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On Christmas Day in 1973, some twenty Boston journalists ditched their families for a top-secret, ultra-exclusive 12:30pm screening of the most hotly anticipated film of the year: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Then an employee of the theater, Nat Segaloff’s job was to guard the door.
Audiences’ visceral reactions to the film—vomiting, fainting, storming out of sold-out theaters in protest—are now the stuff of cinematic legend. It’s these images that usually define what’s often called “the scariest film ever made.” But no one puked at that screening of The Exorcist, recalls the Los Angeles-based Segaloff—who grew up to become a journalist and author, most recently of The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, out July 25.
Then and now, even for experts like Segaloff, the film defies easy classification. Though it’s most commonly called a horror movie, The Exorcist has only a single jump scare (a not-so-scary flaring candle). It’s a prestige project—the only horror film ever nominated for best picture nomination—and a supernatural whodunnit, according to Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty. (Or as Segaloff calls them, “the two Bills.”) Segaloff himself classifies it as a psychological drama, although with this big caveat: “Like all great art, people take from it what they bring to it. And people brought a lot to The Exorcist.”
Half a century after its monumental release, Vanity Fair talks to Segaloff about The Exorcist’s little-known roots in comedy, whether it’s really based on a true story, why the Catholic Church became a surprise fan of the film, and the many reasons why the zeitgeist selected The Exorcist for a permanent place in our collective psyche.
Vanity Fair: Can you take me back to that scary Christmas Day? Were you aware of the importance of what you were seeing?
Nat Segaloff: Most of us had read the book, as I had. [The film is based on Blatty’s novel of the same name.] But nobody really knew what to expect from the film. Nobody knew we were supposed to throw up, because there was no lore surrounding it yet. I was a publicist with the theater in Boston, and we had convinced William Friedkin to do a pre-screening, so it was literally delivered wet from the lab. As you probably know, critics are very stoic. We have what we call “the two-block rule,” which means you don’t speak about the movie for two blocks after leaving the theater. This isn’t for discretion, it’s for keeping your colleagues from stealing your wisecracks. Clearly we were impressed though, as I’ve been possessed with it—if you’ll pardon the obvious pun—since the day before it opened on December 26, 1973. All these years later, this book is kind of my exorcism from The Exorcist.
Certainly not every film’s anniversary still matters fifty years later. What is it about The Exorcist that has us still caring half a century later?
It’s still as effective now as it was then, because there are still people who are too afraid to see it. Horror movies are a very strange genre…if you see Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolfman or Dracula, you can leave them at the movie theater. That’s not true of the devil, who may be waiting for you in the closet when you get home. It’s a different kind of monster. But the truth is, I don’t know. I did movie publicity for five years, and if I could bottle whatever made The Exorcist a hit, I would do it and make a fortune. I’d be running a studio instead of writing about people who run studios. Some films are just of the zeitgeist, though certainly you can theorize about the particular moment in time to try to explain.
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