What an excellent day for an exorcism.

Luke, Matt and Westy head to Georgetown for William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own bestselling novel and built on a real case from 1949. Across two parts we tell the full story of how a film about a possessed twelve-year-old became the first horror picture ever nominated for Best Picture and left a trail of fainting audiences, ambulances and complimentary sick bags behind it.

Part one takes us from the dust of Hatra in northern Iraq, where 130-degree heat limited shooting through to the end of the second act. We cover the casting of Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair and Jason Miller. We also cover the so-called curse, the fire that destroyed the entire MacNeil house set and left Regan’s bedroom untouched, the deaths, the injuries, and Max von Sydow’s very sensible explanation for all of it.

Part two goes up those stairs. We get into Blatty’s screenplay, the crew who made the impossible look mundane, and the score Friedkin arrived at by throwing two composers off the picture before stumbling on thirty seconds of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Then the exorcism itself, the ending Friedkin and Blatty never stopped arguing about, ten Oscar nominations, and a legacy every possession film since has been doing cover versions of.

From the arteriogram that doubled as a radiology training film to the Georgetown students who rented out their rooftops to watch the stunt fall, we deliver the thoroughly researched film analysis that makes All The Right Movies the movie podcast for film fans everywhere. Whether you came for the head spin, the pea soup, or a serious conversation about how a director gets the best work of everyone’s career by behaving appallingly to most of them, there’s plenty here you won’t find anywhere else.

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