So this is one of those movies that I’ve never seen, but thought I knew what to expect. There’s… y’know, the girl in the bed, puking and spinning her head around, right? And then an exorcism. Bam.

Well, turns out there’s actually a lot more to the movie than that, and it’s a lot weirder than you’d think. There’s a whole-ass intro in Iraq that’s only tangentially tied to anything in the movie. There’s this whole quasi-giallo plot with a dude falling down stairs and a cop investigating. There’s a priest who has family issues.

But then of course, there is in the last quarter of the movie the little girl doing all the stuff and the priests coming in and doing their stuff, too. Because I know where it’s going, it feels almost deliberately slow in getting there, in a way that I find fascinating — no modern movie would be paced like this — but also a little frustrating to experience.

Because the problem with famous movies is that it’s hard not to watch them “wrong.” You already know what Rosebud is, you already know he shouts “Stella,” you already know the little girl’s going to be doing her spinny vomit thing, you already know Norman Bates is going to stab her in the shower. And so because you’re watching and waiting for The Thing to happen, you don’t get the sense of the build-up, the mystery of what might be happening next, the way that the movie layers on events and mysteries to drive to its conclusion. The first watch isn’t quite a rewatch, but it’s also nothing like people experienced it at the time, alas.

But still and all, even with all that, this holds up pretty well. I don’t know that it feels like a transcendent classic, but it does feel like a genuinely good movie, and is easy to recommend to anyone who likes lowkey ’70s horror.