On December 26, 1973, people stood in freezing lines around city blocks to see a film already famous for making audiences faint, vomit and flee the theater. This deep dive examines how The Exorcist went from a commercially disappointing novel, rescued by William Peter Blatty’s serious late-night talk show discussion about the devil, to a cultural phenomenon. It covers the casting battles with Warner Bros., who pushed Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn and Jane Fonda, while Blatty and director William Friedkin insisted on unknowns like playwright and former theology student Jason Miller to preserve documentary realism, and the search for a twelve-year-old who could handle the material, which ended with Linda Blair.

The episode details the hidden performers behind the possessed Regan, including Mercedes McCambridge, who smoked, drank whiskey and swallowed raw eggs to create the demon’s voice and then had to go to the Screen Actors Guild to get credited, and Eileen Dietz, who performed the spider walk in a harness. It unpacks the so-called curse, from the set fire that spared only Regan’s bedroom to Ellen Burstyn’s permanent back injury, arguing the chaos came from a 200-day shoot and Friedkin’s psychological tactics rather than the supernatural. It also looks at the four-wall distribution gamble, why the medical angiography scene caused more fainting than the demonic scenes, and how scholars read the film through Watergate, Vietnam-era generational fear and opposing feminist interpretations.

• How a talk show appearance turned a dead-in-the-water novel into a bestseller
• Why the filmmakers rejected A-list stars in favor of unfamiliar faces
• The uncredited labor of McCambridge and Dietz and the studio’s effort to protect the illusion of a single child performer
• Blank gunshots, refrigerated sets and a Pazuzu statue shipped to Hong Kong: the production behind the curse
• Stephen King’s social horror reading and Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine interpretation