The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

53. 1973 - The Exorcist

Honourable Mentions: American Graffiti, The Long Goodbye,The Wicker Man,

No film's reputation has done a greater disservice to what it actually is than The Exorcist. It's regarded as "the scariest movie ever made", and conclusions are regularly drawn from whether those expectations are met. While the movie is scary (and really, whether something is or isn't "scary" totally depends on what the viewer is bringing to the table), William Friedkin's horror masterpiece is so much more. It's tortured, existential, and laden with drama - a film about one man's crisis of faith and its rediscovery when he's confronted with pure evil.

William Peter Blatty - the screenwriter behind The Exorcist who also authored the novel on which it was based - developed the story and its true sequel, Legion, with an ideological throughline: the presence of an ultimate evil must, by logic, mean that there is an ultimate good. While he and Friedkin differed on how explicit to render those themes in certain sequences (an argument Friedkin conceded for The Exorcist's re-release in 2000), that arguably only makes the adaptation all the more fascinating. It's a film that exists in the margins of hope and despair, and as Friedkin himself believed, one that you take out of what you bring to it.