The Exorcist – Blood and Porridge

October 26, 2026

Black magic and black ops

© Cork University Press

A few posts ago, I mentioned the Satanic panic that seized Northern Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974. As Halloween is nearly upon us, I thought I would republish the following, which is a slightly revised version of something I wrote a decade ago, after I’d read Richard Jenkins’s book on the topic, Black Magic and Bogeymen (2014).

When I was eight years old, I lived in a tiny village near the border between Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. Thinking back, I suspect that when my neighbours saw me they’d whisper, “Look… There’s the most gullible child in the village.”

They probably thought I was gullible because I readily believed any old guff people told me, especially relating to things that, scientifically speaking, didn’t exist – i.e., manifestations of the supernatural.

I was a sucker for ghost stories. For instance, an uncle once told me about the Cooneen Ghost – a tale involving a local family who supposedly were tormented by poltergeist-type knockings on the doors and windows of their house. When they tried to escape the entity by emigrating to North America, it travelled with them. The phantom knockings continued in their cabin on board the ship and then at their house in the New World. After hearing that, I lived in dread of hearing similar knockings on the doors and windows of my house.

I also believed that fairies were real because a girl in my primary-school class had assured me that once her mother had been in the family’s stick-house (Northern Irish for ‘wood-shed’) when she’d heard crying sounds coming from a block of wood. Presumably these were made by a fairy whose home was in the tree that’d been chopped down for the timber.

I even believed in banshees for a while because an older boy spun me a yarn about how, one night long ago, his father had heard a hideous screeching noise out in the darkness; and very soon afterwards, someone well-known to his father died unexpectedly.

So you can imagine my alarm one day when a couple of my primary-school classmates started talking about devil worshippers being active not only in Northern Ireland, but in the town of Enniskillen a few miles along the road from us. They talked about a family in Enniskillen who, according to rumour, drew all the curtains in their house as soon as it got dark and then spent the night performing black-magic rituals. They described the carcasses of freshly-sacrificed goats that’d been discovered beside the River Erne in Enniskillen with their hearts removed. Most alarmingly, they claimed a child, about our age, had been abducted by devil worshippers and later been found dead and cut into pieces. I swallowed every word of this and took it as gospel truth.

Talking of the gospel, I’ll say in my defence that I belonged to a fairly religious community of Northern Irish Protestants. We were a paradox. On one hand, we prided ourselves on being rational and not superstitious, seemingly unlike the Roman Catholics, with their talk about saints, visions and weeping statues; but on the other hand we believed everything that was said to have happened in the Bible because it was the Word of God. And since the Bible said the devil existed – he did exist. Our local clergyman confirmed this. I remember him telling us sternly during a Sunday sermon that if you believed in the existence of God, you had to believe in the existence of the devil too.

From wikipedia.org

So if the devil was real, surely it followed that evil people who worshipped him by slaughtering humans and animals were also real?

During the decades since, I often wondered how my primary-school classmates got hold of those grisly stories about devil worship in early-1970s Northern Ireland. Well, I finally found the answer when I read Black Magic and Bogeymen, a 2014 book by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield and a one-time undergraduate at Queen’s University in Belfast. This investigates a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction” that “swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.”

According to Jenkins, “(b)etween 5^th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements… Most of the reporting concerned the east of the province: Belfast and counties Antrim, Armagh and Down… The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

At their height, these reports seemed to reflect genuine panic in parts of Northern Ireland – adults concerned that their children might be kidnapped and sacrificed, and children generally scared witless. (I was one of them.) As Jenkins observes, children were also among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours. They “seem to have actively elaborated or invented stories about bad people doing bad things” and were “likely to have contributed to the meagre ‘tangible evidence’ of supposed witchcraft and black magic practices.”

Jenkins explores the many factors likely to have fostered these stories of devil worship, black magic and ‘witchcraft’. (My apologies to any Wiccans or other practitioners of white or pagan magic reading this, but to 1970s Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics, witchcraft was devil worship and vice-versa: end of.) He describes the heightened interest in the occult in Western culture at the time, signified by such things as the sensational black-magic novels of Dennis Wheatley and high-profile movies like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). He devotes a chapter too to “the supernatural lore that was part of the enchanted world-views that could be encountered in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s” and no doubt made some people believe the rumours more readily – supernatural lore that includes not just the ghosts, fairies and banshees that so worried my eight-year-old self, but also traditions of faith and folk healing and a great enthusiasm for celebrating Hallowe’en.

Obviously, something that casts a huge shadow over Jenkins’ subject matter is the Northern Irish Troubles. In their fourth year when the rumours began, the Troubles had already claimed an appalling toll – 467 people killed in 1972 alone. Jenkins discusses how “social conflicts may be symbolised and re-worked in supernatural imagery and stories, not least in threats such as witchcraft and fears of spiritual jeopardy”. The Troubles figured in the rumours in more tangible ways too, for example, through tales of teenagers getting embroiled in the occult after “trying to contact the souls of those killed in the Troubles, using Ouija boards or other methods.”

Jenkins attributes considerable blame for the scare to the province’s local newspapers, which generally reported the stories with ‘very modest facts’ that were ‘inflated and misrepresented’, ‘framed with unconnected material’ and ‘ornamented by apparently authoritative, if somewhat imprecise, anonymous information.’ Admittedly, those newspapers were under massive pressure. A few years earlier their main stories had been about ‘livestock sales’ and ‘the Women’s Institute’ but now they were regularly covering ‘intimidation, murder and mayhem.’ Thus, standards weren’t high among their beleaguered journalists.

© Carrickfergus Advertiser

Fascinatingly, another possible culprit identified is the British Army, which depending on your political viewpoint was then in the province as protectors or oppressors, as peacekeepers or occupiers. Jenkins provides evidence suggesting the army was happy to stir the pot of black-magic rumours. It conducted ‘black propaganda’ operations promoting the belief that, yes, diabolical things were going on and religious and / or superstitious Northern Irish parents should keep their offspring off the streets at night. On those streets, they were actually unlikely to tangle with devil worshippers; but they could tangle with paramilitaries or the security forces.

Jenkins prints an interview conducted in 1993 with the legendary Intelligence officer and ‘psychological warfare’ expert Colin Wallace, who claims he and his men went around Northern Irish properties mocking them up with magic circles, esoteric symbols, blood, bones, candles and inverted crosses to make it look like unspeakable rituals had taken place in them.

Tragically, one element in the stories was real – the child who, my classmates had told me, had been ‘cut to pieces’. Jenkins devotes a chapter to the murder of ten-year-old Brian McDermott. Brian was reported missing from his home in east Belfast at the start of September 1973 and his remains, ‘burned, mutilated and partially dismembered’, were discovered in the River Lagan a week later. Although the police dismissed the idea that the murder was the result of some occult ritual, Jenkins notes how “a ‘black magic’ interpretation of the murder of Brian McDermott became an established tale of the Northern Irish Troubles.” Officially the crime remains unsolved. According to the journalist Martin Dillon, British Army Intelligence suspected the killer as being John McKeague (himself killed in 1982), one of the conflict’s most notorious and feared loyalist terrorists. However, the fact that McKeague was in prison at the time of the murder casts doubt on his culpability.

Richard Jenkins conducts his investigations with academic thoroughness, analysing certain stories and rumours from different perspectives as he goes through the various actors in the drama – the Troubles, religion, superstitious belief, the media, the army, etc. His approach is exhaustive and may seem exhausting to the casual reader. However, I found Black Magic and Bogeymen fascinating – well, I was there at the time – and it’s surely the last word on the subject.

Returning to my own experience, I recall being asked in December 1973 if I wanted to go to the Christmas pantomime being held at Enniskillen High School and telling my parents flatly that no, I didn’t, because Enniskillen was full of witches and devil worshippers. My Dad went ballistic at me for believing such ‘a pack of nonsense’ and then demanded to know who’d told me those stories. I gave him the names of my guilty classmates. “More fool you,” he raged, “for listening to them slabbering eejits!” And that was that. I stopped worrying and agreed to go to the pantomime. Somehow, that angry burst of rationality from my Dad cured me of my fears.

Surprisingly, decades later, I remember my Dad – who originally hailed from Country Cavan in the Irish Republic – having a whiskey with an old Irish friend. The pair of them started talking about their childhood in the Irish countryside and how, once the sun went down, their family members would tell ghost stories.

“I’m not kidding,” marvelled my Dad. “After dark, you’d be too terrified to step outside the house.”

“I think,” said his friend, “that was why they told us them stories.”

Which proves I wasn’t the first member of the family to be troubled by tales of ghosts, fairies, banshees, black magic and bogeymen.

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions / 20^th Century Fox

September 1, 2026September 2, 2026

Musical genres I don’t like

From pixabay.com / © Fietzfotos

In recent years, I’ve tried to follow the adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Therefore, rather than write about books, films, TV shows, etc., I thought were bad and slag them off, I’ve tried to focus on works I thought were good and be positive in my vibes.

However, I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and feel grumpy. So, here’s a post radiating unapologetic negativity – about some genres of music that I always thought were a bit, or a lot, rubbish. But my diatribes will also mention some honourable exceptions, thus leavening the darkness with a little sunshine.

Jazz

There’s a sizeable segment of the world’s music-loving population who think jazz music is the bees’ knees. But it never did much for me. In fact, I agree with Jimmy Rabbitte, the youthful Svengali behind the band in The Commitments (1991). After Dean the saxophone player starts sneaking jazz bits into the band’s soul sound, Jimmy confronts him while he’s having a pee at a urinal and declares, “Jazz is musical wanking! If you want to wank, use that thing in your hand, not your sax!”

© Beacon Pictures / 20^th Century Fox

It’s surprising because I love blues music, another musical genre that grew out of the culture of the American south’s black population in the early 20^th century. Yes, I can happily spend all day listening to my collection of records by bluesmen and women like John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Minnie, Freddy King, Bessie Smith, Howling Wolf and so on. But jazz? It strikes me as ponderous and leaves me cold.

I suspect part of my beef against jazz is powered by the fact that certain people I’ve known over the years who were into the genre were, frankly, pretentious and annoying. This includes two ladies I’ve encountered, at different times and in different places, who fancied themselves as jazz chanteuses, fronted bands and did that ‘scat’ singing thing where they drooled ‘shooby dooby doo-wah’ into a microphone all evening thinking it made them the epitome of cool. It didn’t. (By the way, anyone acquainted with me when I lived in Sapporo in the 1990s, please note – the above rant does not apply to the well-known jazz fans Gordon Ents and William Green, whom I knew back then and regarded as really good guys.)

Honourable exceptions: I think Ethiopian jazz is brilliant. Its jazziness is suffused with Middle Eastern sounds and rhythms, making it sublimely trippy.

© Ritz Records

Country and Irish

I know many folk dislike country and western music on account of some of its practitioners and fans being right-wing, red-necked and, well, a bit racist, and on account of its seemingly limited subject matter: trucks, trains, prisons, farms, horses, beer, heartbreak and patriotism. But such generalisations do the genre a disservice. It’s also produced some great artists: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, Kris Kristofferson and the saintly and now sadly departed Dolly Parton.

But country and Irish music, which Wikipedia defines as “a musical sub-culture in Ireland formed by mixing North American country-style music with Irish influences” that “emerged from Ireland’s showband scene, where local bands would play American pop standards tailored to Irish sensibilities”? Sheesh! I find it an aural puree. All the interesting, gritty bits (symbolised by Johnny, Hank, Willie, Gram and co. above) have been removed and what’s left are some easy-on-the-ears twangy guitars, jaunty accordions and cheery female choruses and a bloke from Athlone or Letterkenny crooning about tractors, or hayfields, or going to church, or – that great country and Irish staple – ‘mammy’.

My own, late mother was into country and Irish music and her record player gave heavy rotation to the likes of Foster and Allen and the inimitable Brendan Shine, which explains why I’m so scarred. If you can listen to Brendan Shine’s 1981 opus Spuds (“Spuds, spuds, spuds! / Ah, these spuds are really great / Good oul Irish spuds / Are on everybody’s plate!”) all the way through without having a breakdown, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am. At least my mum wasn’t that keen on the country-and-Irish superstar and knitwear-clad cultural juggernaut that is Daniel O’Donnell. O’Donnell’s reputed to have sold 10 to 15 million records globally and was parodied in the 1998 Father Ted episode Night of the Nearly Dead, in which a much-loved singer called Eoin McLove visits Craggy Island and bluntly informs Ted, “I have no willy.”

Honourable exceptions: I’m not wild about the music, but Philomena Begley can certainly sing.

From wikipedia.org / © Atlantic Records

Prog rock

Prog rock, or to give it its full title, progressive rock, was initially essayed by bands in the early 1970s like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Yes, Pink Floyd after Sid Barrett left and Genesis before Phil Collins took over. It had guitar solos and keyboard solos that twiddled on forever because the musicians wanted to convince everyone that, no, they weren’t just dumbass rock or pop musicians but proper artistes pushing boundaries by fusing rock with classical music and (eek!) jazz. Much of it is unlistenable to me. I agree with John Peel, who once observed, “the one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn’t progress.” Anyway, by the mid-1970s, God decided that enough was enough and created punk rock, which seemed to put an end to it. (Though Marillion popped up in the 1980s and the genre lives on today.)

Honourable exceptions: Okay, I’ve been facetious. I have a few nice things to say about prog rock too. Firstly, looking at Wikipedia’s List of Progressive Rock Bands, I see many names on it whom I actually like. However, while those bands may have been prog-rock-tinged at times, I view them as essentially playing different types of music: Hawkwind (space rock), Can (Krautrock), Rush (hard rock and heavy metal), Ozric Tentacles (psychedelic rock), etc. Secondly, you can’t deny that, judiciously used, the music of prog rock bands has enlivened many movies – see Michael Mann’s use of Tangerine Dream on his soundtracks, or Dario Argento’s use of Goblin on his, or Vangelis’s contribution to Blade Runner (1982), or how that bit from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1971) turned up brilliantly in The Exorcist (1973). And thirdly, among albums by latter-day prog rock bands, I thought Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) was wonderful.

From wikipedia.org / © RSO Records

Disco

I don’t hate disco. I was just never into it. So sorry, ABBA, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band and Earth, Wind and Fire. The problem, of course, is that to be a fan of disco music, you have to be a fan of dancing, and as I have always danced like I possessed two left feet, that’s excluded me from the culture.

Incidentally, it’s weirdly ironic – considering how disco was a big thing among the black, Latino and gay communities in the late 1970s – that two legendary disco bands have been tarnished by associating with intolerant far-right-wing politicians recently. Admittedly, these are modern incarnations of the bands, i.e., with hardly any of the original line-ups remaining in them. A version of Boney M has been in talks to perform at this month’s conference by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, while a version of Village People played at inaugural events for Donald Trump in 2025. Of course, Village People’s YMCA (1978) is much-loved by Trump, who dances to it at every opportunity – arthritically shuffling about whilst joggling his little fists in front of him like he’s trying to milk a levitating cow.

Honourable exceptions: The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive (1977) is a sprightly tune, though I like it even more in this mash-up with AC/DC’s Back in Black (1980) from Wax Audio.

Right, I’ve released some of that yellow bile from my system, am feeling better and will end this post here. But stay tuned. I’ll be writing about more musical genres I can’t stand soon. (Hint: we’re getting near the 1980s…)

© Beaumex Music

October 18, 2024October 21, 2024

A. N. Other

© Coronet Books

It’ll be Halloween in a fortnight’s time. I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically. They shouldn’t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn’t British but American. Here’s the latest whinge from Guardian columnist Zoe Williams. It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers. So, if you view Halloween as ‘un-British’, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain. If only…

Anyway, as is my pre-Halloween custom every year, here’s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season. I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The Other by Thomas Tryon.

Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The Other. This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies. It also – along with the similar success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves ‘a nice little earner’. But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom Tryon. And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.

As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958’s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The Glory Guys. I don’t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day, in which he acted alongside John Wayne. However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it’s not surprising that I missed him.

© 20^th Century Fox

It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast. Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work. Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger’s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson’s hugely bestselling – but now forgotten – novel of the same name from 1950. Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger. According to the director’s Wikipedia entry, “Preminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.” On his own Wikipedia entry, Tryon is quoted as saying of The Cardinal, “To this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger. He was a tyrant who ruled by terror. He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names. He said I was lazy. He said I was a fool. He never cursed me. His insults were far more personal.”

I wonder if it’s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The Other, was a horror one. I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis, lover of Janet Leigh’s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The Psycho-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon’s novel.

The Other centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell… and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles’s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited. We get an idea of the meanness of Holland’s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell’s pet rats. Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a ‘Sunshine Biscuit box’ as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath. But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong ’un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.

Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland’s father Vining Perry. He died “while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage… Father started down with a basket… he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head…” As we learn more about Holland’s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining’s death was really an accident.

The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there’s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on. To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction – it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.

What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there’s a lot of other stuff. You get back-stories – most notably Ada’s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia – and sub-plots, including one about a ‘game’ that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes. Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era – from the popular radio-comedy show Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Irish tenor John McCormack, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.

You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories. Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: “On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.” The Perrys’ barn, meanwhile, is “venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road. Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed. This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.” At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb evoked the South.

I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today – when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots – would it ever escape from the slush pile? Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now… and not just because it’s set in 1935.

But that’s not meant as a criticism. The Other was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I’d found it a rewarding book. And it was a surprisingly downbeat one – the chills and nastiness, when they come, are chilling and nasty. You needn’t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book’s characters. Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.

From centipedepress.com

August 31, 2023July 29, 2024

The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection. This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream film industry had previously thought impossible. Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later). Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius. Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s. That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV. My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice. The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland. The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in. Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances. I was at college and staying in a hall of residence. The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon. As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR. Definitely not a big-screen experience. Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all. For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988. They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.” Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999. At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25^th anniversary.

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy. I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing. Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay. That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty. Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted. He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb. And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre. The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too. And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising. This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men. I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film. Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M. The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex. In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community. Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component. It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller. Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt. This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad. She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of. Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods. (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.) The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend. About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.” The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk. It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it. However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant. His movie had to have a killer tree!

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21^st century. This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts. First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing. For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’ Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name. This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy. A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it. An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe. “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick. Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy. When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to. I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee. The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films. I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops. He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges. He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom. He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice. Truly a man of many achievements.