The return of The Exorcist

By Azad on 2000-09-23 19:37:18

With the Sept.?22 re-release of an enhanced and expanded version of The Exorcist, moviegoers will have a chance to see scenes cut out of the 1973 film's original release.?From the various press releases from several sources, the info scoop is that Warner Brothers and director William Friedkin have added back more than 11 minutes of footage and digitally remastered the soundtrack.?

All the additions includes several scenes Friedkin originally deleted over the objections of writer William Peter Blatty, who authored the best-selling book of the same name on which the film was based.?

Conversing with entertainment news folks over at E!, Blatty told them, "I told Billy, yes, it's a classic, but the first version was a masterpiece." Without the missing scenes, the movie "had no moral center whatsoever" and meandered "from shock to shock to shock."

Friedkin told E! that the scenes had to be originally cut to shorten the film's overall length.?"But it was completely arbitrary why I cut them out," he said.?"It was not cut for censorship, but for pace and length." After nearly 30 years, the writer finally persuaded the director to restore The Exorcist. One new segment is the infamous "spider walk" scene, which appears in both Blatty's novel and screenplay and shows the possessed Regan (played by Linda Blair) flipping herself over, contorting her body and crawling down the stairs like a spider.?

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