The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

53. 1973 - The Exorcist

The Exorcist Jason Miller
Warner Bros.

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.

 
Posted On: 
Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.