The Exorcist (1973)

Two priests attempt to remove a demon from a young girl in this box office smash. The movie was based on a 1949 Washington Post article with the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip.” Director William Friedkin spoke about the article to Time Out London: “Maybe one day they’ll discover the cause of what happened to that young man, but back then, it was only curable by an exorcism. His family weren’t even Catholics, they were Lutheran. They started with doctors and then psychiatrists and then psychologists and then they went to their minister, who couldn’t help them. And they wound up with the Catholic church. The Washington Post article says that the boy was possessed and exorcised. That’s pretty out on a limb for a national newspaper to put on its front page….You’re not going to see that on the front page of an intelligent newspaper unless there’s something there.”