Possibly the creepiest film ever...

Rating: 9/10 (16 October 2000)

Or one of the creepiest, anyway. What Jaws does for swimming at the beach and The Blair Witch Project does for camping in the woods, this movie does for, er, being a twelve year old girl and minding your own business. Actually, all stupid jokes aside, that is one of the things that sets this film apart from most other horror films. In most horror movies, it seems the threat is mostly avoidable. For example, Jaws: just stay the hell out of the water; BWP: TS for you if you can't follow a friggin' creek out of the woods; etc. But in Exorcist, the girl and her mother do nothing that we can see to incur the terror that comes to plague them and could have done nothing to prevent it. It just happened. Of course, one has to believe that this kind of thing can happen in reality for the film to have maximum impact (and there is, at least, a basis in reality). But, for my money, even if you believe demonic possession to be so much hokum, this film does a good job at being creepy anyway; it's just that well made.