If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

I wrote about William Friedkin, The Exorcist, and the scariest shot in movie history for Decider.

You may not have heard of the monumental horror-image before, but like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it. The little girls in The Shining, the statue of the demon in The Exorcist, the titular entities in The Wicker Man and It Follows: Though they’re rarely discussed compared to jump scares, gore, monsters, slashers, torture, or other hallmarks of the genre, the monumental horror-image is everywhere. Chances are good that if a movie has ever really frightened you, you have strange, standalone sights like these to thank.

The things you see in images like these aren’t brandishing a chainsaw or baring a mouthful of fangs, but something about them feels completely terrifying anyway. It’s not just scary, it’s wrong, like you’re seeing something that should not be.

Why “monumental?” In part, because subjects of these images are horrifying more for what they represent than what they actually do. In most cases, they don’t do anything but stand there. Yet seeing them alone is enough to indicate that something dreadful going on. Just as monuments in real life commemorate events or embody ideals, these images function as horror’s forward-facing surface — “monuments” to the deeper evil they connote.

Inspired by a twitter thread I did on the topic that went viral recently, I wrote about the monumental horror-image for The Outline, and they made an incredible visual presentation out of it that you really should check out if this subject interests you at all. This piece was nearly 20 years in the making and i’m so proud of how it turned out.

‘Luke Cage’

Netflix, September 30
Ooh baby, we like it raaaaw. With trailer music and episode titles alike nodding to classic New York hip-hop, the latest of Netflix’s street-level Marvel superhero shows (it follows Daredevil and Jessica Jones and precedes Iron Fist and team-up series The Defenders) looks like it will make good on the promise of its lead character, the pioneering African American superhero-for-hire created in the 1970s. Actor Mike Colter’s cameos on Jessica Jones were among the show’s high points; let’s see if his solo turn is as bulletproof as his skin. STC

I wrote about a whole bunch of upcoming or just-debuted shows for Rolling Stone’s big Fall TV Preview feature, along with a whole bunch of talented writers. Enjoy!