I found a copy of the exorcist in a second hand store, and thought I'd take a look, but to be honest I didn't think it would be too scary - I'm a massive horror film fan, and I've sat through films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Saw without flinching. So how scary could a film about some possesed kid be?Uh, very.... The 'Exorcist' was released in 1973, based on the novel by William Blatty. It won an Academy Award, and, accoring to urban legend, paramedics waited outside movie theatres to aid all the people who fainted/went into shock after watching the film! The plot of the Exorcist is threefold - Father Lankester Merrin unearths a sinister artifact ...  Read the complete review

One of the key American films of the 1970's, William Friedkin's The Exorcist remains as relevant and as powerful now as ever. Granted, modern audiences may find several of the key "shock" moments a touch quaint post-Hostel and Saw (the head spinning, the pea-soup episode...), but its themes, its challenging of the limits of faith, of the line between religious devotion and mental illness, of the power of good in the face of an evil that is forever evolving, shifting - these are perhaps more relevant now than they have been at any time since, oooh, at least the Scopes trial. William Peter Blatty's source novel (itself loosely inspired by a ...  Read the complete review

A review of just the film. A DVD of the 'director's cut' is only about a fiver on amazon at the moment. This is a very famous horror film from 1973. It wowed and scared audiences at the time, and was made immeasurably cooler by the BBFC's decision to refuse it a video certificate for decades. It is one of the worst films I've ever seen. I'm quite used to being out of step with the laddish consensus on films, and normally I don't worry about it. I can sort of see why people like films like Apocalypse Now or The Shawshank Redemption, even if I think they're dull and pretentious. But try as I might, I honestly cannot understand the continued popularity ...  Read the complete review

Ok, so maybe when you’re not feeling too well watching The Exorcist isn’t the most appropriate course of action to take, but it seemed like the perfect opportunity to watch the very film that caused so many cinema audiences to faint all of 28years ago. So some people may not feel it’s particularly scary today, but I hadn’t seen this before and although it wasn’t overly terrifying, it managed to shock me in places! I bought the DVD a few weeks back, and hadn’t been able to watch on my on and off faulty Wide-screen television, and so took the DVD player and connected it up to the living room 21inch normal TV. Right from the very ...  Read the complete review

Despite assurances about the quality and power of this film, it's never really been something that has appealed to me, if I'm honest, and so when I watched it the reason was more because I'm working my way through Empire's 500 top movies than because I really wanted to. What I encountered is without doubt a top class film, but this doesn't necessarily mean I found it amazing. You can see why it had initial exposure as much as it did, with its attacks on religion and science, and the frankly disturbing scenes featuring Linda Blair as a possessed 12 year old girl are enough to explain why so many people have reported being scared ever since, be it of the dark, ...  Read the complete review