The Exorcist Satire

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Recommended: The evolution of the horror genre

If someone is trying to find the point in time when horror movies started to shift into what they are today, the best place to start is the 70s. Some of the most popular horror movies came out in the 70s, most being ones that critics and fans alike refer to as “good horror films”. Those include Halloween, Carrie, The Omen, Amityville Horror and the focus of this paper - The Exorcist. The Exorcist was a ground-breaking film that is the foundation for modern possession films, and to understand why this movie is so important to modern times, it starts with looking at it in it’s own time. The most important thing to do before getting really into how this movie helped make it possible for modern horror movies is explaining how this is a horror film, and where it fits into the genre. Horror, whether films or stories have two sides - horror and terror. Horror is horrifying and disgusting, and terror keeps the audience on the edge of their seat with subtle creaks and banging doors. The Exorcist has very obvious elements of both. Look at Regan the longer she is possessed, she looks (with no better way to put) absolutely revolting. She looks almost like a …show more content…

The Exorcist is one of those films that laid the foundation for horror movies to build upon. It showed how to take what was going on in the world and find one specific fear to prey upon. For them, it was what happens when you break the mold against religion. It built upon that with impressive special effects and disturbing scenes and dialogues so that the audience constantly felt in a state of panic that this could happen to them or someone they loved. Without this film, we would not have the disturbing possession films we have today that makes up a large portion of horror films (think The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Conjuring, or any film with an ouija board) that people very much

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