Eleven minutes of footage that were left on the cutting room floor back in 1973, when this devil-possession movie first terrified movie audiences, have been put back in. Although The Exorcist has long been widely available on video, I hadn't seen director William Friedkin's version of William Peter Blatty's best seller in more than a quarter century. But I questioned whether the film that was recently voted the scariest movie of all time in at least one millennium poll would stand up in the face of all the other horror movies that it had spawned in the interim. Besides the added footage, the sound has been improved for this re-release. It's the little things that count in a big way.
Doctors try to explain the girl's sudden strange behavior in scientific and mental-health terms.
Gee, you'd have thought they'd conclude that something more than mental illness was involved when the little girl's bed started vibrating off the floor. Her distraught mother is finally driven to seek out a priest who can perform an exorcism on her daughter. Father Karras agrees to assist. The plot is fairly simple and allows for all sorts of technical wizardry to turn sweet little Regan into a shrieking harpy who has a pointy devil's tongue, frozen breath and a sewer-mouth complex. This is the stuff that got people talking and brought them into theaters back in 1973 and, apparently, is doing the same thing today.