The one and only ...

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 1998)

Seeing the 25th Anniversary video release of The Exorcist brought me back to Dec. 28, 1973. That first viewing of the film has to rank as one of the top three movie-going experiences of my life. I was one of about 700 people in the audience, but we were all reacting as a single entity to the brilliant way the film was constructed: tension balanced with release, silence followed by horrifying blasts of sound effects and the unforgettable voice of the demon. Terror was being shared by every person in that room, and you could actually feel it. I have never seen any other movie that had such a powerful effect on an audience.
I also remember, when the movie ended and my 3 friends and I walked back to the bus station, that none of us spoke to each other. Not about the movie, or about anything else. Any horror movie that can do that has to be the scariest ever made. There will probably never be another one quite like it.
A lot of the comments here say The Exorcist is slow and boring, especially in the first hour. For me there's not one wasted moment or image in the film. The slow pace is necessary to create a sense of total reality, of the world these characters live in, so that you come to care about them and believe everything that happens to them later on, no matter how fantastic. And everything you see in the first half (Merrin's face-off with the demon statue, Chris's glimpses of Karras in the streets, her foul language on the phone, Karras' love of his mother and his horrible guilt over her death, the old guy on the subway platform) pays off in the second half.
All my favorite horror films (Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, Jaws) have this same structure of a slow methodical build-up before the terror begins, making the terror that much more terrifying. I guess that's just the way I like 'em - never did care much for Jason and Freddy.