Special effects in The Exorcist

Rating: 6/10 (2 June 2010)

The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and premiered in 1973, is well-known for its special effects. It won the Golden Scroll award for the best special effects in 1975. In the movie they use many different techniques to manipulate you into believing Regan, is truly possessed. The director used some extreme techniques to make the movie especially convincing. One of them was that Friedkin used some real emotions of the actors for his film. An example of this is that he fired a gun without warning on the set to elicit shock from Jason Miller (Father Karras).
We think that what Friedkin has achieved with the techniques that were available in the seventies is simply amazing. Computer imagery was not fully developed yet. Therefore, he could only use optical and mechanical techniques to make his movie as realistic and effective as possible. This makes it even more admirable that he has made a movie that got (and still gets) so much attention because of its great special effects.
Optical effects are methods with which you can photographically create images or different film frames. Mechanical effects are techniques using things such as props, the scenery and different atmospheres. These effects are accomplished while recording the movie.
Examples of interesting optical effects in The Exorcist are Regan's floating in the air when the two priests are performing an exorcism and the 360 degree turn of Regan's head. Examples of mechanical effects in the movie are the shaking bed and the flying objects in Regan's bedroom. We think that these effects make the movie very interesting. Because all these things just cannot happen in real life, the effects convince you of the fact that there must be some kind of supernatural power involved. Things do not just start flying around after all.
Another remarkable aspect of this movie is that the special effects build up throughout the movie. In the beginning, when the girl is doing fine, there are very little special effects used. After a while, more and more special effects resemble the demon getting more and more power over Regan. At first, the bed shakes. Then, things start flying around in the air and in the end, Regan herself is floating around. As the special effects become more unnatural, you get more and more confused by the strange things that happen.
The way Friedkin uses special effects to manipulate you, the way he builds up the tension to the climax of the story is excruciating. It starts with small noises upstairs in the attic, the place where things almost always start to go wrong, then the daughter who is behaving strangely and the doctors who cannot do anything about it. He wants to show you something strange is going on, trying to make you wonder: what is really going on and who is causing it? Compared to our modern-day movies, we could quite easily see how all the special effects were created. The techniques used are not too complicated: some only require a bit of easy film editing. As we mentioned above, Friedkin did not possess the possibility of using all the techniques that directors can use nowadays. The techniques of the special effects are therefore not too impressive, but this does not make the way Friedkin applied them to the movie less effective.
So what about the rest of the movie? The special effects are the most important aspect of this movie's success. We think that the rest of the movie is nothing much. The story is quite good, but there are many stories similar to this one and we think that the plot is quite slow. The acting is fine, but we have seen movies in which the actors performed way better in our opinion. We do have to admit that the movies that we think of as being better than this one have been produced years later. For a movie that was made in the seventies, The Exorcist is an exceptionally good movie.
A good aspect of the movie is that there is a certain air of mystery throughout the whole story. The beginning of the movie seems to demonstrate that it might actually be Father Dyer to have caused the problem, with the strange coin he found and the statue the Father visited, which stood out due to the special effect with the light from behind and the wind suddenly setting in. Nevertheless, at the end of the movie the Church turns out to be the solution to the problem. The Church is the last chance for finding a cure for Regan.
The Exorcist has been the source of inspiration for many other horror movies. Many producers have imitated the atmosphere of Friedkin's movie. After watching the movie, all you can do is agree with the producers: the atmosphere of The Exorcist is really horrifying. Many scenes in The Exorcist are frightening and disgusting, but have a certain thing that makes you laugh nervously. An example is Regan's spider walk off the stairs: she runs off the stairs on her hands and feet, upside-down. Her face is covered in blood. You hold your breath because of the immensely dangerous trick that the twelve-year-old performs, but you laugh nevertheless because it is so bizarre. The idea of these frightening but ironically comical scenes has been copied by many other directors, because these scenes give the movie a certain tension: as a watcher, you want to laugh and cry with fear at the same time. The mix of those two emotions makes the horror movie more effective. After a while, you notice that you are on the edge of your chair.