In appreciation: William Friedkin was the street-level master of suspense, from ‘French Connection’ and ‘The Exorcist’ to ‘Bug’
CHICAGO — “No technique.” “No style.” Those are exact quotes from William Friedkin talking about William Friedkin, in the context of the filmmaker’s intentional lack of conventional artifice on what became his biggest hit and the most gruesomely influential horror film of the 1970s: “The Exorcist.” The bloody terrors inflicted on Linda Blair’s Regan in that 1973 landmark? They’d be more ...
CHICAGO — “No technique.”
“No style.”
Those are exact quotes from William Friedkin talking about William Friedkin, in the context of the filmmaker’s intentional lack of conventional artifice on what became his biggest hit and the most gruesomely influential horror film of the 1970s: “The Exorcist.”
The bloody terrors inflicted on Linda Blair’s Regan in that 1973 landmark? They’d be more frightening, and less easily dismissable, Friedkin said in a 1998 Guardian interview, if “I set out consciously to give ‘The Exorcist’ no style. Just, here it is.”
Chicago-born and bred, Friedkin brought his own array of documentary-honed
