Bring Your Own Movie month in my film class ended last night with Scott's choice. There are a lot of really famous classic movies that I never got around to seeing. Casablanca, Psycho, Gone With the Wind. And, until last night, The Exorcist.
It sounds cliche to say that this is possibly the scariest movie of all time, but it is incredibly creepy. We're not talking about a lot of jump scares, and it does start slowly. But the tension builds, little by little, until you find yourself, lobster-like, in a pot of boiling water. This movie is famous enough and has been analyzed enough that there's no need for me to provide any commentary here. The class discussion was animated, and it generally got good ratings -- I gave it a 42 (on a scale of 1-10. Suffice to say that it's now one of my favorite movies from the class. The others being The Wicker Man, Corruption and I Drink Your Blood.
Of course Ethan came home talking about this as the scariest movie he's ever seen, which means that Sharon and Asher felt they had to watch it on Netflix. So I got to see it again, though this was the original theatrical release -- in class we saw the 2000 rerelease. Honestly, I think I prefer the original release. There were some omitted scenes with doctors that I liked in the rerelease. But much of what was added back in actually detracted. The spider crawl scene on the stairs would have been good, but they sped it up or something, and it felt out of place. And the little conversation at the end between Kinderman and Dyer seemed unnecessary.
Class will be on hiatus for a few weeks, so I'll be having withdrawal pains.
Marc, you hit this right on the head. And yes, the original theatrical cut is the best version......
ReplyDelete