The Exorcist Director William Friedkin Didn’t Care For This Stephen King Movie

The late William Friedkin had a reputation for his wild, whirling, aggressive personality on film sets. He was so blustery and temperamental that he earned the nickname “Hurricane Billy” from his co-workers. Stories from the set of his 1973 horror masterpiece “The Exorcist” are recounted frequently, and many actors, photographers, and writers have talked about the things that happened off camera while making that movie. Friendkin, it seems, thrived in a chaotic environment, and played loud audio cassettes of tribal chanting in between takes. Someone even alleged that Friedkin would occasionally fire blanks into the air, making sure everyone was a little jumpy. That kind of behavior would be considered too reckless today, but in the hoary days of the 1970s, it was considered kinda metal. 

Friedkin made several horror films and thrillers in his career beyond “The Exorcist,” which is still often considered one of the scariest films of all time. He also directed the serial killer movie “Rampage” in 1987, and the my-nanny-is-a-murderous-Druid flick “The Guardian” in 1990. In 2006 and 2011, he directed two Tracy Letts play adaptations with “Bug” and “Killer Joe,” perhaps the two most disturbing films in his career. 

In a 2015 interview with Vice, the director maintained that he had no particular penchant for horror, just that he was drawn to certain kinds of stories. Friedkin made actions films, a sports movie, a soft-spoken courtroom drama, and multiple crime movies. There is no one genre he felt an affinity for. He did admit, however, that he was certainly more drawn to dark dramas than light comedies; his only real comedy film was his 1967 debut “Good Times” with Sonny & Cher. 

In the Vice interview, Friedkin was asked about horror in particular, and in discussing the genre, he admitted to hating a notable haunted house classic: Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

Friedkin felt there were only three reasons that people go to the movies: To laugh, to cry, and to be scared. Friedkin admittedly wasn’t adept at creating movies that elicited laughter, but he could occasionally make us cry, and, more often than anything, make us scared. Even Friedkin’s non-horror movies are intense enough to keep casual audiences on edge, and when it comes to his straightforward horror movies, he had a certain way of thinking about it. It seems his approach wasn’t reliant on an overabundance of style … something he hated about “The Shining.” He said: 

“I think I come back to not horror films so much as high-intensity films about characters that have their backs against a wall and no place to go. But you know, the horror film genre is a small brotherhood of real classics. ‘The Shining.’ I’m not a fan of ‘The Shining’ at all. That’s kind of masturbatory stuff, I felt. I don’t find it scary, and I also found it … a bit obscure. I don’t know what the f*** it was about!”

Stanley Kubrick can easily be accused of being cool and mannered to the point of alienation. A lot of his characters don’t feel completely human, and the filmmaker’s slow, deliberate pacing can be off-putting for certain viewers. Friedkin was certainly not mesmerized by Kubrick’s style. He seemed to like sweatier, more salacious storytelling — stories that delved into madness and panic in a way that Kubrick would have remained arm’s distance from.

 

And Friedkin, having made “The Exorcist,” certainly has every right to lambaste “The Shining,” just like Stephen King often does. The two films are very different, of course, but both appear on top 10 lists regularly, and both are hailed as among the scariest of all time. In Friedkin’s defense, I suppose it would take a lot to scare the guy who made “The Exorcist.”