10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts That Haunted The Cast

As we’re still at the beginning of the spooky season, we’re still celebrating how impactful the horror genre is. One movie that transformed the horror genre entirely was none other than The Exorcist. While it has been 50 years since it was released, this movie’s impact can still be witnessed in horror films to date. Many people from that time claim that it was so frightening that theaters had paramedic assistance for their audience.

To make matters even more bone-chilling, it was based on an actual story. This book-turned-movie goes down in history to be one of the most terrifying movies to exist. However, the most interesting part of The Exorcist is that the crew and cast expressed that they often felt darkness during the set, which led to unexplainable, and some creepy incidents. Here are some of the insights on 10 behind-the-scenes facts that haunted the cast of The Exorcist.

Updated on October 12th, 2023 by Yosra Ben lagha: With the recent release of The Exorcist: Believer, it’s no longer a theory but a fact that 1973’s The Exorcist is a movie with the strongest haunting range, still influencing horror movies to this day. In this light, this article has been updated to include even more shocking behind-the-scenes facts about the ominous horror film.

The Unexplainable Fire

Sets are carefully created in such a manner that no fire breakouts happen, and in fact, to prevent that, many film sets have giant coolers to keep all lights chilled. However, what should one do if the fire starts without any proper reasoning? This is precisely what happened in the very first set of The Exorcist. The set which was used to create the McNeil house caught fire. It wasn’t just any normal fire that one could put out easily; this fire eventually burned everything.

However, the creepy part is that everything was completely burned, except Regan’s room, where the whole exorcism scene happened. It remained absolutely untouched. Quite fittingly ominous for a film that is based on demons and possessions. Due to this mysterious fire, a priest was called on set to bless it, so that cast and crew members could feel at ease.

People Linked to the Movie Ended Up Dying

This may come as a shock to many, but two of the actors in the film, Jack MacGowran and Vasiliki Maliaros, who were written to have an on-film death, ended up dying in real life as well. It happened shortly after the movie was wrapped, and was about to be released. Even though MacGowran departed due to suffering from influenza, and Maliaros passed away due to natural causes, it doesn’t make it less unsettling to know their end was similar to how they died in the film.

Not only this, but seven other people who were related to cast and crew members ended up dying in unexplainable manners. In addition, the child of Mercedes McCambridge, the actor who was the voice behind the demon, passed away in a murder-suicide, in which he ended up taking the lives of his daughters and wife, before taking his own. This news of the deaths was enough for the cast and crew to stay up all night for quite some time!

Anyone who makes a movie hopes that it doesn’t get associated with any crime or controversy. Sadly, The Exorcist was unable to forestall it. Just a few years after the movie’s debut, in 1977, Paul Bateson — who plays a doctor’s assistant — was found guilty of killing movie critic, Addison Verrill.

Given that they had worked with him on-site, many members of the cast and crew were perplexed by this information. But to make matters worse, he was subsequently suspected of six additional killings, but never found guilty of them. However, the real truth is still unknown.

Linda Blair Got Attacked

Any movie that deals with even a hint of religion often is required to be cautious about how certain concepts and religious views are presented. Since the focus of The Exorcist was a girl who was possessed by a demonic force, there were a number of sacrilegious activities committed.

Many viewers did not like her portrayal and claimed that she was promoting Satan, which led to her, a child star, getting a plethora of death threats. The amount and intensity of threats increased to the point that after the film was released, she had to keep a bodyguard with her for six months for safety purposes.

Screening in Rome

Screening for this film in general wasn’t an easy feat, as it was met with tons of controversy due to the subject matter. However, when the movie actually debuted in theaters, viewers frequently reported unexplained phenomena that were genuinely unnerving. The first time The Exorcist was shown on a big screen in Rome, it was at a theater that was sandwiched between two churches.

On the day of its premiere, there was a severe heavy downpour and lightning storm that unexpectedly occurred. To make the atmosphere even more terrifying, a lightning strike caused one of the ancient crosses, which was 400 years old, to fall in the center of the theater. This unexplainable and unsettling incident convinced many that there was something ominous about this movie.

Related: The Exorcist: Believer Confirms Linda Blair’s Involvement With Sequel

Cast Members Suffered Through Injuries

Similarly to the audience members who were screaming as they watched this film, so were the characters while shooting it. As unsettling as it may sound, it’s true. When filming the scene where Regan was being haunted, her mother hurriedly approached to rescue her but ultimately ended up getting pushed to the ground. Actress Ellen Burstyn howled throughout that scene, like a shattering of glass. Unfortunately, those were real screams of pain.

The actress ended up falling on her coccyx with significant force since the stuntman pulled the wire attached to her faster and harder than anticipated. Sadly, this led to permanent chronic spinal damage. However, the unsettling part is that the director still used her real audio, which makes that scene even more unnerving to watch. One might think after this incident, the director and crew members would be careful, but that wasn’t the case. Linda Blair had to suffer through something similar, where she ended up fracturing her spine. During the bed scene where the bed shakes, Blair’s rig shook so violently that it broke her back. Unfortunately, she was then diagnosed with chronic pain and scoliosis. Similar to Ellen’s case, the scene added in the film had her actual scream.

The Vomit Scene Was Out of Control

The Exorcist had its fair share of gross and disgusting scenes expected in every movie about exorcism. The most famous of these scenes was when Regan vomited all over Father Karras (Jason Miller). In fact, director William Friedkin had originally meant for the pea soup prop to land on the priests’ chest. However, it seems like the dark forces looming around the set, helped it land on Miller’s face instead.

When his reaction was a genuine expression of disgust that could not possibly be faked, they decided to keep the scene as it was. It just seems like every actor had to sacrifice something for this movie to be the classic that it is today, and having one’s face covered up in fake vomit is certainly the least of all the evils that befell the cast.

A Real Exorcism Was Almost Performed

It was established early on during the shooting that something was off. A carpenter working on set lost his thumb, and a lighting technician lost one of his toes. These minor injuries along with the unexplainable fire put everyone in a constant unease.

So much so that they asked the Jesuit priest, Thomas Bermingham, who played Father Kenneth Birmingham, to perform an exorcism on the set in order to evict any negative or dark energies. Although the Father rejected this request thinking the cast was taking it too far, he performed a blessing and a protection prayer on the whole cast and on the set in general hoping it would put a stop to the ominous occurrences.

Linda Blair’s Drug Addiction

The amount of media attention and the aggressive reactions that Blair received as a young actress overwhelmed her to the point of pushing her into the dark and dangerous path of drug addiction. Several years after shooting the movie, Blair was arrested at age 18 along with 31 other persons and charged with conspiracy to commit a felony in the alleged sale and purchase of cocaine.

She was soon enough released on a $2500 bail. The case led to her subsequent sentencing to three years of probation. Linda Blair even continued to seek the same hauntingly dark atmosphere of the movie by hosting a TV series called Scariest Places on Earth (2000) in which she took the audience to some notorious “haunted” locations around the world. Not just the drug, but the darkness as well, seems to have a special addictive allure for the actress.

Early Screenings Ended Up In a Lawsuit

By the time The Exorcist was released in 1973, the audience was not used to the shocking violence, gore, and frightening theme of possession, in general, that the movie dished to them on a casual December night. It was reported that some people walked out in fright before the movie ended and that others flat-out fainted. One of them was a viewer who was so shocked by the special effects of the film and the extremely violent scenes that they fainted, breaking their jaw in the process.

The viewer ended up taking Warner Bros. to court, but a certain amount of money was offered by the company to cover the damages and settle the issue out of court. To sum it up, everyone who was involved in the movie, in one way or another, had to pay some sort of price: the cast, the audience, the distributor company, and let’s hope not the writers of this article as well.