The Exorcist (1973)
Directed by William Friedkin
When a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.
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What critics compared The Exorcist to
If you you’ve seen The Exorcist (1973), you’ll know what to expect.
"The Exorcist" came out in 1972 and it's sad to say that it still stands as the best film on possession that Hollywood has turned out.
Michael Petroni and Matt Baglio's scenario falls about 500 miles short of The Exorcist, right in the crack between a sincere, bland religious drama and a monster fest.
I was a wee girl in Catholic school when The Exorcist was released, and the nuns stood before us with a stern admonishment: The Vatican — or just someone in a dress and a pointy hat — had decreed that watching this movie might actually cause viewers to become possessed by the devil.
And once again, we are reminded by a self-conscious film just how high William Friedkin 's " The Exorcist " set the bar for cinematic tales of Satan, his demons, and the human hosts who are victimized by them.
But really, how much more can you do since “The Exorcist” broke the mold in 1973?
And the public is no stranger to horror films in general, enjoying a haute horror heyday in the '60s and early '70s with "Psycho," "Rosemary's Baby," and "The Exorcist"; moving on to the teen slashers of the late '70s and '80s; the nod-wink "Scream" parodies of the '90s; and most recently, after the success of "Saw" in 2004, torture porn.
Elements recall The Exorcist and just about every haunted house movie ever made.
Insidious is littered with elements of genre classics (Poltergeist, The Exorcist, The Evil Dead) and nonclassics (Ovidio G. Assonitis' Beyond the Door) alike, but by the horrifically unshocking end of the film you feel as though you've just watched a lamest-hits reel of lesser genre fare.
So the pleasant surprise when you actually watch "Insidious" is that it turns out to be a moderately effective suburban-family creep show, majorly in debt to "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist" and capturing at least a little of their spirit.
This latest shocker from the original “Saw” buzzers, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell , flaunts an adequate measure of the duo’s trademark borderline-camp humor while channeling as if by Ouija board the unholy likes of “The Exorcist” and “Paranormal Activity” (whose director Oren Peli serves here as a producer).
Whannell has come up with one slightly different idea which he lays on top of themes taken from everything from "The Exorcist" to "The Orphanage" to "Paranormal Activity" while director Wan cops visuals from "The Shining," "Poltergeist" "Drag Me to Hell" and even that 'ghost' from "Three Men and a Baby."
With its minimal use of digital effects, its strong, sympathetic performances and ace design work, the pic harks back in themes and methods to The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror , not quite attaining the poignancy and depth of the former but far exceeding the latter in sheer cinematic beauty.
While it owes an obvious debt to the likes of “The Exorcist,” “Poltergeist” and “ The Amityville Horror ” (itself inspired by the Warrens’ most famous case), this exuberantly creepy supernatural shocker is in many ways the film Wan has been working toward his whole career; it not only incorporates elements from his 2007 demon-doll thriller “Dead Silence” and his 2010 haunted-house saga “Insidious,” which felt like a warm-up exercise by comparison, but also taps into the sly, self-aware vein of humor that has long been one of Wan’s trademarks.
The movie is the result of years of work by producer Tony DeRosa-Grund, who assembled an ideal team and delivered a horror movie that can be favorably compared to classics like “The Exorcist,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Psycho.”
One of the scarier haunted house/demon possession movies in recent years, it brings to mind '70s supernatural horror films such as The Exorcist with its stillness, steady build of suspense and handsome cinematography.
There's some degree of religiosity in the picture (The Exorcist, after all, is like Top Gun for Catholics--or vice versa, I don't know; can you believe it was a witch?) that's echoed in interviews with the real-life Warrens, but, honestly, this thing is so allergic to anything like complexity that it's not worth anyone's time to dig around in there, either.
On its way toward a conclusion that manages to recall 1973's "The Exorcist" while taking the treatment of a real-life exorcism in a whole different direction, "The Conjuring" doesn't quite explore the tragic, malevolent backstory of the Perron farmhouse with the level of detail hoped for.
BOTTOM LINE Another year, another mix of “The Amityville Horror” and “The Exorcist.”
Toys begin to spring to life, too: There’s a scene with a toy fire truck that could have been snipped from about 100 other “haunted child” flicks, including the far superior and iconic “The Exorcist.”
And then, of course, there’s that timeless old chestnut, demonic possession, a theme a great many moviegoers take deadly seriously, though you’d think that a lavish attempt to replay “The Exorcist” again, 43 years later, might start to seem a little old hat.
En la primera parte de esta saga (¿vendrá una tercera?, yo apostaría que si) el director James Wan coleccionaba algunos de los trucos más viejos del género para aplicarlos con gracia y hasta cierta maestría, pero para esta nueva entrega se nota el agotamiento de la fórmula (si aquella robaba a Poltergeist, ésta roba a The Exorcist, a Nightmare on Elm Street y a sí misma), lo cual compensa con dosis -a veces calculadas, a veces involuntarias- de humor.
Young American actress Madison Wolfe turns in the finest child performance in a horror film since Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.”
This opening sequence runs the gamut of horror-movie references, borrowing visuals from The Exorcist , Psycho and The Shining, but the franchise certainly has its own horror signature which continues with each subsequent demonic encounter.
Its best pieces of visual imagery are borrowed from other, and better, motion pictures, including The Exorcist , and the filmmakers rarely do anything that comes across as being even moderately inventive or creatively inspired.
Chaves nods at his cohorts, with a shot that feels plucked from The Exorcist , another reminiscent of Evil Dead, and moments that feel like The Autopsy of Jane Doe .
An unsettling sequence involving a waterbed is rather terrifying (and perhaps a slight nod to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master ) and the film’s opening prologue, which features sly visual references to The Exorcist and The Shining , is genuinely unnerving.
The Warrens’ frequent consultant, Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), arrives to conduct an exorcism and his entrance allows director Michael Chaves ( The Curse of La Llorona ) the opportunity to pay homage to an iconic moment from The Exorcist .
This is where director Michael Chaves begins the story and there are homages to the 1973 film, The Exorcist.
Author Stephen King (The Shining) and director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”) have been vocal early adopters of “The Babadook” and it’s no wonder – the film hangs on their work like a coat on a coat hook.
William Friedkin, who directed the movie that tops poll after poll as being the scariest ever made — 1973's The Exorcist, natch — is quoted as stating that "I've never seen a more terrifying film than The Babadook.
The last section of The Babadook is an exorcism movie, but different in thrust from The Exorcist, The Conjuring, and other “religious” films in which a male authority (often from the Church) arrives to expel the demon that has descended on a weak family.
No less an expert than William Friedkin, the director of “The Exorcist,” has declared he’s never seen a more terrifying film.
As is all of "The Babadook," a haunting masterpiece of psychological horror, claustrophobia and paranoia in the vein of Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant," Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and William Friedkin's "The Exorcist."
Such is the case with Aussie writer-director Jennifer Kent and her mesmerizing, disquieting, unexpected debut feature, "The Babadook," a film that, like 1973's "The Exorcist," seems to have arrived fully formed as an instant classic.
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Yet while both Mannis and Haxton served as ‘production consultants’ on The Possession, and Juliet Snowden and Stiles White’s screenplay supposedly takes its inspiration from an article on the box by journalist Leslie Gornstein, this film is true not to the facts of the case, but to the rather different story told by William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
Calis is especially good as the possessed girl, turning in a performance that can be favorably compared to the gold standard for this kind of role, Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.”
The concept behind The Possession , a solid, Jewish-inflected B-movie riff on The Exorcist from director Ole Bornedal , can't help but leave you wondering.
Unfortunately, it isn’t a comedy, it’s an exorcism-themed horror film that fails to glean suspense out of scenarios that devolved into kitsch after The Exorcist inspired an avalanche of knock-offs that continue to this day.
Like " The Exorcist ," the best film in the genre, it is inspired by some degree of religious scholarship and creates believable characters in a real world.
On the other hand, The Possession is also a horror movie being made in the 2010s, and that puts a serious limit on how much character drama it can hold; once it becomes increasingly obvious that Em is possessed by a demon - a dybbuk, specifically, though the further into Jewish mysticism the movie goes, the more obvious that the writers stuck Jewish concepts into the Catholic framework of The Exorcist , and called that "research" - the film abandons all of its subtlety and becomes yet another generic horror picture of the loud noises, things slamming around, and cheap tricks with dark lighting variety.
She swears, she ridicules her father (Kwak Do-won), she makes grotesque drawings, but—in a way—it’s creepier because it’s still her voice, not a demon’s grotesque voice like in The Exorcist.
Rather than playing a game of spot-the-allusion, Na is digging into the religious fabric of a country where old traditions still hold sway, and the long sequence where a shaman (Hwang Jung-min) attempts to perform a “death hex” against a marauding spirit to the pounding soundtrack of drums feels excitingly closer to ethnography than The Exorcist.
This ferociously full-tilt horror-mystery hybrid carries echoes aplenty from the Western horror canon, with nods to The Exorcist, The Shining (in a mesmeric aerial shot following a car along a twisty, lushly forested mountain road), and Poltergeist—if only because The Wailing echoes that film’s accumulative frenzy, crazily piling up one damned (and I do mean damned) thing after another.
At the same time, he puts western tropes from “The Exorcist,” “The Evil Dead” and even “Outbreak” through the blender, but the cryptic denouement, which delves into the abysmally dark cave of the human psyche, is pure Polanski.
Fitting neatly into the festival’s cannibal phenomena (there were five cannibalism-related pictures in the festival), “The Wailing” borrows ever so gently from “The Exorcist” to weave an intricate tale of horror that is part who-(or what)-done-it.
The comparisons to Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder” are warranted, but “The Wailing” can also be described as “The Exorcist” having a demonic, vomit-spewing baby with “The Departed” with Alan Parker’s “Angel Heart” overseeing the bastard offspring’s circumcision.
…imagine if William Friedkin, fresh off directing The Exorcist, had decided to make Star Wars instead of Sorcerer.
At first I thought this was a misplaced tribute to the ending of “The Exorcist,” as if the climactic action of that film represented a heroic defeat of the Devil rather than a capitulation to him and a failure to trust in God.
Screenwriter Gary Dauberman (“Annabelle: Creation,” “It”), working with co-producer James Wan (“Saw,” “The Conjuring,” “Furious 7”), who has a story credit, has certainly streamed his share of old Hammer horror films, along with, of course, “The Exorcist” and even “The Da Vinci Code.”
Father Burke seems to be crafted as a feeble homage to Father Merrin from The Exorcist but without the character development that made that role so iconic.
Great movies about paranormal investigators struggling with doubts like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Daniel Stamm’s underrated The Last Exorcism (2010) slowly ramp up tension by presenting plausible explanations for supernatural phenomenon, making both the characters and audience guess whether or not the hauntings are all a bunch of hooey.
“Nun” lacks the constant sense of dread and unsettling doom of similarly themed films such as “The Exorcist” or even “The Last Exorcism,” though there’s one notable scene of “perpetual adoration” – the marathon prayer the abbey’s nuns maintain to keep Valak at bay – that’s visceral and torturous for poor Sister Irene.
Written by “Annabelle” screenwriter Gary Dauberman and James Wan, it’s lush, operatic, hardcore Catholic horror from the depths of “The Omen” and “The Exorcist,” with hints of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus,” washed with medieval overtones.
The problem is that so much is lifted from other films (not just the original Evil Dead, but also most obviously Evil Dead II and The Raid , while The Exorcist is clearly an influence) that nothing feels very fresh or surprising.
We gather that David is afraid in the same way The Exorcist's Father Karras is afraid: afraid that he's been a bad son to a mother who died asking for him in a mental hospital; afraid that he's been a terrible brother to little sister Mia (Jane Levy), whom he abandoned when things started getting rough at home.
Alvarez evokes not only The Evil Dead, but the freaky-deakiness of The Exorcist and the outré "buckets of blood" stylization of pictures like Suspriria and Carrie.
But he has a clear zeal for bloody mayhem, and the chops to make a hodgepodge of borrowed gestures from The Exorcist and Raimi movies seem bracing again.
Soon, though, Mia is looking like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and telling her pals they’re all going to die there.
And let me be the first to say that this new Evil Dead is certainly not flawless Id happily excise the prologue, which offers a mediocre Deliverance fake-out, witch and Wrong Turn inbreds before cribbing more from The Exorcist than Sam Raimi (the whole Your mother sucks cocks in hell! bit).
Among its other cringe-inducing but impressive feats, “Don’t Breathe” contains one of the 10 most disgusting scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror film, and I’m going all the way back to Linda Blair’s antics in “The Exorcist” as a reference point.
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With Rogen, along with James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Emma Watson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Michael Cera and others all playing themselves -- or at least their perception of how Hollywood and the public view them and their personas -- the film also comes off as a big inside joke as mixed with a "Scary Movie" style spoof of disaster and horror films, complete with an extended sequence lifted from and inspired by a film that was made before many of those involved were born, "The Exorcist."
That their fixation on movies only has them prepared to spout pop culture references and, say, deal with demonic possession by quoting "The Exorcist"?
There's an extended homage to The Exorcist that may be obvious but turns out to be really damn funny anyway.
In some ways this is just a creepier, slightly funnier horror-pic spoof than anything in the recently resurrected “Scary Movie” franchise; along with its references to “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist,” the film spends a considerable amount of time elucidating prophecies in the book of Revelation, often with an impressively straight face.
If Rogen and Goldberg want a hit as big as “Ghostbusters” (another film, along with “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” that this one borrows from), they should remember that the Bill Murray comedy didn’t keep putting the plot on hold for long stretches of improv.
The obvious nods to " The Exorcist " and "Rosemary's Baby" co-exist with a hilarious examination of the familiar dynamics of a group of friends.
Just as the war vet's dramatic exit is seemingly in homage to Jason Miller's famous nosedive at the end of William Friedkin's The Exorcist , Deliver Us from Evil begins by locating the source of its titular evil in the ancient, subterranean bowels of Iraq.
Its police procedural twist aside, “Deliver Us From Evil” is basically the garden-variety possession/exorcism flick — not unlike other alleged true stories such as “The Exorcist,” “The Amityville Horror,” “An American Haunting,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “The Haunting in Connecticut,” “The Possession,” “The Conjuring” et al.
Set in the South Bronx, “Deliver Us From Evil” is a variation on a theme of “The Exorcist,” complete with a hardened police investigator (Sarchie, played by Aussie actor Eric Bana), who has a “radar” for evil, and a flawed but dedicated young Catholic priest (Venezuelan Edgar Ramirez of “Carlos the Jackal”).
Ever since The Exorcist blew everyone’s pants off way back in 1973, filmmakers have been trying to recapture the wonderfully disturbing “possession story” magic that William Friedkin cooked up.
And the granddaddy of them all is "The Exorcist," a truly creepy and shocking horror film that not only still stands the test of time even after all of these years (41 to be exact), but has yet to be surpassed by any number of poseurs and wannabes whose sole desire is to rip that demonic crown off William Friedkin's legendary film.
It stemmed from an idea of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's to make a movie that merged Serpico (1973) with The Exorcist (1973).
His young son crawls out of a box screeching, looking not unlike Linda Blair doing the spider-walk thing in that cut scene from The Exorcist.
I was strongly reminded of Ellen Burstyn creeping into her attic in " The Exorcist ," holding only a candle.
Then again, I don't recall anything occurring after we got cable and HBO (back when it only aired after 5 pm and on the weekends) and thus were able to watch uncut horror movies such as "The Exorcist" and "The Shining."
William Friedkin's The Exorcist casts a long, dark shadow on all who seek to replicate that film's sense of dread.
Is he challenging anyone to defeat him like Pazuzu did to Lankaster Merrin in “The Exorcist”?
Like “The Shining,” “Misery,” “The Exorcist” and “Jaws” played on people’s mental fears without fancy effects as patchwork for weak material, the modern-day “Sinister” captures the most scary element of “The Ring” and “The Cabin in the Woods”: voyeurism.
…and how about dabs of “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and even “Carrie”?