She was chosen among 600 applicants to star in one of the most remembered roles in the history of horror movies. She became a star at the age of 14. But she was never the same again, she suffered from depression and addiction, and she still carries the traumatic aftermath of her performance.
The sequence lasts just over a minute, from when her mother hears the girl's screams for help in her room, but it is impossible to forget. Chris MacNeil finds her daughter in bed beside herself, cursing, and a crucifix between her bloody legs. When she wants to get closer, she is pushed with bestial force against the wall. Then, Regan MacNeil's head turns 180 degrees and she addresses her mother in a guttural voice: "Do you know what your daughter's pig did?"
It is about one of the strongest and most controversial roles in the history of cinema: a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil. When pre-teen actress Linda Blair was chosen to play her out of 600 applicants in August 1972, the exhaustive casting, in which she bested other prodigy actresses such as Melanie Griffith and Laura Dern, made sense: the focus of The Exorcist – considered by many the best horror movie of all time, and until today the second highest grossing of the genre, was set on Regan.
At 13, Blair's career, which had begun at age five as a model and had already brought her some popularity as the face of Macy's catalogs and a series of New York Times advertisements, seemed to be headed toward acting for good. She did not imagine then that she would ever be able to get rid of the diabolical stigma of the film that made her famous throughout the world.
There was another reason to be so rigorous in the search for an interpreter who lived up to the character: she had to be able to embody good and evil at the same time and have the mettle to tolerate it. The screenwriter and producer of the film, William Peter Blatty –author of the bestseller on which it is based–, tells in the biographical documentary about Blair Didn't you used to be Satan? (1996) that she never expected they would actually find a "normal" girl of that age capable of doing it. "Think about the shocking plot, the language, the masturbation scene with the crucifix... oh my god!"
In fact, she had also been considered for the role of Jamie Lee Curtis, but her mother, actress Janet Leigh, considered that she was too young to do it. Linda, on the other hand, surprised the director, William Friedkin, from the first interviews. When she asked if she had read the book, Blair said that she had: "It's about a girl who gets possessed and does a lot of bad things." “Bad stuff like what?” Friedkin asked. "She pushes a man out of his bedroom window, hits her mother, and masturbates with a crucifix." "Do you know what that is? Have you ever done it?" Blair laughed: "Obviously, aren't you?"
According to Blatty, he and the director had an unspoken agreement to protect Blair during filming, but, at a certain point, they realized it was "just impossible." The filming lasted eleven months in which the girl was exposed to the stress of living with a macabre life-size doll of herself and undergoing endless make-up sessions to look like one possessed. Also, Friedkin's harsh methods, which included hanging her in a harness for a scene in which she levitates and falls forcefully, scarring him for life on her spine.
In the Cursed Movies series, Blair recently recounted that she suffered a fractured vertebra on set and had to have surgery much later, after suffering from chronic pain for years. “At that time I did not receive medical assistance, they did not call a doctor. They believed that she was acting”. Her screams in the movie are in real pain.
It is said that, while filming was delayed, Friedkin himself would have been responsible for the marketing campaign that began to ensure that a curse was haunting the film. Although some facts helped raise the question: maybe messing with the devil had not been a good idea. The first alarm bells went off at the start of filming when a fire destroyed the set in New York. No one was reportedly injured, but something caught the attention of the staff: the only part of the studio that wasn't damaged was the room used for Regan's exorcism scenes.
Fears were raised after a string of deaths of several people associated with the team. Casualties included actor Jack MacGowran and actress Vasiliki Mailiaros, whose characters also died in the film. The person in charge of refrigeration (essential because it was filmed in temperatures below zero so that real steam could be seen coming out of the mouths) and a night watchman, and Linda's grandfather, among others, also died. Even cast members, like Ellen Burstyn, Blair's mother in the script, began to believe in the curse. Thus, it began to be common to see real priests on the set mixing with the fictional ones to throw holy water. At that time, Burstyn gave Blair a bracelet with a horseshoe to protect her from the demon that would accompany her through her most difficult years.
After the premiere of The Exorcist, in December 1973, fainting, vomiting, heart attacks, and at least one spontaneous abortion were reported in the projection rooms. Everywhere the film was accused of causing mental disorders in viewers and was even used as an argument in the defense of a murderer who said that he had been possessed after seeing the film. Despite that, it was an absolute crowd boom: people lined up to see that girl in a trance throwing up green and swearing. Linda's image immediately became synonymous with the devil.
It then transpired that the young actress had had an outbreak and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. To silence the rumors, Warner Bross, responsible for the production, sent her on a promotional tour. The documentary about her life shows her on tour, facing questions from the press at just 14 years old: "Linda, it is said that the film affected you psychologically, what is the situation?" She laughs, between nerves and naivety: "I think people felt that it was going to bring me trouble, but it's not like that."
The versions that she was crazy or possessed did not stop. If she had been protected from the press throughout the filming, now it was she, instead of the adult protagonists of the film, the one in charge of answering about God, faith, religion, and satan. "I did my job without asking who the devil was, I was a professional," she would confess much later. But the movie ended and my story changed.”
Being the most tangible face of the devil made her daily life quite complicated: “I could no longer go to the supermarket, or to a store, or anywhere. People saw me and died of fear. They couldn't separate the film from the person: they looked at me as if I were the devil”. She soon began to be harassed by religious groups and fanatics who claimed that she was possessed of her and threatened to kidnap her. She had to hide out at the houses of her parents' friends and Warner hired bodyguards who followed her for six months after the premiere. That left her with a trauma that she did not overcome: "I think it is one of the main reasons why I never had a child: I was terrified of being kidnapped."
