The demonic hiss of Linda Blair’s possessed Regan MacNeil still cuts through cinema history — a sound that gets under the skin and stays there. William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist operates on several frequencies at once: faith under siege, maternal terror, institutional failure, and something far older than all three.

Based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, the film follows Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), an actress whose twelve-year-old daughter Regan (Blair) becomes the unwilling host to a malevolent entity. Desperate, Chris turns to the Catholic Church, summoning Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) and Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) to perform an exorcism.

The film’s power derives from its slow burn. Friedkin avoids cheap jump scares, building dread through deliberate pacing and documentary-style realism instead. The mundane turns sinister — a child’s laughter curdles, a spirit board opens a door to evil. The opening in Iraq, Merrin standing before an ancient statue, sets the terms: this horror is rooted in history, weighed down by centuries of accumulated evil. Nothing here is invented for sensation.

The performances anchor it all. Burstyn’s portrayal of a mother teetering on the edge of despair is raw and heart-wrenching. Blair’s transformation from innocent child to vessel of pure hatred is chilling — her contorted face and guttural voice sit in sharp contrast to her earlier sweetness. Miller gives Karras a quiet, interior intensity: a priest whose faith has already taken a beating before the demon gets anywhere near him. Von Sydow’s Merrin is something else entirely — weary, certain, carrying the weight of having seen this darkness before.

The exorcism itself is where Friedkin tightens the screws until something breaks. The claustrophobic setting, the priests’ desperate invocations, the grotesque physical manifestations — these elements lock together in a sequence that has lost none of its grip. The sound design is especially merciless: eerie whispers give way to sudden, deafening screams, the room seeming to contract around the viewer.

The film is not without weakness. The pacing, deliberate as it is, can drag — particularly in scenes where theological discussion crowds out atmosphere. The spinning-head moment, iconic as it remains, has aged less gracefully than the rest, a reminder that practical effects have their own shelf life. Some of the dialogue tips into melodrama where restraint might have cut deeper.

Crucially, the film belongs to its cast in a way that a starrier production never could have. Warner Bros. executives pushed back hard against Friedkin and Blatty’s insistence on casting relative unknowns — Burstyn, Blair, and Miller rather than the major stars the studio preferred. That resistance was wrong. Because Burstyn and Blair bring no prior star persona to the screen, the horror attaches to them directly. Regan is Regan. The possession is happening to this specific girl, not to an actress you’ve seen in other things. That absence of celebrity distance makes the film’s cruelty land much harder.

The production was punishing. Injuries and deaths among cast and crew, delayed schedules, a budget that ballooned to nearly three times its original figure — these difficulties are usually footnotes, but here they have a strange relevance. There is a frayed, exhausted quality to some of the performances, a rawness that a smoother shoot might have polished away. Whether or not one credits the so-called curse, the film wears its difficult birth on its face.

When it opened in December 1973, reviews were mixed, yet audiences lined up in the winter cold. The disconnect is telling: what critics framed as exploitation or hysteria, audiences recognized as something genuinely destabilizing. Viewers reportedly fainted or vomited at the cerebral angiography sequence — the film’s clinical naturalism turning suddenly grotesque — and several cities moved to ban it outright or restrict access for children. That level of civic panic is its own form of tribute.

Horror has long been treated as a lesser genre, commercially useful but artistically suspect. The Exorcist dismantled that assumption when it became the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture — along with nine other nominations, with Blatty winning Best Adapted Screenplay and the sound engineers taking Best Sound. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2010. These are institutional validations, and they matter less than the fact that the film still works, still frightens, still provokes arguments about faith and rationalism that its characters never fully resolve.

That ambiguity is ultimately what gives The Exorcist its staying power. Is this a story of faith triumphant or faith annihilated? Of a mother who saves her daughter, or a priest who destroys himself? Karras’s sacrifice at the film’s close is both tragic and unresolved — a gesture of will against a force that may or may not have been defeated. Friedkin offers no comfort. The demon is gone, or appears to be. The bodies it left behind tell a different story.