Movies
Watch Unseen FX Test Footage From ‘THE EXORCIST’! (Exclusive)
I’ve been teasing a massive Halloween treat for a few days now. I hope this makes your head spin!
Bloody Disgusting is beyond excited to present you with an exclusive look at never-before-seen special effects test footage that’s been unearthed from William Friedkin’s 1973 horror masterpiece The Exorcist! The footage was provided by someone very special to us, who unfortuantely cannot be named.
Let me attempt to explain what you’re about to see (it will be broken into 3 parts with more “treats” coming in a few days!)…
This footage came from a 16mm print which was labeled as such: “Warner Bros color timed anamorphic test – The Exorcist.” The case had William Friedkin’s name hand written on the address label.
The following footage was shot on 35mm. This print was a 16mm reduction of the 35mm footage, probably intended to view tests at home or in the office.
The most interesting thing to my buddy is that this was shot SCOPE. As he explains, the camera slates in this footage list Friedkin as the director, so this leads one to assume Friedkin was originally going to shoot The Exorcist in scope. This footage, to the best of his knowledge, is totally unreleased anywhere and is the ONLY footage ever seen of the Exorcist set shot in scope. And it’s premiering exclusively right here on Bloody Disgusting!!!
He also believes that the man you sometimes see standing by the bed with a moustache is WILLIAM PETER BLATTY supervising the tests. (Note: this may appear in future videos I share next week.)
Another interesting thing you see in this footage is the ENTIRE ROOM is on some sort of device which makes it shake back and forth violently. Neither of us remember a scene in the finished movie where the entire room swivels around as if it is unhinged from the rest of the house…
HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM BLOODY DISGUSTING!
Below you’ll find the first of 4 videos (shared over 3 days) in which we see some effects tests where Regan floats, and where she is being thrown around her bed. Frightening even in test footage!
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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