Back in 1998, Nick Freand Jones paid tribute to the 25th anniversary of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist with the feature length documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of The Exorcist, featuring interviews with the cast & crew and telling the story of the terrifying horror masterpiece’s creation as well as digging into the way audiences reacted to it back in 1973.
Brought to our attention by the doc’s writer and presenter Mark Kermode this week, the longest “Festival Cut” of the “definitive Exorcist doc” is now streaming for the very first time!
Kermode notes that the documentary “Includes interviews with ALL the film’s key players,” and lets us know that it’s streaming exclusively through the BBC iPlayer service.
Unfortunately, the BBC iPlayer only works in the UK.
The official description for the 81-minute doc reads:
“In this exclusive extended version never seen before on TV, Mark Kermode traces the extraordinary history of The Exorcist, the novel by William Peter Blatty that William Friedkin turned into a popular and controversial film. He examines the aura of mystery that still surrounds the film, the making of which claimed several lives. Alongside extracts and outtakes from the movie, there are interviews with Blatty, Friedkin, and actors Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair and James Ferman, director of the British Board of Film Classification in 1998.”
