Heads swivelled at last week’s news that Scarlett Johansson is to appear in a ‘radical’ new version of The Exorcist. Mine did, anyway. After all, the 1973 original was said to have been even scarier off-screen than on – a mighty claim given there were widespread accounts of cinema-goers crying, fainting and vomiting while watching William Friedkin’s hit supernatural horror. In New York, one woman in the audience reportedly suffered a miscarriage.
Yet by then The Exorcist had already been blighted by a series of tragedies and misadventures that had it labelled as one of the most ‘cursed’ productions of all time. The set was destroyed by fire while death and life-changing injuries struck several members of the cast and crew, or their close relatives. One of the bit-part actors would later be convicted of murder and was a major suspect in the killing and dismembering of at least six gay men.
Johansson might prefer to write off all that as a set of coincidences, not a curse. But she is known to be full of superstitions, never walking under a ladder and crossing her fingers whenever she passes a graveyard. It is also said that while staying at a centuries-old hotel in the UK, she abruptly left her room in the middle of the night and refused to go back, citing a series of ‘strange’ occurrences.
It can therefore be considered curious that, even in a work of fiction, she might be prepared to lock horns with the devil.
She is not the first huge movie star to be swept into The Exorcist’s unholy universe. Richard Burton popped up as a priest in the notoriously awful Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, and in 1990 a pre-fame Samuel L Jackson was credited in The Exorcist III as ‘Blind Dream Man’.
But 41-year-old Johansson is not just one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood, she even features on Time magazine’s latest list of the 100 most influential people in the world, alongside Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Boasting the rare distinction of being nominated twice in the same year for Academy Awards (in 2020, for Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit), she can take her pick of film projects.
So why has she signed up for this one, to be directed by horror specialist Mike Flanagan, whose credits include Ouija: Origin Of Evil? The answer, probably, is that she relishes a challenge.
In 2021, Universal Pictures paid $400million (£300million) for the right to breathe life back into the franchise that began with Friedkin’s Oscar-winning adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel.
Scarlett Johansson is known to be full of superstitions, such as never walking under a ladder
Linda Blair in the 1973 original of the horror film, which spooked audiences around the world
Ms Blair’s character being exorcised in the supernatural hit, which made some viewers cry
Unfortunately, The Exorcist: Believer, released in 2023, was a catastrophic flop. For Universal, another one would be a terrible cross to bear. That’s why producers have turned to Johansson, doubtless assuring her that her star quality is just what the franchise needs. Yet anyone as superstitious as she admits to being is surely aware of the horror stories attached to the making of the original?
In the sweltering New York summer of 1972, construction work began in a Manhattan warehouse on the replica of a handsome Georgetown home. This was the elaborate set for The Exorcist, and at the centre of it was the bedroom in which 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair) would be possessed by Satan.
But the real devil was in the detail. In his book The Devil’s Set: Murder, Mayhem And The Making Of The Exorcist, author Colin Brand records that the film’s production manager – under pressure from the studio, Warner Bros, to get the shoot completed in time – disregarded an electrician’s warning that the wiring was ‘a mess’.
Weeks later, fire broke out, apparently caused by a pigeon nesting in a poorly insulated circuit box. The flames quickly engulfed the set, delaying production by six weeks and costing millions. Eerily, only one room entirely and inexplicably escaped the conflagration: Regan’s bedroom. ‘It was like the fire knew what to spare,’ one crew member said in a 1998 documentary entitled The Fear Of God.
Even before this, there had been signs that the making of The Exorcist would be anything but serene. For starters, it was presided over by the demanding Friedkin, who was in the disconcerting habit of suddenly firing a shotgun to keep the cast jittery.
Friedkin had hired the Swedish actor Max von Sydow to play the film’s title character, Father Merrin. But in June 1972, a scene due to be shot in the Iraqi desert was delayed when a 10ft statue of the demon Pazuzu failed to turn up. Von Sydow and the crew had to wait for weeks while a merciless sun beat down. ‘It was like the desert itself rejected us,’ a location scout later recalled.
Eventually they completed the scene and returned to New York, but there Von Sydow received news that his brother had died suddenly, back home in Sweden. Young Linda Blair’s grandfather had also perished.
In the New York warehouse, meanwhile, a carpenter’s thumb was severed and a rigger lost a toe. Whispers of a jinx began, which were taken seriously by the two actual Jesuit priests hired by Friedkin to ensure authenticity. One of them, Father Thomas, blessed the set with holy water, not that it did anything to stop the fire. ‘This is a warning,’ he growled when he later surveyed the ashes. ‘We’re meddling with forces we don’t understand.’
Friedkin, an atheist, didn’t mind that sort of talk. One headline – ‘Exorcist Set Burns: Mystery Fire Spares Demon’s Room’ – was just the publicity the film needed. But in a 2013 interview he admitted the fire ‘rattled me more than I let on’.
At the time, his own demands didn’t let up. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Regan’s mother Chris, played by Ellen Burstyn, is hurled across the bedroom by a demonic force. Friedkin had Burstyn rigged up to a harness, but to abide by his order to ‘make it real’, it was yanked much too sharply.
Burstyn was slammed against the floor, breaking her coccyx, and the pain lives with her still, at the age of 92. Friedkin used her authentic screams of pain in the final cut.
‘[He] didn’t care who got hurt as long as he got the shot,’ she said in a 2018 interview.
Blair suffered terribly, too. To look as if she was possessed, she was strapped to a shaking bed rig, but it shook much too hard, fracturing her lower spine. Again, Friedkin kept his camera rolling. Like Burstyn, Blair still suffers chronic pain.
Much of this, Johansson might like to reflect, can simply be ascribed to the uncompromising tyranny of one man. But Friedkin, who died aged 87 in 2023, could hardly be blamed for the arrival of what we might melodramatically call the Grim Reaper.
In October 1972, actor Jack MacGowran died unexpectedly, at the age of 54, in a flu epidemic, just days after filming his horrible death in The Exorcist, when, as British film director Burke Dennings, he has his neck broken and is flung from Regan’s window.
The Greek actress Vasiliki Maliaros, cast as the mother of the psychiatrist Father Karras, also died before the film was released.
Around the same time, the son of one of the producers was killed in a car crash, and a sound engineer suffered a fatal stroke. Furthermore, a night watchman on the set suffered a fatal heart attack, and the newborn child of an assistant cameraman died unexpectedly.
None of these deaths were directly related to filming, but there were still nine of them in six months, all duly exploited as more useful publicity.
‘Exorcist Set Haunted By Tragedy,’ screeched one headline. ‘Nine Dead As Devil Film Defies Fate,’ screamed another.
Then there was the case of Paul Bateson, in real life a technician at a New York medical centre, who was hired for a single day’s shooting to play a radiographer. He wasn’t an actor, but Friedkin reckoned, rightly, that his genuine expertise would bring credibility to an alarming scene in which Regan has an angiography on her brain.
Late one night in September 1977, almost four years after the release of The Exorcist, Bateson, who was a regular in the gay ‘leather’ bars of New York’s Greenwich Village, visited the apartment of a film journalist, Addison Verrill. There, he repeatedly stabbed Verrill.
In 1979 he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to at least 20 years in jail.
Citing his skills with a scalpel, police were convinced that he was responsible for the murders of six other gay men, whose bodies had been dismembered and dumped in bags in the Hudson river.
But Bateson was not convicted of the so-called ‘bag murders’. He was released on parole in 2003 and died in 2012.
When the news broke of Bateson’s arrest, those who had worked on The Exorcist were aghast. ‘He was on the set, touching Linda,’ wailed one of the crew.
Of all the horrors that The Exorcist yielded, that seemed like the worst. But again, Friedkin turned it to his advantage, visiting Bateson in prison and using the story to inspire his next film, 1980’s Cruising, starring Al Pacino.
Down the years, other tragedies have befallen those who were associated with The Exorcist. One of them was especially appalling.
The unmistakable, guttural voice of the demon was provided by Oscar winner Mercedes McCambridge – try as she might, the voice of 12-year-old Blair couldn’t muster the same menace.
But in 1987, McCambridge’s son killed his wife and two daughters, aged 13 and nine, then himself. He left a long, embittered note to her that ended ‘Night, mother’.
Whether any of that adds up to a curse is a moot point.
But certainly there are some who believe that, even by signing on the dotted line, Scarlett Johansson is also meddling with forces she does not understand.
