Poor Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair). The decent preteen has been infected by a demon that produces icky boils on her face, makes her head literally spin and uses a guttural voice to spit out curses we still can’t print on a family website (one was rendered in a skit in the first season of Saturday Night Live as “Your mother sews socks that smell!”). Her hope is an exorcist, back in the day when Catholic priests were known for taking bad things out of children, not the other way around. In a decade of A-list horror movies, this one from William Friedkin was honored with 10 Oscar nominations, and won for William Peter Blatty’s script. But it’s better than that: a haunted-soul story with magnificent makeup effects by the legendary Dick Smith (Little Big Man, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Scanners, etc.).
