nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and, decades later, selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Its influence is hard to overstate. The Exorcist essentially templated the visual vocabulary of possession movies: an innocent young girl, the long white nightgown, the suddenly vulgar voice, the contorted body, the terrified family outside the bedroom. Fifty years of imitation later, you could be forgiven for thinking there is simply no other way a human being can be possessed by a demonic force. There have been sequels, prequels, reboots and countless descendants. And still, no one has really surpassed the original( though I am excited for Mike Flanagan’ s upcoming take!).
Slight digression, but I believe overuse of the original movie’ s tropes forced supernatural horror to evolve. Films like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and The Conjuring expanded the genre with intricate“ demon rules,” offering audiences entirely new dimensions of fear.
And then, of course, there is all the lore.
The movie production was plagued by injuries, deaths among those connected to the cast and crew, and a fire that destroyed most of the MacNeil house set except Regan’ s bedroom. These events fueled legends that the film was cursed, and theatre people are always eager to indulge in superstition.
Which brings me to the Grandon Halloween tradition.
We launched our seasonal Halloween play in 2019 with Dracula, and the annual spooky Grandon production quickly became a favorite. We followed with Conor McPherson’ s St Nicholas( our first outdoor production at Brucemore, during the pandemic quarantine in 2020), then, back in the Grandon, Let the Right One In, Misery, and The Woman in Black. After staging Carrie: The Musical on the main stage and pausing Grandon shows last year
�Images from the 1973 film The Exorcist. Photo credit: Life Magazine.
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