On August 20, 1949, Bill Brinkley published a front-page story in the Washington Post. The headline described a boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland, allegedly freed from possession by Catholic priests. The account mentioned between twenty and thirty exorcism sessions, Jesuit priests, and phenomena that defied easy explanation: scratching sounds, objects moving on their own, words appearing scratched into the boy’s skin.
A Georgetown senior named William Peter Blatty read the article. He was twenty-one, Catholic, and it lodged in his mind like a splinter. Twenty years later, he wrote a novel. Four years after that, William Friedkin turned it into a film that audiences literally could not sit through. People fainted. People vomited. Paramedics were stationed outside theaters. The film earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, the first time a horror film had achieved that.
Half a century later, The Exorcist remains the highest-grossing horror film of all time, adjusted for inflation. And the real story behind it is stranger than the film itself.
The Boy from Cottage City
The boy’s name was Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. Born June 1, 1935, in Cottage City, Maryland. His identity was protected for decades under the pseudonyms “Roland Doe” and “Robbie Mannheim.” It was not publicly confirmed until after his death on May 10, 2020, when investigative journalist Mark Opsasnick published his identification in The Skeptical Inquirer.
The events began in January 1949, shortly after the death of Hunkeler’s Aunt Harriet, a Spiritualist who had taught him to use a Ouija board. Scratching sounds came from the walls and floors. Water dripped from nowhere. The mattress moved. The family’s Lutheran minister, Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, witnessed the phenomena and recommended a Catholic priest. Father E. Albert Hughes of St. James Church in Mount Rainier attempted an exorcism. During the ritual, the boy broke a piece of mattress spring and slashed Hughes from shoulder to wrist. The exorcism was abandoned. Hughes was hospitalized.
Then red scratches appeared on the boy’s body. One formed the word “LOUIS.” The family interpreted this as a sign and traveled to St. Louis to stay with relatives. Jesuit priests at Saint Louis University took over. Father William S. Bowdern, S.J., an associate at College Church, agreed to lead the exorcism. Father Raymond J. Bishop, S.J. began keeping a diary.
Between twenty and thirty exorcism sessions were conducted over several weeks in March and April 1949, at the family’s relatives’ home, at the Saint Louis University campus, and at Alexian Brothers Hospital. The sessions always began in the evening. Bowdern fasted throughout. Multiple priests, Alexian Brothers, and family members participated.
On April 18, 1949, Easter Monday, the final session took place at Alexian Brothers Hospital. According to the account, seven minutes in, the boy came out of his trance and said simply: “He’s gone.”
Father Walter H. Halloran, S.J., then twenty-six, physically assisted during the exorcisms and was the last surviving Jesuit participant. He died March 1, 2005. In later years, Halloran became more skeptical. He told Opsasnick he never heard the boy’s voice change, and thought the boy mimicked Latin words he heard the priests say.
Bishop’s diary, twenty-six to twenty-nine pages (sources differ on the exact count), was left in a sealed drawer at Alexian Brothers Hospital and discovered in 1978 by a workman during the building’s demolition. Thomas B. Allen obtained it and published the first comprehensive account of the case in Possessed (Doubleday, 1993). Allen’s own conclusion: the consensus among modern experts was that the boy was “just a deeply disturbed boy, nothing supernatural about him.”
Opsasnick tracked down Hunkeler through the 1954 Gonzaga High School yearbook. Only one name matched a member of St. James Church, born June 1, 1935, living in Cottage City. Hunkeler went on to earn degrees in chemical engineering and psychology, worked nearly forty years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and patented technology for space shuttle thermal protection panels. He died at eighty-five in Marriottsville, Maryland. The boy who inspired the most terrifying film in cinema history spent his career helping people get to space.
The Twenty-Year Gestation
Blatty did not write his novel for twenty years. Born January 7, 1928, in New York to Lebanese immigrants, he graduated from Georgetown in 1950, earned a master’s from George Washington University, and spent the next two decades doing everything except writing about exorcism. He sold vacuum cleaners. He drove a beer truck. He served as a psychological warfare officer in the U.S. Air Force. He wrote comedy screenplays with Blake Edwards and worked with Peter Sellers.
By the late 1960s, the comedy market had dried up. Blatty returned to the story that had been sitting in his mind since 1949. He wrote the novel in approximately nine to ten months, working sixteen-hour days. He changed the fourteen-year-old boy to a twelve-year-old girl named Regan MacNeil, moved the setting entirely to Georgetown (the real exorcism happened mostly in St. Louis), and made the mother a film actress. Father Bowdern had requested the gender change to further protect the real family.
Harper & Row published The Exorcist in 1971. It spent fifty-seven consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, seventeen of them at number one. Over thirteen million copies sold in the United States alone.
What Blatty added to the documented case was theology. The novel is not a horror story with a Catholic veneer. It is a sustained theological argument about the nature of evil and the cost of confronting it. Blatty identified the possessing demon as Pazuzu, a real Mesopotamian wind demon. In ancient Mesopotamia, Pazuzu actually served a protective function: women wore Pazuzu amulets during pregnancy to ward off the demoness Lamashtu. He was a demon deployed against a demon. Blatty stripped away this protective dual nature entirely and recast Pazuzu as something purely malevolent, something that possesses for the sake of destroying faith. The Mesopotamian pragmatism vanished. What replaced it was Christian eschatology.
Friedkin and the Documentary of the Damned
Warner Bros. offered the film to Stanley Kubrick first. He declined, saying he only developed his own material. Arthur Penn declined. Mike Nichols thought it impossible to build the film around a twelve-year-old’s acting. The studio hired Mark Rydell. But Blatty insisted on William Friedkin, who had just won the Academy Award for Best Director for The French Connection (1971). Studio head Ted Ashley told Blatty: “We want him more than you do now.”
Friedkin approached the film as a documentary. He did not want gothic lighting, atmospheric fog, or anything that signaled “horror film.” He wanted it to look like it was really happening in a real house. Cinematographer Owen Roizman, who had shot The French Connection, lit every scene from visible sources. The bedroom’s color scheme was deliberately muted: gray taupe walls, neutral beige bedding, priests in black. The visual palette suggests black and white. The horror emerges not from how the film looks but from what happens inside that frame.
The iconic shot of Father Merrin arriving at the MacNeil house, standing under a streetlight with his hat and bag, was directly inspired by René Magritte’s painting Empire of Light (1954). Friedkin had seen it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Blatty’s novel described Merrin standing under a streetlight “like a melancholy traveller frozen in time.” The painting shows a house at night under a daytime sky. The impossible contradiction between light and dark. That was the film.
Production began August 14, 1972. It was supposed to take eighty-five days. It took over two hundred. The initial budget was $4.2 million. The final cost: approximately $12 million.
The bedroom set was built inside a refrigerated enclosure nicknamed “The Cocoon” at Ceco Studios on West 54th Street in New York. A $50,000 refrigeration system (approximately $284,000 today) cooled the room to minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The actors’ breath was visible on camera. But when the filming lights came on, the heat warmed the air in minutes. Friedkin wanted the actors genuinely cold. They could not spend more than about fifteen minutes in the room at a time. Linda Blair, thirteen years old, endured this for months.
Friedkin’s directing methods were confrontational. He slapped Father William O’Malley, S.J. (a real Jesuit priest cast as Father Dyer) hard across the face before calling “Action” to get a genuinely shaken reaction. He fired blanks behind Jason Miller’s head without warning. He told Miller the projectile vomit rig would hit him in the chest; it hit him in the face. Miller’s shock is genuine. The substance was a porridge of Andersen’s pea soup and oatmeal that spoiled under the hot lights, making the smell real.
The Georgetown house exterior was at 3600 Prospect Street NW. The seventy-five stone steps beside it, descending to M Street, became the “Exorcist Steps” and a permanent tourist attraction. Built in 1895 for a streetcar line, they were designated a D.C. historic landmark. In 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser unveiled a plaque at the base with Friedkin and Blatty present. The steps were padded with half-inch-thick rubber for the final scene where Father Karras falls to his death.
The opening sequence in Iraq was filmed at Hatra, a real Parthian-era archaeological city approximately fifty miles southwest of Mosul. The US and Iraq had no diplomatic relations at the time. Friedkin negotiated directly with local Ba’ath Party officials, agreeing to hire local workers and teach filmmaking. The crew filmed at an active excavation site. The archaeologists were genuinely unearthing severed heads of statues: the city had been seized by the Sassanids around 240 CE and all inhabitants and statuary beheaded. The Pazuzu statue prop, roughly ten feet tall, was accidentally shipped to Hong Kong instead of Iraq, causing a two-week delay.
The People Inside the Film
Max von Sydow was forty-three when filming began. He played a man decades older. Dick Smith, the makeup artist who had aged Marlon Brando for The Godfather, applied multiple separate latex prosthetics each morning in a process that took approximately four hours. Pauline Kael called it “one of the most convincing aging jobs I’ve ever seen.” Von Sydow’s performance is almost monastic: a man who has done this before, knows the cost, and does it anyway.
Ellen Burstyn fought for the role of Chris MacNeil after Audrey Hepburn, Anne Bancroft, and Jane Fonda all declined. She is the film’s emotional center. In the scene where the possessed Regan throws Chris across the room, a harness rig yanked Burstyn too violently. She had warned Friedkin. He responded: “Well, it has to look real.” She suffered a permanent spinal injury. Her scream of pain is in the finished film. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Jason Miller had never appeared in a film. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (That Championship Season, 1973) who had studied for three years to become a Jesuit priest before a crisis of faith led him away. Stacy Keach had already been cast as Father Karras. When Friedkin saw Miller in a play, he had Keach’s contract bought out and replaced him. Miller learned of his Pulitzer Prize while on the Exorcist set. His portrayal of a priest who has lost his faith and must find it again to save a child is one of cinema’s most honest examinations of religious doubt. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. He died May 13, 2001, at sixty-two.
Linda Blair was thirteen. She showed up for auditions without an appointment. She underwent medical examinations to certify she could withstand the physical demands. During filming, a bed-shaking rig malfunctioned and threw her more violently than intended, fracturing her lower spine. Her screams of genuine pain are in the final cut. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Mercedes McCambridge voiced the demon. An Academy Award winner for All the King’s Men (1949), she swallowed raw eggs, chain-smoked, and drank whiskey to distort her voice, breaking years of sobriety. She had her priest on standby for counseling during the sessions where she drank. Friedkin had her bound to a chair during recordings. She pulled a scarf tight around her neck, nearly to strangulation, for groaning sounds. She based the demon’s wailing on a keening sound she had heard at a wake in Ireland. She was not credited in the original release. After threatening legal action with Screen Actors Guild backing, she received a credit, but a generic line that did not specify her contribution.
Dick Smith, the makeup effects genius, created a life-sized mechanical dummy of Blair for the 360-degree head rotation. The “HELP ME” letters on Blair’s body were created by drawing with a solvent, then drying with hot air while filming. A nozzle for the vomit rig was fitted inside the mouth like a horse’s bridle, connected to rubber hoses running down the back. Smith pioneered what he called “special makeup effects,” achieving transformation without optical tricks. No Academy Award category for makeup existed at the time.
The Theology the Film Takes Seriously
Three Jesuit priests served as technical advisors: Father Thomas Bermingham, Father John Nicola, and Father William O’Malley. Nicola, described as “the foremost expert in this country on exorcism,” eventually resigned due to creative disagreements. He opposed the desecration and masturbation scenes but insisted the demon’s language should actually be more obscene, noting that in documented cases the language was far beyond what the film depicted. The dialogue was adjusted accordingly.
The film’s depiction of the Rituale Romanum, the standardized Catholic exorcism rite authorized by Pope Paul V in 1614, was taken seriously enough that Blatty and the advisors worked through every liturgical detail. The four signs of genuine possession listed in the Rituale (speaking unknown languages, revealing hidden things, displaying superhuman strength, vehement aversion to sacred objects) are all depicted in the film.
But what makes the film theologically interesting is not its accuracy. It is the question at its center. In the 2000 re-release, a restored scene shows Merrin and Karras sitting on the stairs after the first round of exorcism. Karras asks why the demon chose this girl. Merrin’s response: the target is not the girl. The target is those around her. The demon wants them to see the girl and conclude that humanity is ultimately bestial, that there is nothing worth saving. The point of possession is despair.
Friedkin said in the 2019 documentary Leap of Faith: “Films are about the mystery of fate or the mystery of faith.” He positioned The Exorcist as the latter. He also admitted that the limits of his own faith obstructed his understanding of the climax, where the possessed Karras throws himself down the Georgetown steps. “I can’t defend that scene,” he said. A filmmaker who cannot fully explain his own ending made the most honest film about faith in cinema history.
What the Film Did to the Real World
The Exorcist opened December 26, 1973, on only twenty-six screens under a four-wall distribution model: Warner Bros. rented the theaters outright and kept all ticket revenue. Theaters committed to showing it for at least twenty-four weeks. The limited release created artificial scarcity. Massive lines in freezing winter weather forced rapid expansion to over 360 screens.
The audience reactions were not marketing exaggeration. Theater managers documented an average of four blackouts and six episodes of vomiting per screening. A plumber at Toronto’s University Theater was described as “practically living here now.” A psychiatric journal published a paper on “cinematic neurosis” triggered by the film. The UK allowed theatrical screenings with an X certificate (no one under eighteen), but the British Board of Film Classification refused to grant a home video certificate in 1988. The film was effectively banned from British homes for eleven years, until February 25, 1999.
The film earned ten Academy Award nominations and won two: Best Adapted Screenplay (Blatty) and Best Sound. It lost Best Picture to The Sting. It won four Golden Globes, including Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director. The lifetime worldwide gross, including re-releases, reached approximately $441 million. Adjusted for inflation, an estimated 116.5 million tickets were sold in the United States alone. Guinness recognizes it as the highest-grossing horror film of all time, adjusted for inflation.
The cultural impact went beyond box office. Sociologist Michael Cuneo of Fordham University attended more than fifty real exorcisms and published his findings in American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (2001). His central conclusion: the film “created an insatiable appetite for the subject.” He found instances where real priest-exorcists modeled their behavior on Jason Miller’s fictional Father Karras. By the early 1990s, Cuneo counted over 600 Pentecostal deliverance ministries in the United States. After attending fifty-plus exorcisms, he was “unequivocal that he saw nothing supernatural.” But the demand was real, and the film was the catalyst.
The “curse” narrative persisted because the production’s tragedies were real, even if the supernatural explanation for them was not. Actor Jack MacGowran died January 30, 1973, of complications from influenza, shortly after completing his scenes. His character also dies in the film. Vasiliki Maliaros, who played Karras’s mother (not a professional actress; Friedkin found her in a Greek restaurant), died February 9, 1973, of natural causes. She was approximately eighty-nine. Von Sydow’s brother died during his first week of filming. Blair’s grandfather died during production. A fire destroyed the entire MacNeil house interior set except Regan’s bedroom, which survived intact. A bird had flown into a circuit breaker. The fire caused a six-week delay. Burstyn stated that nine people associated with the production died during filming.
Coincidence? The materialist reading says yes. The film’s own logic says: the question is what matters, not the answer. That is what makes it a work of art rather than a piece of entertainment.
The Afterlife of The Exorcist
The sequels mostly failed. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), directed by John Boorman without Blatty’s involvement, was so poorly received that opening-night audiences reportedly walked out mid-screening. Friedkin called it “the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen.” In The Golden Turkey Awards readers’ poll, it placed second only to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The Exorcist III (1990), written and directed by Blatty himself from his 1983 novel Legion, was something else entirely. Blatty abandoned gross-out tactics and played it as a theological detective story starring George C. Scott. The film contains what many consider the scariest single shot in the entire franchise: a hospital corridor held in a wide angle for over thirty seconds before a sudden, violent reveal. It has earned a strong cult reputation.
The prequel saga became a cautionary tale of studio interference. Paul Schrader completed a deliberately paced, introspective film about Merrin’s crisis of faith. The studio rejected it as too slow. Renny Harlin was hired to reshoot with a new script. His version, Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), was violent and exploitative. Both versions were eventually released. Neither satisfied anyone.
In 2000, Blatty persuaded Friedkin to assemble “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” adding approximately twelve minutes of cut footage. The most significant restoration was the spider-walk scene (cut in 1973 because the wire rigging was visible; CGI removed them for 2000) and the Merrin-Karras stairway dialogue about the purpose of the demon’s attack. The re-release grossed approximately $40 million.
In 2016, Friedkin filmed a real exorcism performed by Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, on an Italian woman. The resulting documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth (2018), was Friedkin’s attempt to revisit the subject with his own eyes rather than through Blatty’s theology. He died August 7, 2023, in Bel Air, Los Angeles, of heart failure and pneumonia. He was eighty-seven. Blatty had died January 12, 2017, at eighty-nine.
What It Actually Is
The rationalist reading of The Exorcist is straightforward. A disturbed child. Hysterical adults. Priests performing a ritual that kills them. The film works as psychological horror about projection: a group of people, desperate to explain suffering, impose a narrative framework that makes it worse. This reading accounts for why the film’s first hour is a medical mystery. Regan sees doctors, psychiatrists, neurologists. Every test comes back inconclusive. The supernatural enters only after the natural has been exhausted. If you remove the theology, you have a story about medical failure and the human need to find meaning in suffering.
The other reading notes that Friedkin, Blatty, and three Jesuit technical advisors spent over a year making the theological framework as rigorous as possible. The Rituale Romanum is depicted correctly. The four signs of possession are shown. The Marduk-Ea formula of Mesopotamian exorcism, where the exorcist claims divine authority to override demonic power, finds its Christian parallel in the repeated “Imperat tibi” of the Latin rite. Blatty chose Pazuzu deliberately: a real entity from a real tradition that spans four thousand years of documented practice. The film does not ask you to believe in possession. It asks you to take seriously the possibility that the question is worth asking.
The first reading is defensible. The second reading is defensible. What is not defensible is dismissing either one. The film refuses to resolve the tension, and that is why it lasts.
Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” was not written for the film. Friedkin found it unlabeled in Warner Bros.’ music library. He was looking for something that sounded like a childhood lullaby. Only the opening five-minute piano sequence was used. The piece was Oldfield’s debut album, released in May 1973. The film made it a hit. Lalo Schifrin had been hired to compose the original score. His trailer music terrified audiences so badly that reports of vomiting reached studio executives. Friedkin was so displeased with Schifrin’s additional compositions that he literally threw the recordings out of his studio window. Schifrin said working on the film was “one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life.”
A childhood lullaby that isn’t one, playing over a film about a child who becomes something else. The music doesn’t tell you to be afraid. It tells you something is wrong with the world, in a quiet voice, and you cannot look away.
The boy from Cottage City grew up, went to NASA, helped build heat shields for spacecraft, and died quietly at eighty-five. The film that his childhood inspired remains, fifty years later, the one against which all possession stories are measured. Not because it is the most graphic. Because it is the most serious. Because it asks questions it does not answer. Because it trusts the audience to sit with the uncertainty.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. And the details are still there. Still cold. Still waiting.
