Deaths, injuries and a fire: How the original ‘Exorcist’ set was its own horror movie

nypost.com:

release of “The Exorcist: Believer,” filmgoers will once again witness young, possessed girls blaspheming, shrieking and levitating as their parents try to wrest a godless demon from their bodies.What they likely won’t see, however, is their fellow audience members fainting, vomiting and fleeing the theater in terror.

That chaotic scene was what was widely reported to have happened all over the world when “The Exorcist” hit theaters nearly 50 years ago in December 1973.In early 1974, a security guard at a Midtown East cinema described screenings of the horror flick to the New York Times.

He said that there had been several heart attacks and one miscarriage at the venue.The paper also reported that “soon after ‘The Exorcist’ opened, an usher at the theater fell under a subway train and lost an arm.

Then the mother of a cashier died.”All pure coincidence, perhaps. But well before the movie’s release, during its way-behind-schedule, more-than-200-day shoot in Manhattan, elsewhere in the country and abroad, there were so many similarly spooky happenings that many believe director William Friedkin’s petrifying classic was cursed.Actors and crew members perished, a huge fire shut down production for more than a month and star Ellen Burstyn, who returns in the new film as Chris MacNeil, severely injured her back.“Friedkin called me and said, ‘Can you come down and exorcise the set?’” remembered Father Thomas Bermingham, a technical advisor, in the 1998 documentary “The Fear of God: 25 Years After ‘The Exorcist’.” “I said, ‘No, Billy, no.