The Exorcist

How this film uses it

The demon possessing Regan acts out a Freudian nightmare in the open. A child's body expresses adult sexuality and violence, the mother is helpless and the father is absent. The horror becomes a portrait of a family home under attack.

Where to see it

Regan's transformation scenes. The demon speaks through her body in a voice full of repressed adult knowledge that a 12-year-old should not have.

How this film uses it

Friedkin inserts brief flashes of a demonic face throughout the film. You can see them if you freeze the frame. In motion, they only register subliminally, meaning below conscious notice. You are left with a constant sense of an evil presence just under the surface of what you normally see.

Where to see it

The demon face flash during Father Karras's nightmare. It is a single frame of a white-painted evil face. You sense it without being able to say what it was.

How this film uses it

Over the film, Regan's bedroom changes from a child's warm, cluttered room into a freezing, violated space. The set design tracks the possession by showing a safe home physically falling apart.

Where to see it

The bedroom's temperature dropping visibly. You can see breath and frost on the windows. The warm family room has turned into something that should not exist indoors.

How this film uses it

A Dutch angle is a shot where the camera is tilted so the picture sits crooked. Friedkin uses these rarely and precisely. He saves them for moments when the supernatural has clearly broken into the rational world, so each tilt marks a point of no return.

Where to see it

The staircase scenes. The possessed Regan comes down the stairs upside down and backward, moving in ways a body cannot.