I was in the seventh grade the first — and only — time I ever saw The Exorcist. I was 12 years old, at a slumber party with a bunch of girls I sort of knew, and it’s the kind of memory that should’ve faded out of my brain a bit more than it has 24 years later. I can’t remember what we ate at the sleepover or name anyone other than the birthday girl, but I absolutely remember being terrified of the 1973 horror classic… and everything that happened after.
Looking back, it’s not so much that a ton of things happened; it’s just that everything felt weird. I was convinced watching the movie had opened up some kind of portal and that scarier things than our host’s dad literally going outside to knock on the walls of the house as we watched the film were probably going to happen. And y’all, they did.
My Exorcist story goes like this — my friends and I were all legit terrified after watching it, so we tried to play some games and watch something else in the living room to calm ourselves down. After a while, we all felt somewhat brave enough to go to bed, and a few of us tried to pile into our host’s bed, each of us lying horizontally so we could all make room.
I specifically remember getting into the middle where I felt safest, and looking up at the broken blinds on the window across from us. The rod for the blinds was twisted and poking out in such a way that it looked like an arrow aiming straight at my face. I was thinking about how scary it looked when a friend reached over to turn out the lamp — and the bulb blew. It was an enormously loud pop before the room went pitch black, and we all just started screaming.
What are the odds, right? It was my party story for a while — listen to what happened to me after I watched The Exorcist — and then I realized, very quickly, that I wasn’t alone. My brother-in-law has a story of finishing the movie and immediately seeing blood drip from a cut on his hand that he hadn’t noticed before.
“I went to the bathroom after finishing the movie, my teeth chattering I was so scared, and suddenly, a photo fell off the wall outside in the hallway. I’ve never screamed so loud in my life,” Rachel F., a 40-year-old mom in Texas tells me.
“I watched The Exorcist as a grown adult and laughed through most of it. But that night, after I went to bed, the doorbell rang at, like, 2:30 a.m. I came downstairs and nobody was there, but just as I was shutting the door, I swear — the doorbell rang again. Even though no one was on the porch or out in the yard. I still don’t know how it happened,” Sarah T., a 36-year-old mom in Tennessee shares.
You’ve probably got a few stories up your sleeve, too. Everybody seems to have a story from watching The Exorcist. And I mean everybody. These aren’t just “oh, I was so scared I couldn’t sleep” stories, but weird things often happen after viewing the movie. It really starts to mess with your brain and convince you that evil is out there, ready to strike at any time. But how much of everyone’s Exorcist stories is “real,” and how much of it is a random thing happening that we contribute more spooky energy to because of the movie?
“I had a porcelain doll in my room that always gave me the creeps, and then I watched The Exorcist when I was a teenager, and I suddenly had to get rid of it. I don’t know why; just something about it made me think of Reagan in the movie. I stuck it in the closet behind a long coat, and the next morning, the coat was crumpled up on the floor, and the doll was peering out from behind it. I mean, obviously, me moving the coat is what made it fall sometime in the night, right? It always just felt so creepy, though,” Jasmine F. from Michigan tells me.
Look, I believe in the supernatural, too. But the more I think about it, the more I have to admit: The reason we all have a scary story after watching The Exorcist is because we are scared.
As reported in The Washington Post, humans often enjoy being scared because of the adrenaline rush, and it’s easy for your mind to get carried away with such a rush. Cognitive distortions, when your brain plays a trick on you by distorting reality, are bound to happen when you’ve just been scared out of your mind by a roll of thunder hitting the sky as soon as the movie ends or the remote suddenly falling to the floor.
It certainly doesn’t help that The Exorcist set was plagued with its own creepy happenings, or that people were so frightened by the movie they passed out and vomited. My dad has a memory of seeing the movie at a drive-in and needing to pee halfway through but being too terrified to go the bathroom. When he finally worked up the courage, he was crossing the screen right when the head-spinning scene happened, and everyone around him in their cars started screaming. He says he managed to make it to the bathroom in about three jumps.
If scary movies give us an adrenaline rush, then we have to consider that adrenaline can profoundly affect our bodies. It’s the fight-or-flight hormone, which means your senses are more heightened. We act without thinking. It’s not until later we can actually break down what happened to us in those moments and see what they really were — coincidences. Photos fall all the time; it just happened to be when you were scared out of your mind. A faulty doorbell is utterly forgettable until you’re connecting it with a spooky movie you just watched. Waking up at 3 a.m. meant nothing to you until you learned that 3 a.m. was the “witching hour.”
So, really, everyone’s Exorcist story is just that: a story.
But maybe get some sage and a crucifix, just in case.
