The Demon Returns

The Age

Tuesday June 20, 2000

LONG, long before the Blair Witch Project - in fact, more than 20 years before, there was Linda Blair, a child star who really knew how to give movie fans a fright for their money, in The Exorcist.

Playing a child possessed by the Devil, her projectile vomiting, 360-degree head turns, terrifying, guttural growls and weird, weird ways with a crucifix had audiences staggering out of movie theatres and fainting and vomiting in the aisles.

In Berkeley, California, a crazed movie-goer reportedly charged the screen in a vain effort to ``get the demon", while in Anaheim, a Pentecostal clergyman was spending sleepless nights exorcising freaked out viewers. (We saw nothing like this after Blair Witch screenings.)

Director William Friedkin spared us no gore in his 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty's best-seller, which starred Blair as the 12-year-old child from hell, and Ellen Burstyn as her besieged mother (pictured).

The Exorcist spurred two sequels and countless imitations, none, of course, as hideously good as the original.

For those wanting to relive the experience, or those too young to have seen it the first time around, The Exorcist screens at the Capitol Theatre on Friday, June 30, with Jean Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, as part of Cinesonic, the third international conference on film scores and sound design. The Age's film critic Adrian Martin will introduce the double screening.