Terminator 2 not having its theatrical CDS mix, (2) Earthquake not having its SENSURROUND mix
3. "Omitted media" e.g. (1) Halloween not having its original mono soundtrack, (2) The Exorcist not having its original mono soundtrack
4. "Missing media" e.g. (1) The Star Wars Holiday Special, (2) HBO's "Real Sex" documentary show
5. "Censored media" e.g. (1) Fantasia, (2) Song of the South
There are entire online communities dedicated to finding, restoring, and preserving items like the ones mentioned above.
So, is piracy OK in these cases? I emphatically believe it is.
I'm only some ten years older. The films I spoke of were released before I was born. Yet most of my generation is familiar with some of them. Star Wars, then. Or Schindler's List. Maybe I'm Spielberg biased. The Exorcist.
My point is that there was such a thing -- a common film canon -- that people who were interested in film, could be expected to be somewhat familiar with. No longer true?
Yes. Lowest common denominator. Some common point of reference gives a common vocabulary. Even if it sucks.
“Does this guy ever quit?”. In relation to the speed of the film, and the way the story is presented with an ever increasing suspense/action, The Fugitive reminds me of Billy Friedkin's films, The French Contact and The Exorcist (and maybe To Live and Die in L.A.), they are films that simply do not let you breathe, and you leave the theater with the certainty that you have just lived a unique experience.
> I guess now that I have kids I'll soon be on the other side trying to convince them that the old stuff I like is cool and special, and they'll prefer the new stuff.
Absolutely, hehe. (I love the old Blade Runner, not at all the new one)
> I had a professor in college who was obsessed with Blade Runner and had us watch it in class.
To balance that out, our religion teacher showed us The Exorcist ( https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9552-the-exorcist ) - sounds hard but to be fair anybody who did not want to watch it was allowed to leave the room & come back later.
The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2 are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by remakes and franchise films:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year
> the top grossing films of the era (70s) were no better than the MCU of today.
These are the top films, and second place, for 1970-74
70 Love Story, Airport
71 Fiddler on the Roof, Billy Jack
72 The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure
73 The Exorcist, The Sting
74 The Towering Inferno, Blazing Saddles
I only stopped because I got bored copying and pasting. I'm not convinced the MCU stuff really compares. And I love all that Marvel stuff! Maybe if they could do a decent soundtrack. .
Beware of generalizing: I find The Exorcist terrifying. It also remains at the top of most "scariest movies ever" lists (based only on a DDG search)
Dunno, I watched The Exorcist a couple of years ago and it's one of scariest horror films that I watched. Not even in the same league with modern stuff.
Not saying I'm not desensitized to fake on-screen violence (I eat comfortably watching The Walking Dead), I just think horror being scary has nothing to do with violence being scary.
I wonder how much of the difference is attributable to sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the art/medium/representation, and how much is due to the fact that the fears addressed by the work of art were more relatable to people at the time than they are to a modern audience.
My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).
Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.
There are a lot of people who don't know what this is like; as someone who used to regularly experience this, I'd like to share some of my experience.
I have been in real situations that legitimately threatened my life and safety, and sleep paralysis consistently gave me comparable levels of stress and fear in each episode.
Imagine having a bad nightmare, so bad that you wake up from it. But when you wake up, your eyes are open and you cannot move. You see things that your mind logically knows cannot actually be there, but they are real for you. The REM dream state continues, overlapping reality.
In one case I woke up one my side to a large, dimly lit figure on the side of the bed, staring at me with red eyes. It just stared at me, while I physically felt something at the bottom of the bed dragging my body off. I couldn't move or even shift my head.
I was aware that I was awake, that this wasn't a dream anymore, but that this sort of paranormal situation should't be happening. I couldn't move, couldn't struggle - then the thing staring at me unhinged its jaws wider than should be humanly possible and screamed at me at the top of its lungs. It sounded like a human mixed with the shrill cry of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
I just remember trying to yell but not making noise, and feeling like I was drowning. I knew I was awake but the supernatural sense of wrongness was almost more terrifying than the hallucination.
Then, after what felt like minutes of struggling to breath, and the figure almost eating me, it all vanished, and I shook my body so violently I threw myself off the bed (seriously). I think I actually ran to the lights, turned them on and sat shuddering on my bed in the blanket for a while.
It's no joke. I used to regularly have these, and I sympathize with anyone who has had them. They're primarily caused by stress and anxiety (and have a high incidence in people with PTSD). It's not like a nightmare where you can convince yourself it wasn't real, because the things I hallucinated were as real to me as the lamp and nightstand.
Obviously I should say I didn't consume anything the night before. It's almost debilitating, and caused me insomnia for quite a while.
It was hard to describe to people - they are not the same things as night terrors. I would talk to people about it and they would say it was a bad nightmare. But it felt so real, it was like that scene from the Matrix with Neo and the bug.
Afterwards, details were always fully lucid and clear, and never became fuzzy. I eventually realized that the level of obsession I would get into when trying to get people to understand that it wasn't just a nightmare mirrored the hysterical reactions you would see from characters in Nightmare on Elm Street or the Exorcist. I never really believed in things like alien abduction, but I can fully understand why repeated exposure to sleep paralysis would cause someone to seriously question reality.
I think the 1614 Roman rite of exorcism was "updated" after this incident, i.e., exorcisms do still transpire, but in a different way i.e., not talking to "the demon" a la the movie "The Exorcist" but more praying for healing and so forth, reason being, if the subject is not really processed by some other entity, addressing said entity aloud directly might make the situation worse by the power of suggestion. So (to my knowledge anyway) I think exorcisms do still take place, but they try and be a bit more aware of the delicacies of those sorts of situations.
(Time to burn some karma for going against the grain..)
On the other hand, I find movies with constant foul language tedious to watch. I'm happy that movie producers have a financial incentive to really think about whether language really adds to the story or is being thrown in because it is easier to have an actor say f*ck than to have her actually, you know, act out her character's emotions.
Yes, the MPAA is prudish and has gotten more prudish over the years (there is no way the original Exorcist would be rated R today). I also think ratings could be made more objective (but some subjectiveness will remain). Finally, the MPAA shouldn't be the ones doing the rating, simply because of the conflicts of interest involved.
Every time I read about scheduling, prioritization, and focusing on your top tasks, I think of the movie "The Exorcist" when father Karras briefs father Merrin:
KARRAS - I think it would be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities Regan has manifested. So far, there seems to be three. She's convinced-
MERRIN - There's only one.
If you're a programmer, forget about scheduling, prioritizing, and focusing on multiple things. Work exclusively on the #1 thing. Nothing else has made me more productive. See how simple.
pg even talks about it in his essay "Good and Bad Procrastination"
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
"What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"