The Exorcist (franchise)

• 1. Introduction

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  In January 1974, a letter from the Zodiac Killer reached the San Francisco Chronicle with an unexpected film review. The writer called The Exorcist "the best satirical comedy that I have ever seen". That a real-life killer felt the need to weigh in says something about how deeply the story had lodged in the public mind. The Exorcist began as a novel in 1971. It grew into a franchise of books, films, a television series, a stage play, a radio drama and a virtual reality game. Every installment circles the same demon, Pazuzu, and the religious figures who try to drive it out of a human body. Yet by most accounts, only the very first film, and later the television series, earned real praise. So where did the story come from? Why did the sequels struggle so badly? And how did one of them end up being made twice?

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• 2. Roland Doe and Georgetown

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  At Georgetown University, a student in the class of 1950 heard about a demonic possession and exorcism from the previous year. His name was William Peter Blatty. The case involved a person known as Roland Doe, and it stayed with Blatty long after graduation. It became the seed of his 1971 novel The Exorcist, which Harper & Row published. Blatty set the book in Washington D.C., in the shadow of the Georgetown campus he knew from his own student days. The story follows twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil, whose mother is a famous actress. As the girl is possessed by a demon, two priests are called in to cast it out. The book sold over 13 million copies and reached the New York Times bestseller list. In September 2011, HarperCollins reprinted it for its 40th anniversary, with slight revisions by Blatty and interior title artwork by Jeremy Caniglia. The film that made the story famous would be shaped by Blatty's own hand.

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• 3. The Film That Started It

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  On the 26th of December 1973, audiences met The Exorcist on the big screen. William Friedkin directed, and Blatty himself adapted his novel for the screen. Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller led the cast. The adaptation stays close to the book, following a mother's fight to win back her child through an exorcism performed by two priests. Made on a budget of 12 million dollars, it earned more than 441 million dollars worldwide. Critics have been kind to it over the decades, with Rotten Tomatoes recording 78 percent approval and Metacritic giving it 81 out of 100. In 1974, the film received ten Academy Award nominations and won two. It was the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture. Seven Golden Globe nominations followed, and it won four of them. The American Film Institute later placed it third on its list of the greatest thrills and ranked Regan MacNeil as the ninth greatest screen villain. Such a peak was always going to be hard to follow.

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• 4. The Troubled Sequels

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  John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic arrived in 1977, set four years after the first film. Richard Burton plays Father Philip Lamont, a priest struggling with his faith. A cardinal sends him to investigate the death of Father Lankester Merrin, the exorcist played by von Sydow. The Church, it turns out, is now investigating Merrin himself for heresy. Flashbacks show the exorcism of a young boy named Kokumo in Africa. The film earned a 9 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Blatty took a different path with The Exorcist III in 1990. He adapted and directed it from his 1983 novel Legion, which had once been the subject of a court case over its exclusion from a bestseller list. He had based the Gemini Killer, played by Brad Dourif, on the Zodiac Killer. The story jumps ahead fifteen years and makes the philosophical detective William F. Kinderman, played by George C. Scott, its lead. Then the studio, Morgan Creek Productions, stepped in. It ordered rewrites and reshoots, demanded an exorcism scene, and retitled the film to tie it to the franchise. Blatty still called the finished film more frightening than the original. He had hoped to rebuild his own cut, but the studio claimed the deleted footage was lost. In 2007, his wife told a fan site about an alternate opening in which Kinderman views the body of Father Karras in the morgue. That footage resurfaced and was released in 2016 as The Exorcist III: Legion.

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• 5. One Prequel, Two Versions

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  John Frankenheimer was the first director hired for a prequel to The Exorcist. He withdrew before filming because of health concerns and died a month later. Paul Schrader replaced him, and his finished film starred Stellan Skarsgård as a young Father Merrin. This Merrin has lost his faith after an incident in occupied Holland in the Second World War. There, a Nazi SS commander forced him to take part in executions to spare a village from slaughter. The studio judged Schrader's cut too slow and hired Renny Harlin to retool it. Harlin reused some of Schrader's footage but shot mostly new material for a more conventional horror film. That version, Exorcist: The Beginning, came out in 2004, on a budget of 50 million dollars. It sends Merrin to a dig in the Turkana region of Kenya, where a Byzantine church from the 5th century stands in perfect condition. Local diggers refuse to enter it, and a grave said to hold plague victims turns out to be empty. A novelization by Steven Piziks reached shelves on the 4th of October 2004. Reviews were harsh, with Rotten Tomatoes recording 10 percent approval. Nine months later, Schrader's original appeared in 2005 as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. It earned only 251,495 dollars against a 30 million dollar budget.

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• 6. Screens Big and Small

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  In 2016, 20th Century Fox Television launched a series that continued the story of the 1973 film. Its pilot was filmed in Chicago in early 2016 and directed by Rupert Wyatt. Alfonso Herrera played Father Tomas Ortega and Ben Daniels played Father Marcus Keane, with Geena Davis as Angela Rance. The show followed two very different men confronting one family's possession. Reviewers liked it, and Rotten Tomatoes recorded 89 percent approval. Fox canceled it in May 2018 after two seasons. The big screen took longer to recover. In August 2020, Morgan Creek was reported to be developing a reboot. By December, Blumhouse Productions had joined it and turned the project into a direct sequel under David Gordon Green. Universal and Peacock together paid 400 million dollars for distribution rights to a planned trilogy. Burstyn returned as Chris MacNeil for The Exorcist: Believer, released on the 6th of October 2023. It earned about 136 million dollars against a 30 million dollar budget and scored 24 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The Golden Raspberry Awards nominated it five times, but all five awards went to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Green's second film, titled The Exorcist: Deceiver, vanished from Universal's calendar on the 11th of January 2024 after he left to pursue other projects.

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• 7. The Flanagan Reboot

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  By May 2024, Mike Flanagan was in talks to take over the franchise. Later that month he was confirmed as writer, director and producer of a reboot, replacing the scrapped trilogy. The first release date was the 13th of March 2026. Flanagan then explained in a Tumblr post that filming would not start until he finished his miniseries adaptation of Carrie. He wrote that there was "no way it's coming out next March". In November 2025, Scarlett Johansson was announced as part of the cast. The film is now scheduled for the 12th of March 2027. If it arrives on time, it will mark more than fifty years since the 1973 original first reached theaters.

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• 8. Imitations and Parodies

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  In 1974, the year after the film appeared, Italy's Beyond the Door, starring Juliet Mills as a woman possessed by the devil, started a wave of copycats. A Turkish film called Şeytan, meaning Satan, was an almost scene-for-scene remake. Germany produced Magdalena, vom Teufel besessen that same year. The blaxploitation film Abby also followed, but its Louisiana-based producers were sued by Warner and the film was pulled from theaters. It still earned 4 million dollars first. Britain's 1975 film The Devil Within Her gave Joan Collins a demon-possessed baby to deal with. Comedy took notice too. Mexican comedians Los Polivoces made a parody called El Exorcista, flying a bed with rotoscoping. In 1987, Warner Bros. released "The Duxorcist", in which Daffy Duck frees a female duck from a group of spirits. The Simpsons has spoofed the film several times, including a Treehouse of Horror segment based entirely on it. In Supernatural, Linda Blair herself plays a police detective, and Dean Winchester leaves the episode craving pea soup. This Is the End has Jay Baruchel exorcising Jonah Hill by repeating lines from the film. Even the comic Angel: Earthly Possessions argues that the film made demons' work easier, because people now knew what a possession should look like.

  On the 11th of April 1973, the contortionist Linda R. Hager performed what became the film's most infamous cut scene, the spider-walk. Friedkin pulled it shortly before the December release because he felt it was technically ineffective. He later worked with CGI artists to make the scene more convincing for the 2000 re-release, The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen. That version added blood pouring from Regan's mouth during the scene's finale. Friedkin has insisted that no alternate version of the scene was ever shot, whatever rumors suggest. The film has had many other lives. A 1998 box set was limited to 50,000 copies and included a 52-page tribute book and the BBC documentary The Fear of God. In 2012, a stage adaptation premiered at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, after playwright John Pielmeier completed a first draft within ten days. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part dramatization in 2014 featuring Ian McDiarmid as Merrin. A virtual reality game, The Exorcist: Legion VR, appeared in 2018. In 2025, a haunted house called Universal Horror Unleashed brought the franchise's characters to a theme park.

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