The most frightening movie ever made

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2002)

I think most people are skeptical when they see horror movies, and for the most part I think this is the right attitude. There's absolutely no reason to assume any of the events are at all realistic, and even less reason that anyone should care about the people involved.
And yet, the same can likely be said about The Exorcist, because it's certainly not realistic, and I don't especially care about Helen Byrston as the caring mother.
I think the secret to the success of The Exorcist is the movie's deliberate pace and subtlety. The real fright fest doesn't come until a good 45 minutes-1 hour into the movie, while all the time things are building. The beginning doesn't seem to fit, until at a certain point much later on, and even then the beginning sequence may not have been especially necessary. For the life of me, I can't understand why the statues of demons are scary, but there they are and they are horrifying. Who would ever makes such things?
Then the story shifts to the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. and things get very scary, very slowly. Reagan's unhappiness with her parents divorce allows her mind to be corrupted, or this is what I gather from the movie. This corruption begins with a simple imaginary friend, but that friend has a much different plan in mind. Soon the subliminal images of demons appear, and one must wonder if he actually saw what he thought he saw.
Once it becomes clear that Reagan is indeed demonically possessed things aren't quite as bad, because now you have some idea of what to expect. And yet the chanting in Latin, and backwards English, and the levitation scene all add to make the exorcism very frightening.
Some may see that the ending is one of the few movies in which evil triumphs over good, but I don't really see it that way. Evil in this movie is certainly evil, and good is . . . well, good is better than evil.
I thought I was tough and wouldn't be frightened by this movie, but the Exorcism is such an extraordinarily well made movie, coming out of the 1970's, the best decade in movie making by far, that it is impossible not to be scared.