Horrible Sites: Makeup and Production Design for The Exorcist

At Moving Image Exhibitions, *The Exorcist* is framed as an inquiry into exorcism as a cross-cultural practice, where trained figures are tasked with driving out forces believed to have taken hold of a person, place, or object. The presentation places the idea in dialogue with moving-image traditions, drawing on work by Jim Henson, Yuri Norstein, Lu Yang, and Todd Haynes. In New York, the subject carries cultural weight through the city’s long history of immigrant religions and vernacular healing. One clear takeaway is how cinema often borrows ritual language to make inner conflict legible.