Nearly three decades after its initial release, the classic scarefest about a young girl possessed by the devil has received a long overdue makeover courtesy of Warner Bros. and director William Friedkin, who has digitally remastered the soundtrack and restored 12 minutes of never-before-seen footage to the film.
Friedkin, who won an Oscar for directing The French Connection, teamed with bestselling author William Peter Blatty to unleash The Exorcist on an unsuspecting American public the day after Christmas--December 26, 1973.
The movie went on to become, literally and figuratively, a monster hit--grossing $160 million at the box office (at the time second only to The Godfather) and scoring 10 Oscar nominations (it won for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound). And it carved a permanent place in our cultural landscape.
"Audiences were deeply affected by it," Friedkin tells E! Online.
But the released film was not what Blatty, who wrote the book the film was based on, had originally envisioned.
"I told Billy, yes it's a classic, but the first version was a masterpiece," says Blatty. The writer says without those missing scenes, the movie "had no moral center whatsoever" and meandered "from shock to shock to shock."
The "first version" Blatty refers to is the original cut Friedkin put together. But the director, wanting to bring the running time in at two hours, ended up chopping several minutes of footage. "For me, they're well done scenes," he explains, "But it was completely arbitrary why I cut them out...it was not cut for censorship, but for pace and length."
But after nearly 30 years of "friendly banter" as Blatty calls it, the writer finally persuaded the director to restore The Exorcist to its original gory glory.
"Bill Blatty had been working on me for 27 years to restore the film," says Friedkin. "After it became Warner's biggest picture in England when it was rereleased there last year [and grossed $13 million], I thought I'd finally take a look at the footage I originally took out."
After retrieving the edited-out film from a vault in Kansas City, Friedkin was surprised to find how well the old scenes held up. "When I looked at the footage again, I thought [Blatty] was right," says Friedkin.
One new segment Exorcist fans will particularly savor is the infamous "spider walk" scene, which appears in both Blatty's novel and screenplay and shows the possessed Regan (played by Linda Blair) flipping herself over, contorting her body and crawling down the stairs like a spider. Friedkin shot it, but excised it from the released version.
"At that point in the narrative, I just thought it was too much, but through rumor and word-of-mouth it became a famous scene," says Friedkin, who refuses to divulge exactly how it was done. He does say he was able to make it work now thanks to digital technology that was unavailable to him at the time. (Fans wanting a more detailed account of how the scene was done can go to the film's official Website. )
Another scene that Blatty wanted reinstated was Regan's first visit to the doctor's office. In the original version, Regan walks around the party laughing at one moment, and the next, she's urinating on the carpet and asking her mother (Ellen Burstyn), "What's wrong with me?" Burstyn's character replies, "It's like the doctor said." This line always bothered Blatty, who repeatedly asked, "What doctor?"
The author was adamant that the scene of Regan's initial visit to the doctor be restored because it showed the onset of her possession before the party. Friedkin agreed, but put another spin on it. He points out that the new scenes (the longest of the newly added footage) gave additional depth to the movie thanks to the doctor's diagnosis of Regan and the passage of time.
Friedkin asserts the doctor may have exacerbated Regan's possession by overprescribing Ritalin for her, a trend among doctors back then that's coming under close scrutiny today.
One last scene Blatty fought for involved a religious medal that Burstyn gives to the priest near the end of the film. In the released version, the priest takes it and drives off. But in the restored version he tells her to keep it and hands it back to her.
"Her acceptance of the medal symbolizes that for this atheistic woman, a door to faith has at least been opened," says Blatty, who acknowledges his own faith (he's Catholic, of course) was strengthened in the process of writing and researching the book. The new version also restores the scripted "happy" ending, in which a priest befriends a detective--a display of hope for the future--instead of the priest walking off alone.
Will the movie still strike the same chord it did more than a quarter-century ago? Friedkin thinks so. "I don't feel it's dated in any way," he says. "The story's timeless."