In 2023 Barbie enjoyed her biggest year since her creation in 1959, when Greta Gerwig’s hit movie found new resonance in the classic children’s toy.
In 1986 Barbie was the subject of work by another artist, Andy Warhol. It might seem that the doll was a natural subject for an artist who had famously painted Marilyn Monroe and also had interest in consumer culture and mass production. But Warhol actually came to Barbie in a strange and roundabout way.
As recounted in this BBC story, Warhol was at first interested in painting Billy Boy, a figure in the world of art and fashion. Billy Boy, however, did not want to be painted. But Billy Boy was a big Barbie fan. He had a collection of more than 11,000 Barbie dolls (with 3,000-plus Ken dolls as well) and authored a book titled Barbie: Her LIfe and Times.
After turning down Warhol’s repeated requests, he reportedly told the artist, as a blow-off, that he should paint a Barbie doll instead:
“Out of annoyance I said to him, ‘Well if you really want to do my portrait, do a portrait of Barbie because Barbie, c’est moi.
“He took it literally. He took a Barbie that I had given him and turned it into a portrait and called it ‘Portrait of Billy Boy’.”
The painting would end up being Warhol’s last, as he died on Feb. 22, 1987. There actually ended up being two versions of his Barbie portrait: The original version sold at auction for $1.1 million in 2014. A second version was created for and purchased by Mattel, the company that gave us Barbie. The bonds between the worlds deepened when Mattel introduced a limited edition doll of Barbie done up as Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol displayed his portrait of Barbie, 1986.
There’s something about mummies. Those preserved human remains are powerful on several contradictory levels, sometimes simultaneously: They’re seductive, with an aura of mystery and rich antiquarian appeal; at the same time, mummies can be repellent because, well, they’re preserved human remains; and certainly they have the capacity to terrify as eerie avatars of mortality that have inspired a whole subgenre of horror fiction and film. Mummies are time capsules bearing secrets of the distant past and often stand as works of art; think of Egyptian sarcophaguses, with their elaborately carved and painted ornamentation. On a more modest scale, the 7,000-year-old mummies of South America, crafted by an early maritime community known as the Chinchorros, resemble small statues, hardly as grand as the Egyptians’ handiwork but with a kind of rugged and deeply affecting beauty.
Indeed, mummies come in different forms from a variety of regions and historical eras. Of course, it’s important to distinguish between naturally mummified remains, like those found buried in the bogs of Denmark and Britain, where peat released acids that essentially pickled the body, and human-made mummies, meticulously prepared, typically—but not exclusively—by removing internal organs and then drying and treating the corpse. In addition to the Chinchorros, mummification was practiced by the Incas as well as the ancient Chinese and Canary Islanders, among others. But mummies are most inextricably associated with Egypt in the age of the pharaohs, where bodies were embalmed and preserved, bound in their signature linen bandages, specifically to prepare them for the next world. If they were prominent enough, they were buried with valuable possessions to take along on their journey. Either way, Egyptian mummies and artifacts are routinely among the most popular attractions at some of the world’s great museums. The 1922 discovery of the “boy king” Tutankhamun—whose tomb was filled with a spectacular array of treasures—famously ignited a global frenzy.
“I think people are obsessed and interested in mummies because they are such immediately recognizable people—so they don’t look like remains but rather like someone who might get up and start talking at any moment,” says Salima Ikram, Distinguished University Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and a noted historian of Egyptian funerary practices. “For example, look at the mummy of Ramses II or King Seti I. They really look like who they were, and this is what fascinates, because it telescopes time as one looks at people who lived 3,000 or 4,000 years ago—the fact that their faces are recognizable in many instances makes it all the more poignant and intimate. I think it gives an immediacy and intimacy with the past.”
Ikram also acknowledges that mummies have a darker, even frightening allure. “Of course, they’re not all beautiful or have faces that are explicitly preserved, and that brings in some of the thrill of the macabre,” she says. “The reason that people will go and watch a horror film is the same reason that some of those people will be enthralled by mummies. And death is also something that fascinates everyone because it comes to us all.”
The history of mummies is also about the study and treatment of mummies—and not always by respectful scholars like Ikram. In past centuries, mummy tombs commonly fell prey to plunder and desecration. From medieval times through the Renaissance, mummies were ground up and dispensed as medicine for their imagined healing properties; later, they were brought back to Europe and America as souvenirs for the wealthy or to be displayed in museums. In the 18th and 19th centuries, mummies served as popular entertainment at public “unwrappings” performed for paying audiences. There was often an undercurrent of racism and colonialism to it all—look how these strange, dark-skinned old exotics dealt with their dead.
On the other hand, mummies have also inspired a vast canon of serious archaeological and scientific study. The remains have offered a wealth of information about life in their ancient communities, more than ever now that researchers have the benefit of imaging technology. We know, for example, that the Egyptians were subject to some of the same illnesses that have plagued modern societies—heart disease, arthritis, smallpox, and polio, among others. In early 2023, a study published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine described CT scans conducted on the 2,300-year-old mummy of a teenage boy that had been discovered in 1916 and stored in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo ever since. Dubbed the Golden Boy mummy because of his gold mask and amulets, he was “digitally unwrapped” to reveal important cultural details without violating the integrity of the body. Scans showed that the boy’s 49 amulets came in 21 shapes and sizes, each with a special significance—and all meant to prepare him for the next world. Hence, a golden tongue amulet placed inside his mouth ensured that he could speak. A right-angle amulet was designed to keep him balanced and leveled.
To be sure, the idea that there is some kind of postmortem existence was central to human-generated mummification. In Egypt and elsewhere, preserving the integrity of the body was essential if the deceased were to transition smoothly to the afterlife. Mummies underscore the cruelest subtext of human experience, our awareness that death is inevitable and, despite all efforts to prevent it, unavoidable. One’s earthly life might be riddled with emotional and physical misery, comfortable and richly fulfilling, or somewhere in between. One might live to a great age or die achingly young. Either way, it’s all finite. Whether you have been blessed and would like more of a good thing, have been cursed and feel cheated, or simply want to enjoy more sunsets, it’s reasonable to ask, like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s musical buzzkill, “Is that all there is?”
Long before recorded history, humans began trying to answer that question with a resounding “no” by cultivating a belief in some sort of afterlife. In ancient times, life expectancy was much shorter than today, sometimes brutally so. Chinchorros, for instance, were lucky to see 30 and suffered devastating rates of child mortality—which is why some of their most powerfully moving mummies are of doll-like infants and toddlers. Some Egyptians, including Pharaoh Ramses II, who died at around 90, lived well into old age. But for most ancients, except the lucky and privileged few, life was hard (and short) and then you died. There had to be something else—otherwise, what was the point? Of course, loss, bereavement, and the certainty of death are just as excruciatingly present today, no matter how long we or our loved ones may last. Mummies represent that universal aspect of being human. “Grief, pain, sorrow, joy, and love are all primordial emotions that connect us with the past,” says the Chilean anthropologist Bernardo Arriaza, who has spent decades studying Chinchorro culture. “We are all united by them.”
And so, when we gaze on mummies, whether we find them endlessly intriguing or unnervingly creepy, we should see a bit of ourselves.
The mummy of Ramses II (1301-1235 BC), son of Sethy I, at Cairo Museum, Egypt, in April 2006.
Photo by Patrick Landmann/Getty Images
Egypt’s antiquities chief Zahi Hawass (center) supervised the removal of the linen-wrapped mummy of King Tutankhamun from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Nov. 4, 2007. The pharaoh’s mummy was moved from its ornate sarcophagus in the tomb where its 1922 discovery caused an international sensation to a nearby climate-controlled case where experts say it will be better preserved.
BEN CURTIS/AFP via Getty Images
Jens Klocke examined a mummy of the Guanches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, at the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, Dec. 14, 2015.
Photo by Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images
Queen Tiye, Tutankhamun’s grandmother, at the Egyptian museum in Cairo on February 17, 2010.
KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images
Howard Carter, the noted English Egyptologist, near the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamon in Egypt in 1922.
Photo by Apic/Getty Images
Chile’s Chinchorro mummies, the oldest in the world to have been purposefully preserved by humans, are on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The mummies, which were found in the north of Chile at the start of the 20th century, are more than 7,000 years old, meaning they pre-date the Egyptian mummies by two millennia.
Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images
Lon Chaney Jr., dressed in character as Kharis the mummy, strangles the hapless Kurt Katch as Cajun Joe in a still from director Leslie Goodwins’s 1944 film ‘The Mummy’s Curse’.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A publicity poster from the film ‘The Mummy’, 1932.
If it’s not the strangest movie ever to come out of Hollywood, it’s close enough. And of all the strange movies to come out of Hollywood, it is likely the sweetest.
The stars of the 1948 film Bill and Coo were birds. That’s not to say these these birds stole the show by upstaging their human costars—the birds were the show. The movie’s running time is just over an hour, and except for a two-minute introduction featuring humans, the story is acted out entirely by trained birds on a set of miniatures.
The pictures on these pages from Republic’s new movie Bill and Coo are tokens of the gloomy contention of the producer, that movie stars belonging to the species homo sapiens are washed up and the birds are ready to take over….No newcomer to strange breeds of actors, Vaudevillian Ken Murray for the last five years has been packing Hollywood’s El Capital Theater with a raucous oldtime variety show called Blackouts…When a bird trainer named brought his lovebird act around, Murray was so impressed that he dreamed up a starring vehicle for it, had miniature sets built and a lovebird story written.
The entire movie can be viewed online, and the photos taken by Peter Stackpole capture both the charm and peculiarity of the enterprise. The film is set in “Chirpendale U.S.A.,” and the location is one of the movie’s many bird-themed puns. The story is narrated by an off-screen human, but you see birds doing things like walking in and out of buildings, pushing little baby carriages and dropping letters in mailboxes. The plot revolves Bill and Coo, who love each other despite their class differences (Bill has a taxi service, Coo comes from a wealthy family), and they must fight off a malicious crow who threatens life in Chirpendale.
(Perhaps the most surprising detail about the production is that it was the only movie directed by former child actor Dean Riesner, who decades later would leave his mark on Hollywood history as one of the writers of the decidedly un-precious movie Dirty Harry. Yes, the man who directed Bill and Coo also gave us the line “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you punk?“)
On the one hand, no one is going to mistake Bill and Coo for Citizen Kane. On the other hand, it did win an honorary Academy Award, for creating a film “In which artistry and patience blended in a novel and entertaining use of the medium of motion pictures.”
It was novel indeed. In fact, when you look at the movie’s IMDB page and scroll to the heading “More Like This,” what you get are not more live-action movies but rather animated films such as Bambi. Which is another way of saying, there really are no movies like this.
Bill and Coo, the titular stars of the movie, stood on top of a trolley on the film’s set.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ken Murray first encountered the birds in his vaudeville show and helped dream up the idea for featuring them in the movie that become Bill and Coo.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Trainer George Burton works with alligators who also played a role in the movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
From the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The “wrong brothers” are celebrated in one of the many bird-related puns in the movie Bill and Coo.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A fire-bird slides down a pole the set of the all-bird movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
From the set of the bird-centric live action movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
From the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A crow played the villain in the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Owls on the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At the end of the movie Bill and Coo, the titular birds head off on their honeymoon in a puppy-drawn carriage, 1947.
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Seriously, if you had to choose between only watching movies and shows that featured SNL alums or limiting yourself to movies and shows that had no one from Saturday Night Live in the cast—no Will Ferrell, Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Kate McKinnon, Mike Myers, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Martin Short, Robert Downey Jr. (yes, the future Iron Man was on SNL, though he lasted only one season) and on down the line— which would you choose? That this is even a viable discussion is a tribute to the magic that longtime producer Lorne Michaels has been able to conjure up from his casts.
Here we pay tribute to SNL with photos of the stars of its early years and the first few turnovers of a cast that is always evolving as it keeps people laughing.
Original SNL cast member John Belushi and with frequent guest host Steve Martin, 1981.
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Original SNL cast member John Belushi with frequent guest host Steve Martin, 1981.
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Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, circa 1985.
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Dan Aykroyd, 1988.
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Gilda Radner.
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Chevy Chase and SNL producer Lorne Michaels attending Saturday Night Live 25 party at NBC/Rainbow Room in 1999.
DMI Shutterstock
Cast members Eddie Murphy (left) and Joe Piscopo (right) appearing with guest Jerry Lewis on Saturday Night Live, 1984.
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Comedian Eddie Murphy (left) and singer Rick James following Murphy’s performance at Madison Square Garden, 1986.
David Mcgough/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Downer Jr., 1989.
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Martin Short in his dressing room at Roundabout Theater, 1998.
Ted Thai/Shutterstock
Brad Hall, who was a Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live, with wife and former SNL cast member Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the Golden Globe Awards, 1994.
DMI/Shutterstock
Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman, 1987.
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Myers Mike and Dana Carvey/
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Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri.
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Molly Shannon surrounded by women dressed as her Saturday Night Live character Mary Catherine Gallagher.
DMI
Victoria Jackson, 1989.
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Kevin Nealon and Rob Schneider.
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Jan Hooks, 1991.
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Chris Farley, David Spade and Adam Sandler, 1990.
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Chris Rock, David Spade and Chris Farley, 1994.
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Adam Sandler with Chris Rock, circa 1988.
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Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell, who played the Butabi brothers together on SNL and in the movie A Night at the Roxbury.
Earnest discussions of great American pop-music lyricists—a grouping that might run from Willie Dixon to Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, with dozens of worthy stops along the way—rarely include Jimmy Buffett. And yet, the second verse of “Margaritaville.” You’ve got it by heart, “Don’t know the reason” through “How it got here I haven’t a clue.” The 33-word verse packs in character and narrative along with suggestions of a layered backstory and an uncertain tomorrow, all delivered with a final twist.
“Margaritaville” is a brand, a business empire, a point of view. It’s perhaps the most profitable song in pop history, and the merchandising that surrounds it—T-shirts, tequilas, taprooms—has obscured its magic. First, and most important, “Margaritaville” is a gorgeous song, life-loving and elegiac, finely crafted and cheeky, a nuanced nugget of genius.
There was more where that came from. Critics weren’t often kind to Buffett—although in 1976, before the blinding presence of “Margaritaville,” a New York Times review suggested, “Mr. Buffett is a clever man, both in his words and his music. The lyrics generally hint at deeper meaning without getting portentous about it.” Dylan once named Buffett among the songwriters he most admired.
Buffett died at age 76 on September 1, 2023, the Friday of Labor Day weekend. That called to mind the opening lines of “Come Monday,” Buffett’s first Top 40 hit, a song he said rescued him from depression and helped to set his course toward the open sea. “Come Monday” is about the privilege and pain of missing someone, the promise of rediscovery, and the fact of having, in that someone, a North Star. “You’re that much a part of me now,” Buffett sings.
Upon Buffett’s death, many in the music world saluted his songwriting, his lyrics, his place in the firmament. Paul McCartney weighed in, as did Elton John and Brian Wilson. So did a cohort of country music stars Buffett influenced, among them Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, and, of course, Buffett’s friend and collaborator Alan Jackson. “Shores distant shores, There’s where I’m headed for, I got the stars to guide my way, Sail into the light of day,” Jackson posted on X, excerpting the 2004 Buffett song “Boats to Build,” which Jackson also sang on.
Buffett’s vibe was fed continuously by the shores and waters of the American South. Of performing live, he liked to say, “I only play where it’s warm.” In fact, he played Greenwich Village folk clubs along with Texas roadhouses. He headlined at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. He opened for the Eagles on their Hotel California tour. He shared the stage with Willie Nelson at Nelson’s annual Fourth of July festival. Buffett crossed the Atlantic—he had planned to play Paris again this year. He traversed the equator, he sailed through rain and snow, and he cut records in the shade of a volcano. Sometimes he got where he was going by piloting one of his planes or captaining one of his boats. He was a kind of missionary—with margaritas. The crowds, devoted Parrotheads at their core, followed everywhere.
Come Monday of Labor Day weekend 2023, the DJs on Sirius XM’s Radio Margaritaville were weeping less openly than they had been on the days before. Laughter and remembrances rang over the airwaves between some songs. A few listeners requested “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On” as support. “How you doin’?” a caller asked JD Spradlin, a DJ who has worked from his Parrot Perch studio in Universal Orlando’s Margaritaville Café since 2007. “Doin’,” Spradlin replied.
Gone are the live concerts—healthy, Buffett played three dozen a year—with the folksy storytelling, the tall tales, the audience singing along. But the radio station isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Margaritaville, as a place or as a state of mind. New tribute bands will form; country stars will pay homage at their own shows. We’ll be listening to Jimmy Buffett’s words and melodies, feeling him, for many years to come. He’s that much a part of us now. •
Everett Collection; Ron Jenkins/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT/Alamy Live News (inset)
Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.
Gems/Redferns/Gett
Jimmy Buffett performed at the Calavaras County Fair on June 10, 1978 in Angels Camp, California; the broken leg was from a pickup game of softball.
Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty
Jimmy Buffett watched the launch of the Space Shuttle from a VIP area at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 1981.
AP/Shutterstock
From left to right: Clint Black, Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett, George Strait and Toby Keith performed at the 38th Annual CMA Awards at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Nov. 9, 2004.
Frank Micelotta/Getty
Jimmy Buffett performed during a press conference for the renaming of Dolphin Stadium to LandShark Stadium on May 8, 2009 in Miami Gardens, Florida.
Alexander Tamargo/Getty
Jimmy Buffett performed at Jimmy Buffett & Friends: Live from the Gulf Coast, a concert presented by CMT, on July 11, 2010 in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Rick Diamond/CMT/Getty
Jimmy Buffett raised the margarita that set the Guinness World Record for the largest ever in celebration of the Margaritaville Casino grand opening in Las Vegas, Oct. 14, 2011.
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Jimmy Buffett, with wife and family, arrived at a “Men In Black II” screening after-party to benefit Hayground School at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, N.Y.. June 30, 2002.
Evan Agostini/Getty
Parrotheads Joe and Vicki Manning of Maryland traveled up to tailgate and attend the Jimmy Buffett concert at Jones Beach in New York,on August 10, 2021.
“They wait hours to be shocked,” read the headline in the January 27, 1974, edition of the New York Times. “People stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film about a 12-year-old girl going to the Devil,” Judy Klemesrud wrote of the crowds outside Manhattan’s Cinema 1, where The Exorcist had been showing since its release a month earlier. “It’s been reported that once inside the theater, a number of moviegoers vomited at the very graphic goings-on on the screen. Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks, a guard told me. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said.”
Surely some of those rumored reactions were apocryphal, but there’s no doubt that The Exorcist struck a powerful chord in audiences who had never before witnessed anything like it—quite simply because there had never been anything like it.
Rosemary’s Baby had frightened moviegoers in 1968 with the story of a woman who unwittingly gives birth to the son of the Devil, but that film was relatively restrained in its depiction of the horrors unfolding around Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse. The Exorcist, by contrast, held nothing back. Employing expert craftsmanship and groundbreaking special effects, director William Friedkin chronicled young Regan MacNeil’s terrifying transformation from an angel-faced tween into a projectile-vomiting, foul-mouthed monster in unflinching, explicit detail.
“If that film hadn’t been put out by a major studio, there’s no way it would have gotten [only] an R rating—that was, I think, a lot of what made it an immediate sensation,” says Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips. “People knew they were seeing something they probably shouldn’t have been seeing under that rating. It was crafty in the way that it wrapped itself in the dogma of the Catholic church, and giving you a happy-enough ending but also giving you pure hell along the way.”
Notably, Friedkin, as he set out to adapt William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel for the big screen, never intended to make a horror film. The director, who died in 2023 at age 87, said many times that for him, The Exorcist was not simply the story of a little girl who becomes possessed by a demon but rather a compelling character piece that offered a profound exploration of the mysteries of faith. Yes, Regan endures unimaginable suffering, but ultimately she is a means for the evil entity to torment Father Karras, a priest grappling with his relationship to God in the wake of his mother’s death.
Blatty’s intentions, too, had nothing to do with monster-movie influences. “When I was writing the novel, I thought I was writing a supernatural detective story that was filled with suspense, with theological overtones,” the author—who was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother—told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “To this day, I have zero recollection of even a moment when I was writing that I was trying to frighten anyone.”
Initially, Blatty’s novel, which was inspired by a supposed real-life case of demonic possession, appeared on track to be a flop. Despite a serious publicity push from publisher Harper & Row, the book debuted to sluggish sales, which didn’t entirely surprise the author. “I never got the impression that he was convinced this was going to be a big hit, a big novel,” says Blatty’s son, Michael. “In fact, I think he was a little worried he could pull it off.” It was only after the elder Blatty’s fortuitous appearance on The Dick Cavett Show that interest in The Exorcist spiked. And then it took off. Before long, millions of people had picked up the compulsively readable thriller.
The first time Friedkin read Blatty’s story was in an early draft of a screenplay the author had penned after selling his film rights to Warner Bros. The director was hooked, seizing on The Exorcist as his ideal follow-up to The French Connection, a crime thriller that had netted five Academy Awards, including best director and best picture. “You don’t just do any picture next,” Friedkin said in 1973. “You try to make a film as good or better than the last one, to uphold the tradition of the Academy Award.”
Friedkin and his artistic collaborators sought to make The Exorcist hew as closely to Blatty’s source material as possible. And acclaimed though he was, Friedkin also had a well-deserved reputation for exacting perfectionism. He was an uncompromising taskmaster who wanted every aspect of a film to rise to a certain level of excellence, and conditions on his set would often be punishing, especially for Linda Blair, who famously won the role of Regan after a meeting with Friedkin in the Warner Bros. offices at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“What everybody went through is their own path and journey with Billy,” Blair said in 2013. “He is difficult because he wants to deliver . . . the best of everything in the art form. That’s why the audience can still believe and relate to it. I know we’re all very proud to have been part of it. Yes, it was hard. There’s no doubt. It was no walk in the park.”
After The Exorcist opened on December 26, 1973, it didn’t take long for the film to dominate the cultural conversation. Some critics praised it as a work of genius; others decried it as a well-appointed exercise in child exploitation. But any poor notices did little to sway public opinion. The Exorcist raked in more than $10 million in its first five weeks as moviegoers, like the ones the New York Times had found, lined up outside theaters across the country, eager to see what had so many people talking—or fainting in the aisles.
Friedkin’s straightforward, documentary-inspired style grounded the outré events unfolding on-screen, and the movie’s superb acting further sold the illusion that Regan really was in the Devil’s grasp. “It was the first horror film I remember that had all the trappings of an A picture,” says veteran Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan. “Horror had been around for a while, but it had mostly been the domain of the [B-movies]. The Exorcist was really well cast. Also: Friedkin at the top of his game as an audience manipulator. He was really skilled at knowing how to make people jump.”
Ellen Burstyn, who played Regan’s distraught-actress mother, Chris, echoed those sentiments in 2016. “It’s very real—the story, the people,” she said. “The level of reality in the performances, I think, draws the audience in so that they’re hooked into the characters before it starts getting what could be hard to believe if you weren’t already engaged. I think that the audience gets taken on a trip, and then that combination of religion and sex and evil is a very potent combination.”
The Exorcist unquestionably tapped into deeply rooted anxieties about female adolescence, notes Julia Elliott, a professor of English and of women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina. “Regan, as a monster, is definitely embedded into fears of femininity, sexuality, and puberty,” Elliott says. “Her skin is oozing. She’s using foul language. She’s talking back to her mom. She’s explicitly sexual. The priests are just struggling to expel this demon of female sexuality from this adolescent body. At this time, society is particularly freaked out about female sexual freedom, because it’s 1973 and second-wave feminism, revolutionary energies, all that stuff is happening.”
Whatever the explanation, there’s no question that the film profoundly affected some viewers. Burstyn herself has said that she witnessed one woman lose consciousness during a screening in Tucson. “During the film, the part where Linda undergoes this test where they put the needle in her neck and all this blood squirts out—which is where people always fainted in the movie—I saw a lady going up the aisle and kind of wobbling,” Burstyn said in 1984 on Good Morning America. “She got to the top of the ramp of the aisle, and she fainted. I went over to help her. I loosened her collar, and I was talking to her. Her eyes were fluttering, and they started to open. I thought: My God, if she wakes up and sees me, she’ll think she’s in The Twilight Zone or something. So I jumped up and said, ‘Quick, somebody else come help her.’”
There was also a reported increase in the number of people who—many after viewing The Exorcist—came to believe that they, too, were host to some evil force. In 1974, Rev. Richard Woods, a Dominican at Loyola University in Chicago who authored a book about the Devil, told the New York Times: “I’ve received dozens of calls from people who are horribly frightened or so confused that they have begun to lose their grip on reality. . . . I also know of two kids who came out of the movie thinking that they were possessed, and they have now been hospitalized.”
Predictably, larger cultural voices weighed in, too. Televangelist Billy Graham famously noted of The Exorcist that “the Devil is in every frame of this film,” and both Time and Newsweek ran stories about the surrounding frenzy. The satirists at Mad magazine even got in on the act with a spoof 1974 cover featuring the grinning mascot Alfred E. Neuman depicted on an “Exorcist barf bag” alongside the slogan “If the Devil makes you do it.” The following year, Saturday Night Live did its own riff, with Richard Pryor playing a reluctant priest ministering to Laraine Newman’s Regan-inspired character.
By that point, The Exorcist had already earned a place in the annals of cinema with 10 Academy Award nominations, including for best director and best picture, though it won only in the adapted screenplay and sound categories. That fact rankled Blatty, who, despite having won a statuette himself, for writing, said the other snubs were a “disgrace” and that The Exorcist was “head and shoulders the finest film made this year and in many other years.”
Ultimately, other films might be more highly decorated, but few can boast the same widespread cultural and artistic reach as this harrowing tale of demonic possession. Five decades on, The Exorcist has lost none of its potency—if anything, the passage of time has more deeply etched the movie’s most terrifying scenes into the collective consciousness of cinephiles around the globe. It ranks No. 3 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 most thrilling films of all time, behind only Psycho and Jaws, and Regan, indelibly portrayed by Blair in her feature- film debut, ranks No. 9 on the AFI’s list of the 50 best movie villains.
“The Exorcist—both the book and the film—retain their hold on the public because they scare the hell into people,” says Nat Segaloff, author of the new book Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear. “The Exorcist is so skillfully made on every level that it has neither dated nor diminished in power. William Friedkin’s use of documentary style keeps it in time-present, the acting is consummate and takes every scene seriously, and [the movie] exploits centuries of religious indoctrination. There are people who, even today, are afraid to watch it, so great is its cumulative reputation.”
The Exorcist’s success spawned a wave of imitators around the world, unleashing an entire subgenre of horror in which young women come to host demons, transforming into monstrous and abhorrent creatures. “There’s an almost shot-for-shot remake made in Turkey called Satan; it’s not about Catholic priests . . . it’s just, like, a wise old man and a psychiatrist, but otherwise it’s almost identical,” explains David Wilt, a lecturer in film studies at the George Washington University who for the last several years has lectured on The Exorcist as part of a Profs and Pints series in Washington, D.C.
The 21st century, too, has seen yet more fictional stories about victims plagued by demons or by the Devil himself: The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005; The Last Exorcism in 2010 (ironically, a sequel followed three years later); The Rite in 2011; Deliver Us from Evil in 2014; The Possession of Hannah Grace in 2018; and, in April 2023, the Russell Crowe–led The Pope’s Exorcist.
And then there are the many sequels and prequels—and TV series and stage productions—spun off from Friedkin’s original film, which itself was re-released in theaters in 2000 with 11 minutes of additional footage, with the subtitle The Version You’ve Never Seen. The latest: Filmmaker David Gordon Green will unveil another follow-up, The Exorcist: Believer, in 2023, with Burstyn reprising her role as Chris MacNeil for the first time.
Yet no project to date has attained the same level of cultural cachet as did Friedkin’s standard-bearer. A true classic, The Exorcist retains its raw power. “Friedkin’s and Blatty’s original has stood the test of time because of its originality, its integrity, its skill, its lack of cynicism, and its morality,” says Segaloff. “It’s not a horror film—it’s a detective story about the mystery of faith. In a world where faith is exploited by televangelists and politicians, a movie that takes it seriously deserves its apotheosis.”
Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist that shocked audiences in 1973.
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Fines lined up in the cold to see the horror movie sensation The Excorcist.
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Richard Pryor (right), Thalmus Lasulala (center) and Laraine Newman (left) in a Saturday Night Like sketch inspired by The Exorcist, 1975.
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The 2023 film The Exorcist: Believer, starring Lidya Jewett (left) and Olivia Marcum (right), picked up the story of the orignal film from 50 years before.
