It’s lean, mean, slightly more ambiguous, and powerfully effective to this day. The original version of The Exorcist is still clearly the best one. This time Friedkin was amenable to it, and that’s how we got the 2000 release of The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, which ended up restoring around 10 to 12 minutes of previously unseen footage, some of it a Holy Grail to aficionados. Some 17 years later, however, Friedkin–whose friendship with Blatty had been damaged by the editing squabble, but who had reconciled with the author in the intervening years–was approached by Blatty about restoring as much of the footage as possible. Over several objections by producer and screenwriter William Peter Blatty (who adapted his own novel), Friedkin pruned away 20 minutes or so, bringing the film in at a tight two hours. When director William Friedkin made The Exorcist in 1973, his initial cut was two hours and 20 minutes. That religious chiller is still renowned as the greatest horror movie of all time, and it starts a run on Netflix this week. That’s what happened with The Exorcist too. But it happens more often than you may think: look at movies like Aliens, The Abyss, or Blade Runner–just to name a handful–where such excisions literally made a movie-defining difference. It’s astonishing to think that a few judicious edits, a deletion of seconds here, or a few minutes there, can sometimes change the entire meaning, theme, and even narrative trajectory of a motion picture.
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