"The Exorcist" Prologue: Buzzing Perfection

by Cláudio Alves

Between William Friedkin's death, a special spooky season re-release to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and a new sequel, The Exorcist feels like a hot topic. Then again, the 1973 movie is hard to shake off, even half a century after its original release. Indeed, one can count it among the most influential horrors in film history, a classic whose legacy lives on, scaring, maybe even scarring, generations long after it first shocked audiences. And yet, when discussing it, most people focus on the nightmare of a possessed child and her terrified mother, the doubt-ridden priest who regains his faith confronting evil beyond belief, or perhaps the freezing room where domesticity rots into hell on earth. 

For me, though, the best part of The Exorcist is its prologue, perhaps the picture's most divisive passage…

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Review: 'The Exorcist: Believer'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The legacy of William Friedkin’s screen adaptation of The Exorcist is a complicated one. Like any long-running horror franchise, the history of its lore is long and maybe a bit confusing. 50 years after the original, we have a sixth film entry (although two of those are duelling prequels built from production turmoil) from director David Gordon Green who works once again on the screenplay with his Halloween reboot buddy Danny McBride (alongside Scott Teems and Peter Sattler). It unfortunately adds little to the myth...

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Showbiz History: "Blame It (on the Alcohol)" or Pazuzu

8 random things that happened on this day, January 26th, in showbiz history...

1931 Cimarron premieres in NYC. It becomes the first western to win Best Picture

1961 The Mark opens in theaters. You have to see the trailer to believe it (film distributors were so excited at the new raciness of the 1960s). Stuart Whitman, a rising star of the time and a last minute replacement for Richard Burton, received an Oscar nomination playing a ex-con child molester who is suspected of a new crime...

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Ellen Burstyn's Oscar history

by Cláudio Alves

At 88 years of age, Ellen Burstyn is back on the hunt for gold and she might just become the oldest acting Oscar nominee of all-time for her work in Kornél Mundruczó's Pieces of a Woman. (The record is currently held by Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, who had just turned 88 at the time but Burstyn would be just a bit older). Burstyn's film, now streaming on Netflix, concerns Vanessa Kirby's Martha, a woman dealing with the unimaginable pain of having lost her newborn daughter. Burstyn plays the protagonist's mother, a severe matriarch whose disapproval of her daughter's life choices is an incandescent force, blinding in its intensity.

The actress breathes life into this supporting role, illuminating the brittleness, the scars of past woes, and the terror brought upon by the first signs of dementia. It's a showy performance, complete with an Oscar clip-ready monologue that unspools from Burstyn like a torrent of misdirected fervor. As we ponder if AMPAS will grace the thespian with another honor, let's look at her record with the Academy. Ellen Burstyn has been nominated six times and won once… 

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Doc Corner: 'Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist'

By Glenn Dunks

We’re back with another film about the making of a classic movie (after last week's Television Event), this time a title that's streaming right now on Shudder. It is Alexandre O. Phillippe doing his thing; a horror behind-the-scenes-doc majestically titled Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Artistically speaking, it is probably his best movie yet. (But from me that’s faint praise indeed.)

The problem with a director like Phillippe is that he tends to take incredible works of art and then bleeds them dry. 78/52, his most well-known feature to date, somehow turned the shower sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho into a routine film school dissertation. He takes iconic horror and performs a very practical (to the point of strict orderliness) dissection. The intellectual passion is there, but that doesn’t necessarily always make for the most scintillating of viewing.

It would have been easy to make a more traditional making-of documentary about The Exorcist. Hell, there’s enough of them out there to prove that. (I would recommend the Exorcist episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films if you want more of the making of style).  What makes Leap of Faith interesting is that Phillippe has done something of the opposite...

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