Credit: Dangerous Minds / Warner Bros

The Exorcist wasn’t a big hit for a horror film, it was a big hit period.

Put it this way. Not adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing horror film of all time is It: Part One. A blockbuster of a hit, raking in over $700million. A miracle for a horror movie to gross that much, right? A mockery of the $440m that The Exorcist made in its time, right? Not so much. Adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist is the ninth highest-grossing film of all time with over 110million tickets sold since its release in 1973.

It’s also worth considering that It: Part One waltzed to that box office draw on the back of a number of different factors. 1980s nostalgia. The reverence for Steven King is at an all-time high. The presence of Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard in the cast. Most of all was arguably offering a modern version of Pennywise, a character that’s been iconic since Tim Curry scared a generation of viewers as the character in the 1990 mini-series. The Exorcist had none of that. So, what sold well over a hundred million tickets to William Friedkin’s masterpiece? The fact that it was the scariest fucking film anyone had ever seen at the time.

Seriously, horror cinema had always been a draw, but not the way The Exorcist was. Y’know how you might watch an old creature feature from the 1940s and 1950s for a laugh and roll your eyes at how fake it looked? Yeah, audiences at the time were doing the same. Horror pictures, for the most part, were B-movies, and the major league releases like the old Universal Monster movies featuring Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster were more like gothic dramas than anything else.

Occasionally, you’d get outliers like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead and Psycho, but nothing on the level of The Exorcist.

What set The Exorcist apart from other horror movies of the time?

Now, the most frightening moments of The Exorcist are legendary by now. Father Karras’ nightmare. The Spider-walk. The unnervingly real Angiography scene. The brief, still-petrifying flashes of Pazuzu that make you, for a brief moment, wonder whether you really saw what you thought you did. This commitment to going for the jugular with the scares is reflected in the reviews of the time. The critics of the time are legitimately shocked, not really knowing what to think about the picture beyond they’re going to sleep with the lights on for a long time.

However, that was only part of the black magic behind The Exorcist. The other was something so insidious and cunning that Lucifer himself would be proud. That’s right, they had the power of marketing on their side. As the hype of just how terrifying the picture was grew, Warner Bros. put together a campaign so effective that it resembled mass hysteria. We’re talking hiring actors to play nurses at selected screenings, there to help people in case anyone fainted. Which, of course, led to people fainting at screenings of The Exorcist.

This grew into hiring people to play pastors who were there to help people if they felt like the movie was possessing them. Obviously, this lead to people saying that the film was demonic. Thus, audiences flocked to the theatre to see what was going on with this picture. This lead to the picture having an initial theatrical run of two whole years and being as big a blockbuster as any other titan of the 1970s you could name.

To be clear, if the film wasn’t good, this would all be a con. The Exorcist, however, is one of the best horror movies ever made and still holds up half a century after its release. A testament to its power then, now and forever.