This newsreel from 1973 shows just how freaked out people were by The Exorcist, William Blatty’s still-great movie about demonic possession.
The original has been rendered mostly harmless — even cheesy — by decades of increasingly refined and extreme imitations. And some proportion of the hysteria was surely media and marketing hype all along.
But there’s a truth revealed here about the opportunity that lies in blasting through society’s weakening norms, if you can spot them first.
I’d like to see the same newsreel, but this time it’s people walking out of John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.