Before William Peter Blatty became a best selling novelist and occasional movie producer, he was an anonymous young author working outside his chosen field and who once appeared on Groucho Marx's game show, You Bet Your Life. In the course of his efforts he managed to win $10,00 and was asked what he planned to do with the money. His answer was simple enough in that he was going to take time off from his day-to-day life and set to work on a novel. The result was The Exorcist, a monster hit in the publishing world and a genre-changing source for horror film history, let alone the history of Hollywood.

By the time Warner Bros. secured the rights to the book, it was fast becoming a prestige project due to its success on booksellers' shelves, its sizable budget and the participation of star director William Friedkin. Fresh from the critical and commercial success of his involvement with The French Connection, Friedkin was known for being a filmmaker with a penchant for action sequences, fluid camera work and an uncanny sense of detail. He was also a fanatic about recording real emotional reactions and went to extraordinary lengths to secure his actors' fear. To that end he reportedly fired guns to startle them, is rumored to have slapped one of his actors across the face before filming a scene and put his stars in harnesses for some of the possession sequences that subjected them to numerous short- and long-term injuries.

The film's pivotal role of Chris MacNeil was given to Ellen Burstyn after it was first offered to, and refused by, both Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine. Not yet of their caliber of screen star, and still a year away from earning her Oscar for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Burstyn accepted the part but only after being granted the caveat of having her dialogue filtered of any reference to the devil.

Child actress Dana Plato was first offered the role of Regan, Chris's possessed daughter, but passed thereby allowing Linda Blair to turned in her most memorable performance. Secretly, veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge, once a mainstay of 1940s Hollywood and an Academy Award winner, was also brought in to dub Blair's voice and lend her gravelly instrument to the eerie possession of Regan MacNeil. Though considered a special effect and not a performer by the filmmakers, McCambridge's participation was eventually revealed when she sued Warner Bros. to receive proper billing and credit.

Lalo Schifrin, then a relatively new composer with an impressive and growing filmography, was commissioned to write the film's score, though his result was rejected outright and replaced by the minimalist efforts of Jack Nitzsche. Blatty adapted his own book into a workable screenplay and Friedkin was finally forced to ask one of his technical advisers, the Reverend Thomas Bermingham, to exorcise the set after the production was plagued by a number of ominous events, including the deaths of nine people associated with the production and a mysterious fire that destroyed the set over a weekend furlough.

When it was finally released, The Exorcist was a cultural milestone. "Something beyond comprehension is happening to a little girl on this street, in this house. A man has been called for as a last resort to try and save her. That man is The Exorcist." So read the ad copy that was also tagged as being about, "The Devil Inside."

The finished film was produced for $12 million and went on to gross nearly $300 million in worldwide fox. Twenty-seven years later it also inspired a never-before-seen version that was released in 2000 to once again prove the title a box office titan with some $100 million in additional sales.

The film's progeny include two sequels, along with a third that's in pre-production, as well as certain archetypal horror images that have entered the popular consciousness. Basically the story of a little girl possessed of the devil and the efforts undertaken to free her, Friedkin's movie is a story told in two parts.

Beginning with possession and ending with exorcism, it's an extremely spooky film that remains disturbing even now after so many rip-offs, copies, homage and farces. Perhaps most striking about it, however, is its claustrophobic feel stemming from a purposeful theme. That is, the exploration of dangers and terrors inherent in the hearts of the faithful when they lose their way and are forced to face absolute evil, seemingly alone.

The film opens with Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), a clerical archaeologist, who is on a dig for antiquities in Iraq. Uncovering a symbol of heretical origin, Merrin immediately returns to his parish in the United States to decipher what's happening in the continuing struggle for humankind waged between Yahweh and Beelzebub.

Shooting her latest movie on the outskirts of Georgetown University is Chris MacNeil, a single mother who daily lavishes affection on her increasingly troubled daughter Regan. Unbeknownst to them both there is a portal to hell that exists in the attic above Regan's bedroom that is slowly uncovered as being the source of the girl's neurotic, and eventually psychotic, behavior.

Nearby Chris's comfortable townhouse is the seminary psychologist and conflicted priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Daily struggling to maintain his religious belief after counseling so many troubled laypeople and clergy alike, he meets his spiritual crossroads when his invalid mother dies, leaving him feeling guilty and responsible.

When Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran), Chris's movie director friend, is found dead after an evening spent baby-sitting Regan, Lieutenant William Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) is dispatched to investigate the apparent suicide. Aware as he is of Regan's troubles and seeing how he's unable to explain certain aspects of the Dennings case, he comes to believe something unusual is going on in the MacNeil home. He simply can't explain what that something might be in the usual framework of conventional law and order.

After exhausting all traditional therapies to assist her daughter who is seen peeing in the middle of dinner parties, screaming profane invective, experiencing violent mood swings, complaining of being bodily moved in her bed and having odd lapses of prescience, Chris turns to Karras for help. She believes her daughter is possessed and wants help in performing and exorcism since she's frightened of losing her baby girl to a nameless force she can scarcely see.

Karras is at first quite skeptical. When he meets Regan, though, he becomes a true believer after witnessing the girl's embodiment of memories and personalities she couldn't possibly know without an outside force working from within to destroy her. Still, he's troubled by the loss of his mother and considers himself inexperienced in the ritual of exorcism so he turns to his church elders for direction.

Father Merrin is dispatched because he is the only living priest to have survived the performance of an exorcism, although the experience nearly killed him. Joining with Karras, they enter the MacNeil home and lay siege to Regan's possessor. They confront supernatural forces, spinning heads, desecrated crosses, ice-cold conditions, lies, deceit and their own fears before Merrin dies of a heart attack and Karras invites the devil into his person so he can kill himself and save the girl.

In the end, Regan is returned safely to her mother without memory of her awful ordeal. Merrin and Karras are posthumously lauded for their achievements, Kinderman is opened up to the possibilities of irrational, sometimes otherworldly, crimes and the devil is banished to some other time and some other place.

To say The Exorcist was a hit in light of this story summary would be to underemphasize its contemporary impact and long-lasting influence. Built on the back of Blatty's bestseller, and produced with all the best available technology, Friedkin's film was transformed from its low-level, B-movie roots into being a sign of the times.

How George Roy Hill's The Sting won the 1973 Best Picture Academy Award over such notables as George Lucas's American Graffiti and The Exorcist is a statement about both poor judgment and the triumph of innocuous, but pleasant, craftsmanship over suggestive and difficult art. Likely The Sting's producers, all of them Hollywood journeyman and maverick insiders with a clear ambition to Oscar glory, had more than a little something to do with the ascension of their film that is everywhere less than brilliant. Even so history immediately noticed the Academy's misrecognition of The Sting as picture of the year and added to it a sort of footnote like Roger Maris's 61 home runs that required extra games to best the Babe's record dating from an earlier epoch in baseball.

In keeping with the spirit of revisionism everywhere necessary when remembering overlooked masterworks, The Exorcist may not be Best Picture material. At base it's a horror movie with violent, disturbing and deeply complicated themes embedded in a plot that moves rather ruthlessly to a depressing, if not cathartic, conclusion. But it's also one of the classics of modern horror movies and went on to inspire an entire subset of popular figures that make easy, ready reference to Blatty's fiction of possession and sacrilege.

Burstyn, von Sydow, Cobb and Miller all turn in topnotch performances. The script alternates between image-based storytelling techniques and occasional explanations to increase the movie's tension and Friedkin's camera is everywhere emboldened by the overall sense of claustrophobia and possession at the heart of the film.

Yet the movie has long been remembered for Blair's work as the effects-laden Regan MacNeil, if not also for McCambridge as the disembodied voice of the devil. In this combination of childhood innocence rendered by a rich child performance along with the sound design manipulations of an androgynous other performing her possession, The Exorcist contributed its vision of pure evil to movies and to mass culture more generally.

Arguments about female sexuality being the crux of the film, notwithstanding, and they are interesting arguments, The Exorcist ends up for posterity as a technical marvel peeking behind the blinds of faith to discover evil in the very seat of privilege and wealth. The MacNeil household is a location of profound repression, anger, dislocation and, finally, destruction even though its built on a stable foundation of love and material comfort. Perhaps it's the fact of being a single mother-led home and gynotocracy. Perhaps it's the problematic, indeed vaginal, idea of possession itself that requires a passive, innocent young woman to be the vehicle of devilishness and horror.

Regardless, the film is a gore fest and spectacle on par with few other works ever produced by mainstream movie studios. In this way it may aspire only to broadly commercial goals though it achieves the transformative effects of fine art by the release and relief of its conclusion.