Considered for years to be the best horror film in history, “The Exorcist” featured one of the most ingenious moments in horror film production, to the extent that one of its sequences was dubbed “The Impossible Shot”.
The scene.
Around the 53rd minute of the film, we see Dr. Klein and Dr. Tanney arrive at Chris McNeil's house after receiving a call requesting their urgent presence. Upon arriving at the house, the pair is greeted by Chris's nanny and secretary, Sharon, who leads them upstairs to the girl's room, where she is suffering from spasms and violent seizures.
The problem.
Although this interesting sequence goes unnoticed by the general public, more experienced viewers wondered how the production team managed to achieve such stable and fluid camera movement when, to begin with, the shot takes place upstairs at a fairly fast speed, and was filmed three years before Garrett Brown's Steadicam made its debut in the film "Bound for Glory" (1976).
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| Garrett Brown's steadicam. |
The solution.
The ingenious solution came from director of photography Owen Roizman, his crew, and members of the art department, who designed a system for the occasion consisting of a series of rails located at the top of the set erected at Warner Bros. Burbank Studios that followed the trajectory and turns of the staircase.
A structure similar to a swing was hung, on which the camera operator sat and which moved by means of a pulley system and with the help of an assistant who directed the movement of the device. This made it possible to achieve stabilized tracking which, while not completely stable, is much more suitable than a simple handheld camera.
