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1. The young priest who gave Father Karras confession at the end of the film was (and still is) a Catholic priest (Reverend William O’Malley). In order to make him visibly shocked in the final scene, the director (William Peter Blatty) slapped him across the face unexpectedly and yelled “action!” Father O’Malley still teaches to this day at Fordham University.

2. On the first day of filming the exorcism sequence, Linda Blair’s delivery of her foul-mouthed dialogue so disturbed the gentlemanly Max von Sydow that he forgot his lines.

3. Very brief cutaways appear in the film in order to make the audience uneasy. The most famous is the demon face (seen above) – the face was that of Eileen Dietz who also starred in Happy Days and General Hospital. The face is, to me, the most memorable scene from the film and it still gives me a fright when I see it.

4. In the disturbing scene where Regan is masturbating with the crucifix, Eileen Dietz (as mentioned in number 3) was used for the shot where Regan belts her mother across the face. William Friedkin felt they needed someone with more heft physically to perform the stunt, and the double was shot from the back. The crucifix scene was filmed with Linda Blair, who says she wasn’t totally aware of what she was doing or the implications of the vulgar acts.

5. The scream of the demon being thrown out of Linda Blair was actually created by recording squealing pigs being driven into slaughter.