Linda Blair

The Casting That Destroyed a Childhood

Linda Blair was thirteen years old when William Friedkin chose her from six hundred candidates. They weren't looking for an established actress but for a girl who could endure brutal shooting days in temperatures several degrees below zero. The box office success of 1973 thrust her into a media circus that no teenager was prepared to handle.

It was genuine physical torture.

Friedkin tied her to a bed that vibrated so violently it caused a mechanical fracture in her spine. And while audiences were throwing up in cinemas around the world, she was receiving death threats from religious fanatics who believed the devil really lived in her body. Warner Bros had to pay for bodyguards for six months to prevent attacks on her in public.

The Troubled Girl Label

The real problem wasn't physical safety but the typecasting that came right after. In 1974 she starred in Born Innocent, and in 1975 in Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. Both were TV movies that exploited her image as a young woman in danger and a victim of circumstance.

The industry decided that Blair was the face of teenage trauma.

She tried to revive her career with Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977. The film was a critical and commercial disaster that buried any chance of returning to the top tier of major studios. Sometimes a poorly executed sequel outweighs a masterful debut.

Chains, Cells and Activism

In December 1977, police arrested her for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. That arrest put her on a blacklist she never fully escaped. So during the 1980s she turned to exploitation films and B-movies such as Hell Night in 1981 and Chained Heat in 1983.

The shoots were fast and poorly paid.

Her life changed course when she decided to channel her energy into animal rescue. In 2004 she founded the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation to save abandoned dogs in the Los Angeles area. She stopped chasing directors' applause to focus on work that kept her firmly away from the red carpet spotlight.

She made a brief appearance on Supernatural in 2006, playing a police detective. It was a nod to her past in horror that fans appreciated. In 2023 she worked as a technical consultant and made a cameo in The Exorcist: Believer, supervising the well-being of the underage actresses during the possession scenes.

400 million dollars was spent on the production of that 2023 film, just to acquire the rights to the franchise.