The room was ostensibly illuminated by a pair of small table lamps set on either side of Regan’s four-poster bed. To ensure that the breath vapor would read correctly, Roizman painstakingly created a backlight effect for each actor while trying to stay true to his source-lighting approach. "This created a problem because our sources were right next to the bed, and [the priests] were always facing the light," the cameraman notes. "The challenge was to get the backlight on the breath while keeping it off everything else. With the actors moving all the time, it became difficult to hide the backlight and keep it off them; my gaffer, Dick Quinlan, was usually sitting on the floor behind Max and Jason, handholding an inky-dink with a snoot on it and just getting the light on the vapor. He did an amazing job.
"For some arbitrary reason I never understood, Billy didn’t want to use any backlight on the actors during the exorcism. That was like a monkey wrench for me; I could only use frontal, side or cross light. The action called for people to be walking through the door and around the room, and because we were often shooting from low angles, we’d see almost the entire ceiling and three walls at one time. For this reason, our biggest lamps were usually inky-dinks occasionally a baby or some zip lights hidden wherever we had space. We were controlling them on dimmers, so that if an actor got too close to one, we could take it down. Dick had one dimmer in each hand, as did one of his crew members. They would sit and ride those four dimmers as if they were playing musical instruments. The lights were also very carefully netted, and we’d grade the nets down as much as possible within the light because we didn’t have the room to place them away from the fixtures and do it sharply."
The difficulty of achieving a proper exposure under such conditions demanded that all of the film’s interior footage be force-developed by one stop. This allowed Roizman to slightly wash out the highlights and print down to retain rich blacks, eliminating the smooth gradations between tones and increasing the contrast. At the time, the cameraman regularly utilized this process, but he later abandoned it. "The blacks in those scenes were always a bit milky, and I was never happy with them," he admits. "But given the stocks we were using back then, it was the best that could be done."
The exorcism sequence showcases a wide variety of violent special effects depicting Pazuzu’s wrath, but one of the most disturbing the illusion that Regan is slowly levitating toward the ceiling was executed in a very basic way. Like most of the other effects sequences in the film, this scene was done in a practical manner, in front of the camera, using the simplest of techniques: wires. "I’ve always found it easy to hide wires even when shooting against a background of normal tone," Roizman attests. "I’d done it many times before while shooting commercials, simply by painting the wires with alternating shades of paint to disrupt the straight line. It’s like a checkerboard pattern. But in this case, the girl was moving through such extremes of background light and shadow that it was enormously difficult to hide the wires."
Makeup effects artist Dick Smith’s more ghastly work in the picture still draws gasps: projectile vomiting, a slowly spinning head and a swelling throat mark Regan’s hideous transformation. However, Smith’s "aging" of von Sydow who was just 44 years old at the time of filming is just as impressive. "Dick’s makeup was the closest thing to flawless," commends Roizman. "He’s a dedicated craftsman and artist, and his makeup was brilliantly conceived, so it wasn’t difficult to shoot. I was just careful not to get too openly bright with the light on Max’s face. It always had to be angled, but I didn’t have to do anything to hide any mistakes Dick might have made."
One particular special makeup effect relied on a simple camera trick. After opening Regan’s nightshirt, Karras is shocked to see the words "Help Me" appear as raised letters on her heaving stomach. Roizman reveals that the girl’s belly was actually a foam latex prosthetic; prior to shooting, a reactive chemical was painted onto it to create the raised letters. With his camera running in reverse, the cinematographer shot a close-up on the two words, which gradually receded as the chemical evaporated. When the footage was cut into the final film, the plea seemed to mysteriously arise from the girl’s flesh.
Also making a brief appearance in the exorcism scene is a frightening phantom that has become known as Captain Howdy, named after the spirit Regan contacts with her Ouija board. With its expressionistic, skeletal features, the specter’s visage is briefly superimposed over the girl’s own face to suggest the spirit lurking within her. Roizman remembers that this effect was achieved in-camera "with an old trick I learned while doing commercials, using a piece of glass angled 45 degrees to the camera. You’d first position your subject in front of the camera, and then place the element you wanted to superimpose over it to the side against a black background, reflected in the glass. In this case, the element was [stand-in] Eileen Dietz’s face in makeup. I then put my lights for Eileen on dimmers; to create the superimposition effect, all I had to do was bring the lights up on her face. By doing that shot live, we saved ourselves an optical. And in those days, nobody wanted to do opticals because of how the image quality would suffer."
Midway through the exorcism, a major lighting change is motivated when the room furiously shakes and one of the two table lamps falls over. "From that point on, one lamp is on the floor and the other is still on the night table," Roizman recalls. "This gave the set an entirely different look for the rest of the exorcism adding to all of our problems. Friedkin wanted to the room to have a completely different feeling, even though our sources were the same. He wanted it to have an ethereal quality a soft, glowing, cool look. We tried, at that point, to work with absolutely no shadows in the room, using just bounce light."
Asked if any of the members of the production were disturbed while filming the picture’s more patently grotesque scenes, Roizman responds, "I don’t think so. If someone is going to have a problem like that, they’re going to know it when they’re reading the script and doing preproduction. Theoretically, you should be past that stage and just be a professional when you’re actually shooting. In fact, Linda Blair was constantly laughing between takes, even while we were doing some of the exorcism scenes. Maybe she was so young that she didn’t realize the intensity of the material. I’ll have to ask her some time."
For earlier scenes in which Regan is relentlessly examined using all the tools of modern science, the filmmakers utilized locations at the New York University Medical Center. Here, Roizman went bit more extreme with his lighting approach, deciding that this institutional world should be somewhat cold, bright and sterile. "This includes the scenes where the doctors give Regan an arteriogram sticking a needle into her carotid artery and examine the brain X-rays," he says. "I wanted to go a bit over the top with bluish, whitish tones."
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