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The Exorcist

Looking back on a film like The Exorcist, the scariest moments seem to be the ones that don’t involve pea soup and potty-mouthed little girls. We’ve wondered before if the movie has lost its shock value, but we pointed to Regan’s (Linda Blair) hospital test scenes as some of the movie’s most enduring horrors. The subliminal demonic face that pops up during a dream sequence makes this list, however. “I saw subliminal cuts in a number of films before I ever put them in The Exorcist, and I thought it was a very effective storytelling device… The subliminal editing in The Exorcist was done for dramatic effect — to create, achieve, and sustain a kind of dreamlike state,” director William Friedkin explained. It works. Happy Days actress Eileen Dietz played the demon and gave us an image that has been impossible to erase from our minds all these years later.