Stephen King’s It breaks The Exorcist’s record as the biggest horror film in history

Horror, like every other genre, comes in every style. Sometimes we’re in the mood for the worst, because the times reek of disillusionment and moral rot. And other times, worse times, we yearn for some nice, scary comfort food.

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The biggest-ever Stephen King movie adaptation recently set a record worth noting, and examining. Last weekend, director Andy Muschietti’s It, set in Maine in the 1980s and full of nostalgic references, broke the horror film box office record set by The Exorcist, which opened in the US to long queues and sporadic reports of vomiting in cinemas on December 26, 1973.

Nobody’s throwing up at It, now heading towards US$500 million (HK$3.9 billion) in worldwide gross receipts. (The film’s production budget was a relatively modest US$35 million.) That makes It the most lucrative King film to date, bigger than The Green Mile, and much, much bigger than many people’s favourite, Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie.

The dark fairy tale about Pennywise the killer, shape-shifting clown and the lovable “Losers’ Club” of bullied, isolated misfits now ranks as the biggest R-rated horror title in filmhistory. (Jaws got a PG rating, and many argue that it isn’t a horror film, really.)

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Adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist in its various domestic theatrical runs made the equivalent of a little over US$1 billion. It was huge, in other words, as opposed to It, which is merely big.

The Exorcist’s influence opened the door to a new degree and marketability of screen cruelty. (Many thought the same about Hitchcock’s Psycho, back in 1960.)

Compare the The Exorcist to the tamer but more suggestive nightmare Roman Polanski whipped up with Rosemary’s Baby, five years earlier. Polanski made a sly adult thriller that went just far enough. The Exorcist deliberately went too far, got away with it and redirected American popular culture in the process.

It was a solemn sort of gross-out. The Exorcist sensation of late 1973 and early 1974 culminated with 10 Academy Award nominations (it won two) including a first-ever best picture nomination for a horror Film. Certain sequences and individual shots, notably that of the possessed young girl (Linda Blair) stabbing herself in the privates with a crucifix and then rubbing the horrified face of her mother (Ellen Burstyn) in the blood, never would have had an R rating unless a stalwart such as Warner Brothers had its name above the title.