Back in October 1973, the Motion Picture Association of America gave The Exorcist an R rating, which meant anyone under 17 could get in as long as a parent or guardian came along. When the movie opened in Washington, D.C., the day after Christmas, parents took that literally: Roy Meacham, the arts critic for the local Metromedia TV station, later wrote in The New York Times that parents brought children as young as 6 and 8, that one woman herded 10 kids into a showing, and that he watched a boy slip $3 to an adult in line to buy him a ticket. Within hours of the opening, Meacham’s co-workers “watched as a girl was removed from a showing at the Cinema theater and placed in an ambulance.”
A First for Washington
On New Year’s Eve, MPAA president Jack Valenti phoned the ratings board, and the board kept the R, reasoning that the movie had no nudity and no overt sexuality. Only the studio could ask for a stricter rating, and its chief, Ted Ashley, declined to request an X, a rating that would have kept the film out of many theaters and, in some cities, out of the newspaper ads.
So Washington acted on its own. “Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, Washington became the first city ever to bar children from a film the review board said they could see,” Meacham wrote. After consulting the US Attorney’s Office, officers from the police department’s morals division warned the management of the Cinema Theater that arrests would be made if any more tickets were sold for use by minors. A sign went up at the box office: “No one under the age of 17 will be admitted,” parent or not. Mental Floss has covered the warning before, but the legal hook is stranger than the threat. The police didn’t move on the movie’s violence or its scares: they used a provision of the District’s code that barred minors from seeing scenes of certain sexual conduct, “even when the actors are fully clothed,” and the scene in question was the two-minute crucifix sequence. Meacham admitted he had personally urged the police to see the movie, and that sex wasn’t what bothered him: “The film’s violence was.”
Mississippi Went After Everyone
Other places didn’t stop at children. In April 1974, several police officers and a justice of the peace went with the district attorney to the Saenger Theatre in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to watch The Exorcist. Afterward, the print was seized, and the theater’s manager and projectionist were arrested. Their charges were dropped, but the company that owned the theater was convicted under a state law against “obscene, indecent, or immoral” pictures. The Mississippi Supreme Court threw out the conviction in January 1976, ruling the law too broad, over a dissent from a justice who wrote, “I have neither read ‘The Exorcist’ nor seen the movie,” before concluding, from the briefs alone, that it was obscene anyway. In Boston, where 5,000 people a day lined up at the Sack 57 Cinema, according to TIME, an attempt to ban the movie reportedly ended when a judge dismissed the case.
Britain’s Long Wait
The British Board of Film Classification passed The Exorcist uncut in 1974 with an X certificate, which already kept out everyone under 18. Secretary Stephen Murphy’s verdict: “It is a powerful horror movie. Some people may dislike it, but that is not a sufficient reason for refusing certification.” That didn’t satisfy everyone. The Christian campaign group the Festival of Light protested, a small number of local councils banned the film outright, and in Tunbridge Wells, 15 people fainted during its first week at the Classic Cinema, so the St John Ambulance service was put on call.
The measure aimed squarely at kids came later, on home video. The movie went out on tape in 1981, and when a 1984 law required videos to be certified, the BBFC balked. Its concern, in its own words: “the protagonist of the film was aged 12, and the film might therefore have appeal to underage viewers.” The tape was pulled at the beginning of 1988, and The Exorcist didn’t come back on video in Britain until after its 25th-anniversary re-release, when the board passed it with an 18 certificate, uncut.