10 Important Horror Movie Details That Are Almost Never Mentioned

Now to be completely fair to everyone, you'd need to have a working knowledge of century-old novelty songs to have a hope in hell of catching this, but it's still pretty surprising how little it's discussed among fans of The Exorcist.

We all know that Father Karras (Jason Miller) sacrifices himself at the end of the film, allowing himself to be possessed by the demon in order to free Regan (Linda Blair), and then throwing himself out the window and tumbling down the outside stairs to his death.

But this was actually foreshadowed much earlier in the film, when Father Dyer (William O'Malley) is playing a song on the piano - Ben Ryan's 1926 tune "Down on 33rd and 3rd (Thoidy-thoid and Thoid)."

This particular song was likely chosen for one specific reason - there's a lyric which foreshadows Karras' death. The lyric reads, "Three flights of stairs is a hellava fall."

Given that William Friedkin suffused The Exorcist with subliminal messages, this is an especially eerie discovery, that Karras' future demise was slyly hinted at much earlier in the film.