47) King Kong Escapes (1967)

I don't see how you can be amused by gorillas. I think they're dull!

Director
Ishiro Honda

Cast
Rhodes Reason - Comm. Carl Nelson
Linda Jo Miller - Lt. Susan Watson
Hideyo Amamoto - Dr. Who
Mie Hama - Madame Piranha
Haruo Nakajima - King Kong
Yu Sekida - Mechani-Kong and Gorosaurus

While I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, King Kong Escapes was the kind of movie that would air on a Sunday afternoon on KOFY TV 20 or on KBHK TV 44's Saturday night movie.
I can still hear the station bumper jingle. "We've got what you're looking for! K-O-F-Y TV Twenty! [whisper] Stereo."
With the sun streaming through the drapes into the living room and reflecting off the screen of our old family Zenith, and a tub of Costco gummy worms next to me on the floor, these Toho movies were fun to watch, and still are.

I searched for a copy of King Kong Escapes for quite sometime, and finally found a newly purchased copy at my local library.

Co-produced by Toho Studios in Japan (the company that brought us Godzilla and other Kaiju monsters) as well as Rankin/Bass Productions (the company that brought us Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and those other claymation Christmas movies) I wasn't sure if this was a sequel to Toho's third Godzilla movie King Kong vs. Godzilla from 1962. 

King Kong Escapes was released in Japan as King Kong's Counterattack so, well, it can easily be considered a sequel. I don't see why not though Godzilla doesn't make an appearance. Instead, Kong squares off against Mechani-Kong - the remote controlled robot double of Kong. Oh, how I love you, Japan! 💖 

The movie was directed by legendary Toho director Ishiro Honda who directed the first Godzilla movie Gojira (1954) and several other Godzilla films proceeding that. He also directed other Kaiju films such as Rodan (1956), Mothra (1961), War of the Gargantuas (1966), and Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) - I'm still searching for a copy of this one. And of course he also directed King Kong vs. Godzilla, the remake of which is set to be released later this year.

If you've seen any Japanese monster movie from the 1960s, then you probably know what to expect with this movie. 

An evil scientist (seriously, he's both of those things) named Dr. Who (No! Not that Dr. Who. This doctor is played by Hideyo Amamoto) builds a towering 60-foot robot version of King Kong in order to dig below the earth's service in the North Pole as he's searching for a substance called Element X.

So Mechani-Kong walks into an ice cave and starts digging through a glacier. Radiation shorts out its circuitry causing it to shut down. 

Dr. Who decides the real King Kong could take over Mechani-Kong's work, and attempts to capture him. 

On top of this, a supervisor named Madame Piranha (Mie Hama) berates the doctor as her country is financing his work yet he manages to fail. 

Meanwhile, an American pretty boy named Comm. Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) is commanding a submarine to Kong's home, Mondo Island. I guess they didn't want to put him on Skull Island?
Seeing the name Rhodes Reason in the credits, I imagined Crow or Mike or someone on Mystery Science Theater 3000 saying "Rhodes stands to Reason." That's just what came into my head watching this.

With Nelson is Lt. Susan Watson, whom Kong sees and falls in love with similarly to Kong falling in love with Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in the 1933 movie King Kong. 

Nelson finds Kong battling the giant dinosaur, Gorosaurus, and a sea serpent. It's a scene reminiscent of the classic scene from the original King Kong where Kong is duking it out with a T-rex, finally killing it by snapping its jaws in half. The same thing happens here. Classic!

Dr. Who also heads over to Mondo Island, kidnaps Kong, and furnishes him with an earpiece to control him. 

He takes Kong back to the North Pole so he can send him to retrieve Element X.

The ear piece fails, so Who kidnaps Watson as she's the only person Kong will respond to.

And of course, obviously Kong and Mechani-Kong are going to fight once Kong escapes captivity and makes his way to Japan. 

The movie is a fun sci-fi movie. It's entertaining, and a bit schlocky. Kong's appearance is on the cheesy side, but it's simply a product of its time. I can't in good conscience critique that. He looks just as he did in King Kong vs. Godzilla. 

This is meant to entertain and impress audiences as they munch on their popcorn, or make out at the drive-in. Now it has a welcomed nostalgic feel to it. It's all that. Fun. Neat. Entertaining. Nostalgic. Kaiju fans should check it out.
This isn't necessarily a horror movie. It's obviously sci-fi. Still, I used to have nightmares about being chased by a giant gorilla or monster when I was young. I'd run through homes, and into an apartment, and could see a huge gorilla peering through windows looking specifically for me. So, this is a little retrospective for me. 

46) Frankenstein '80 (1972)

The serum!

Director
Mario Mancini

Cast
Gordon Mitchell - Dr. Otto Frankenstein
John Richardson - Karl Schein
Xiro Papas - Mosaico - Frankenstein's monster
Renato Romano - Inspector Schneider

My efforts in depriving myself of sleep continue as I force myself to stay awake while making my way, movie by schlocky B-movie, through the Night Screams collection.
The next flick in the line-up takes me back to Italy. Not the nice, touristy part of Italy full of gorgeous historic culture. Rather, a strange, dark, annoyingly repetitive, and sexually exploitative part with a little known avenue called Frankenstein '80. 
Frankenstein '80 barely resembles the original movie with Boris Karloff. This one has a Dr. Otto Frankenstein create a monstrosity out of random body parts, and that's about all it has in common with the original story.
In the movie, Dr. Frankenstein is always in his lab during the day. At night, however, he's working on a creature he calls Mosaico that's pieced together with various body parts from cadavers.
The monster escapes and goes on a complete killing spree, attacking mostly helpless women (mainly prostitutes) and doing bad monster things.
Police are racing to capture the killer, who just keeps on killing. They search. He kills. They continue searching. He continues killing. They search more. He kills more. Search. Kill. Search. Kill. (SPOILER) They find him. He dies. The end. Frankenstein '80 is that cut and dry.
Each kill is gruesome, and some murders include nudity. I guess the producers had to throw in sex appeal of the worst kind into the mix so they could attract an audience. But the fact that this flick hardly went noticed in its home country upon its release in 1972 shows someone failed miserably.
Italian audiences know tasteless when they see it!
Dr, Frankenstein uses something called "Schwartz serum" to give his creation life. I'm fairly sure that's what it was called. That's what it sounded like to me. I thought that was funny. I guess one could now saw "the schwartz was with him!" #Spaceballs
The serum is really meant to keep the body from rejecting implants. It's stolen almost as soon as the movie begins.

Xiro Papas as Mosaico, the Frankenstein monster.

Another scene that was hilarious without meaning to be so was a struggle scene shot in a meat locker.
The monster makes his way into the walk-in freezer and attacks an unsuspecting woman inside.
After a few minutes of struggling, he takes a side of beef, or a shank or something, and beats her to death. Death by beef shank!
At another part of the movie, the scene fades out...and fades right back to the same scene. Bad editing, maybe?
To its credit, Frankenstein '80 does make an honest noteworthy attempt to be scary with all the sudden, various ways the monster attacks his unsuspecting victims.
Sadly, though, time isn't a friend to this movie. But that's not necessarily the movie's fault.
One thing still stands true. As I've mentioned before, Italian horror film makers really like blood and gore. This movie is no exception. It delivers in that regard. But the erotica is just plain unnecessary.
It makes the low budget movie much more cheaper than it already is.
This one isn't even a B-movie among B-movies. It's repetitive, boring, and unimaginative in its story line.
Despite that classic Italian gore, Frankenstein '80 is an easy pass. And just what the "80" stands for, I don't know?

45) Gate 2: Trespassers (1990)

"Who needs chicks when we got demons?"

Director
Tibor Takacs

Cast
Louis Tripp - Terry Chandler
Pamela Segall - Liz
James Villemaire - John
Simon Reynolds - Moe


The 1987 movie The Gate is one of my favorite horror movies from the 80s. I reviewed it a while ago.
Since then I had been searching for the sequel Gate 2: Trespassers (aka Gate 2: Return to the Nightmare) without any luck. But that luck changed when I happened to find it on Amazon Prime. I wasn't even looking for it there. I just happened to see it while browsing through other horror movies. Score!
It's the third horror sequel I've reviewed so far on this blog.
Actor Louis Tripp, who later changed his name to Baph Tripp, is the only returning actor. He's currently a musician now, but is known primarily for his work in The Gate movies.
Tibor Takacs also returns from the first film's director's chair to helm this sequel.
It has been five years since the events of the first movie. Terry (Louis Tripp) tells how he's been left to stare at his old friend Glen's house across the street, now boarded up after what happened in part one.
Glen and his family have since moved away.
Terry and his dad are still grieving the loss of their mom/wife. She died in the first, and Terry had that hallucination of himself hugging his dead mom which turned out the be a dead dog. Remember that?
Anyways, his dad has taken to booze pretty hard to heal the pain.

Also Terry has become deeply interested...obsessed...with the portal to hell he and Glen previously opened, and the powers that come with it.
The movie opens with Terry, sporting a blue sorcerer's robe, and conducting a dark ritual to open the portal again inside Glen's old house. He wants to capture that power by opening the portal the right way this time around.
During the ritual, he's interrupted by a teenager named John (James Villemaire), who's as cookie-cutter a bully as can be with grease-backed hair, low I.Q., and leather bike jacket.
With John is his girlfriend, Liz (Pamela Segall) and goofy sidekick, Moe (Simon Reynolds).
Liz is genuinely interested in Terry and his interests in demonology.

She convinces John and Moe to get in on the ceremony, which they do.

Louis Tripp in The Gate 2

Terry is successful in conjuring a minion like the ones in the first movie. But John freaks out, pulls out a gun and shoots it.
When they all leave, Terry picks up the lifeless body of the minion, takes it home and keeps it in a jar of formaldehyde .
During the ritual, everyone made small burnt offerings in order to have wishes come true.
The next day, Terry realizes his wish actually came true - that his depressed father (a former airline pilot) quits drinking and obtains a new job with an airline.
Liz comes by to see Terry, and they realize the minion can makes those wishes and more come true as well. So, she wishes for a new sports car and burns a small effigy of a car to make it happen.
But they soon realize those wishes, no matter what they are, will end by turning to crap - literally. Never trust a demon!
John and Moe see Terry and Liz driving around in their sports car, and John's jealousy boils over. He breaks into Terry's house, steals the minion, and he and Moe use it to wish for a lot of money.
As they're driving around, the minion gets loose in the car, and attacks John and Moe.
When they finally stop at a very exclusive restaurant to spend their large wad of cash, John and Moe soon realize that not only does their money turn to crap, they've also become infected by the minion.
They slowly morph into demons themselves, and kidnap Liz for a blood sacrifice that'll allow demons to dominate the world. It's up to Terry to make everything right.
The movie uses the same stop motion special effects like the first film. I really appreciate this style of effects. The amount of time and effort that goes into pre-CGI effects (stop motion particularly) is remarkable and praise worthy. It doesn't even matter how realistic it may or may not look. The work that goes into it is remarkable.
I felt the movie skidding too closely on dragging the story.
For a moment, I found myself thinking "where is this going." But it picks up and keeps the audience engaged and intrigued. It's a fun movie, just like the first, despite failing to live up to the likability of part one. But that's generally the nature of sequels.
The Gate 2 tries and succeeds to be its own story fairly well. It takes things in a new direction, certainly not attempting to be just another part one.
It takes the scary elements of the first film and gives us a closer look. Part two dives deeper into the details such as where the monsters come from, and what more they can do.
It's an entertaining movie with not nearly as much exposition as the first. The element of "Show! Don't tell" is utilized more in the sequel.
If fans of the first movie want to explore the demons a little more, and find out what else the gate can do, this sequel won't disappoint. Though the acting often seems scripted, who's really going into this for the acting?

44) The Witches (1990)

My orders are that every child in England shall be rubbed out!

Director
Nicholas Roeg

Cast
Anjelica Huston - Eva Ernst/ The Grand High Witch
Jasen Fisher - Luke
Mai Zetterling - Helga
Rowan Atkinson - Mr. Stringer
Charlie Potter - Bruno Jenkins

I'm six movies away from 50 on my journey through 1,000 days of horror. I wanted to do something memorable (more or less) for my 50th review, and The Witches was going to be that movie. But I changed my mind.
Though the purpose of this blog is to review B-horror and obscure thriller movies, and the like, I'm bending the rule and reviewing this one for the sake of those who weren't around when the movie was released, or haven't seen it, or worse, didn't know it existed.
It's certainly not an obscure movie, and it's definitely not a B-movie.  But its popularity seems a bit pulled back.

So, think of this post as a sort of "in case you didn't know..." kind of write-up.

The most important aspect about The Witches (for anyone who didn't know) is that it's based on a book by children's author, Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox.)

After that tidbit of crucial information, this movie has a lot, and I mean a lot, going for it. It has a great and talented cast, especially Anjelica Huston. Critic Roger Ebert said this movie is almost worth seeing just for her performance as the "Grand High Witch." And, I agree.
There's very memorable visuals thanks in large part to Jim Henson's workshop. By the way, many argue this was the last film Jim Henson worked on before his passing.
Also, it has an original story line. And for a children's movie, it really doesn't water down the scares. Those scares aren't just in the form of ugly looking witches. There's an underlying theme of abduction in this movie.
I was nine-years old when this movie was released. And the idea - the possibility - of being permanently taken away from my family, depicted in the film, terrified me. No doubt my nine-year old self isn't alone in that regard.
The movie begins with a grandmother named Helga telling her grandson, Luke, who are living in Norway, about witches and how to identify one.
She explains that not only are witches ugly, and have distinct physical traits that non-witches don't possess. For instance, real witches always wear gloves because their hands resemble claws. They also wear wigs as they're bald. And those wigs give them rashes, so they're always scratching their scalps.
Their square feet have no toes, so they wear ordinary shoes. No sandals or open-toed shoes Their eyes have a purple tinge to them. In the book, their saliva was a blue color, which they often used in place of ink.
Above all, they hate children with a passion. So much so, their primary goal is to wipe out children! Witches always hold their noses around kids because to them the smell of a child is similar to a dog's droppings.
Even more frightening is the story Helga tells Luke about a girl she knew in her childhood named Erica who suddenly went missing.
As the story is played out, Erica is taken by a witch. And being witch, as Helga says, means never getting caught. When Erica finally turns up, it's in a very peculiar and unimaginable place that she cannot be rescued from.
Later that night, Luke's parents are killed in a car accident. Luke is now in his grandmother's care, and she decides to move out of Norway and into England.
It's at their new home that Luke has his first encounter with a witch. She tries to coax him down from his tree house, but Luke is no fool.

Jasen Fisher and Mai Zetterling

Later, on his birthday, Helga becomes sick from diabetes. The doctor advises them to take a seaside vacation, and to lay off sugar.
They check into a seaside hotel, operated by Mr. Stringer, played by the always funny Rowan Atkinson, who at the time had just finished his first episode of Mr. Bean.
But little do they know that the hotel is going to host a convention of all the witches England, including their leader, the Grand High Witch - Miss. Eva Ernst.
The witches disguise themselves as the "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" but their purpose is vastly far from their fake namesake.
Ernst has called the annual meeting of witches together to debut her brand new potion. Formula 86. This potion has the power to turn children into mice. And all the witches are instructed to quit their jobs, open up candy stores all around England, and eliminate all children once and for all.
Luke eavesdrops on their meeting, and witnesses the witches turn another boy named Bruno, whom he met earlier in the hotel dining room, into a mouse.
The witches catch Luke, and turn him into a mouse as well.
Now, Luke has to stop the witches before they all leave and execute their plan.
Huston's performance is so enjoyable to watch. Though, from what I've read about how difficult it was for her to perform in a full mask and heavy make-up and prosthetics underneath hot stage lights, it seems she's having a lot fun in her role as an evil witch.
In various interviews, she said it took five to six hours to apply her make-up, and another five to take it off.
Houston doesn't hold back on being scary. This is one of her best roles. And despite those harsh conditions, she puts her entire self into the character.
The make-up, visual and special effects are absolutely memorable. The hideous look of the Grand High Witch is well done. Her grotesque hag look contrasted with her seductive sleek black formal gown her character wears while wearing a mask to blend in with everyone else is just imaginative. The details in the mouse transformation is fantastic. Jim Henson's puppetry is unmatchable.
When it comes to children's movies, Witches is truly scary. In fact, there was a scene or two Director Nicholas Roag cut from the final film because he deemed them too scary based on reactions from his son.
When compared to the "scariness" of other children's films such as Return to Oz, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Watcher in the Woods, this one surpasses them.

Anjelica Huston

Though many know and love this movie, I'm surprised it's not on the same level of "classic" as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That could be due to the terrifying elements in the movie. But, then again, Wonka had that freaky tunnel scene that gave so many young people nightmares. 
Still, like Wonka, The Witches has the same charming qualities (great visuals, casting, and performances). However, The Witches isn't a musical like Wonka.
This movie is actor Jasen Fisher's second film. He only acted in three according to IMDB.com. Before starring in this film, he played Kevin in the 1989 movie Parenthood. After The Witches, he starred as Ace in the 1991 movie Hook, which was actually filmed before The Witches. 
The majority of his acting is through voice work since his character is a mouse, he still comes across a little too dry and scripted at times. Otherwise, he seems to also be having fun in the role, and the effort is truly there.
English actor, Bill Paterson, plays Bruno's father. He's perfect at adding a little comedy as he tries to be both dignified yet gluttonous, which is were is overweight son clearly gets his own love of food.
Like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl didn't like this adaptation either. He called the movie "utterly appalling" as the movie had a different, and happier, ending than his book. Sorry, Mr. Dahl. I completely disagree.
Also, comedian and Monty Python member Michael Palin has a cameo as one of the witches present at the meeting. Though he's wearing a dress and a wig, he's pretty easy to spot. Other men were used to dress as witches during the conference scene to bolster up the ugliness.
This movie deserves much more recognition because it's one of the best Roald Dahl movies out there. Since it's one of my personal favorite movies, I had to include it in this blog!

Personal Favorites in the Genre

43) Buried Alive (1939)

"There's no doubt Johnnys' been a victim of unfair tactics. But we must accept things as they are."

Director
Victor Halperin

Cast
Robert Wilcox - Johnny Martin
Beverly Roberts - Joan Wright
Wheeler Oakman - Manning
George Pembroke - Ernie Matthews
Peter Lynn - Gus Barth

Watching the early thriller Buried Alive puts me at four movies in out of the 50 included in the Night Screams collection.
As I've mentioned in previous reviews, this collection includes B-horror, thriller, and suspense films from a variety of decades.
Buried Alive falls into the suspense/ melodrama movie genre. And for a film from an early decade, it doesn't hold back in dealing with injustice perhaps too often found in the justice system.
For this story, the scary part is the officials with the remiss attitude surrounding an innocent person in jail and on death row.
A prison executioner, Ernie Mathews (George Pembroke), is overwhelmed by his job and asks a prison trustee named Johnny Martin (Robert Wilcox), whose on his way to the airport to drop off prison doctor Robert Lee (Steven Chase), to drive him over to a local bar.
While he's having a drink at the bar, Mathews is confronted by a jerk tabloid reporter named Manning (Wheeler Oakman) which ultimately leads to a fist fight.
Meanwhile, Joan Wright (Beverly Roberts), a prison nurse who was driving with Martin to see Lee off at the airport, asks him to swing by the bar to pick up Mathews.
When he arrives, Martin is pulled into the ensuing fight and ends up punching Manning pretty hard.
He manages to pull Mathews out of the bar and into the car. And in retaliation, Manning writes an unsavory article about Martin, blaming him for the fight though he himself is the one who actually started it. The article also makes the governor look pretty bad.
Martin ends up in jail, and the governor is now inclined to delay his parole.
After spending time in jail, Martin is in fact denied parole and sent back to jail.

His outburst of anger after the hearing certainly doesn't help his image with the parole board.
Meanwhile, Joan has been helping him deal with the list of injustices Martin has been buried under, and they both end up falling in love.
To add to Martin's dilemma, his cell mate ends up killing a prison guard and attempts to escape.
Martin chases him to discourage his attempt at fleeing, and is shot and captured under the belief he was also trying to escape.
Martin is brought up on murder charges thanks primarily to false testimony from an inmate who has nothing but contempt for Martin.
Now, Martin has to somehow find a way to prove  his innocence among unsympathetic officials.
The plot just seems a little too convoluted. I had trouble paying attention and trying to recall just what was going on, and what the significance behind a few characters was.
Nevertheless, I was intrigued enough to carry on, especially after Martin is falsely accused. The story tightens up at that point in the movie.
Despite the title, Buried Alive isn't a horror film. It's a metaphor for the main character being "buried alive" under a large amount of injustices.
The ending is a payoff worth waiting for.
This movie's pacing helps keep my interest, despite boring and often times disinterested acting.
But I have to hand it to early cinema choreography. The fist fight in the bar is brutal.
Actors really get into the scene. I imagine the director telling actors on set, "just start punching, and we'll see what we get." I've seen this same kind of style in other movies produced in the same era.
Director Victor Halperin had earlier directed Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, in the famous horror movie, White Zombie (1932). So, he knows horror for sure.
Overall, this is a movie about determination and confidence in the truth while pursuing vindication. Martin is dangerously close to insanity with the heavy weight forcing him down. And being up against the justice system, escape seems impossible.
For early cinema, and film noir melodrama fans, this movie could easily satisfy.

Not a Review Necessarily: Is the Exorcist Still the Scariest Movie Ever?

Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973).

I believe it's a safe assumption that movie audiences, whether horror fans or not, know to some degree that director William Friedkin's 1973 movie The Exorcist was and still is an impactful movie. That's putting it in simple terms, but it's true.
The movie is about a young girl named Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) who's possessed by the devil. Her very non-religious mom (played by Ellen Burstyn) has no idea what is happening to her daughter. With all avenues of medical help exhausted, she finally turns to a Catholic priest for help.
The whole demonic possession motif is so common in the horror genre these days. By "demonic possession," I mean the idea that someone can somehow be taken over by evil spirits, and the remedy is the intervention of a priest or religious person to exorcise that malevolent spirit. I'm not referring to supernatural horror movies about haunted houses or possessed dolls, or the like.
Before 1973, there was no movie The Exorcist could really be compared to. It was a new kind of horror subject for the big screen - a subject as old as Christianity, and older. To see a Catholic exorcism reenacted was brand new and terrifying. But audiences get used anything the more they see it.
A lot of inspiration springs from this one movie.
After the release of The Exorcist, the theme was repeated in movies such as Abby (1974), Beyond the Door (1974), The Entity (1982), Burnt Offerings (1976), Prince of Darkness (1987) and of course the sequels to The Exorcist to name a few. 
The cultural impact of the movie is intense.
Though horror movies centered on exorcism and the demonic have lingered on through the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s, the 2005 movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose brought the horror sub-genre back into a more prominent place not seen since audiences watched Linda Blair be taken over by the devil.
What these two movies have in common is what makes them stand out above the rest. They're both based on true events.
The Exorcist is based on the Catholic exorcism of a 13-year old boy back in the 1940s outside Washington D.C.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based on the Catholic exorcism of a German woman named Anneliese Michel back in the mid-1970s.
Both movies also have a documentary style about them, especially Emily Rose which focuses around a court case.
Friedkin comes from a documentary background. His previous film, The French Connection, has a similar feel to it. That's why author William Peter Blatty, whose book this movie is based on, picked him to film the movie.
That style adds to the frightening nature of each movie. It's an emphasis on the idea of "what if it really is true."
There's a ton of movies centering around possession and exorcisms released in the last 10 years alone - The Last Exorcism (2010), The Rite (2011), The Possession (2012), The Last Exorcism II (2013), Deliver Us From Evil (2014), The Exorcism of Molly Hartley (2015), The Possession Experiment (2016), The Crucifixion (2017), The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018), The Prodigy (2019) and more possession-based movies slated to come out in 2020. There's at least one for every year of the last decade! Demons are all the rage now.
To be honest, I find these kinds of movies repetitive and dull. They rely mostly on jump scares and grotesquaries to frighten audiences - contorted bodies, eyeballs rolled back into the head, scars and lesions, and a lot of vomit! Occasionally there's a good movie, but they don't hold a candle to both The Exorcist  and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. 
I first saw Friedkin's movie back in the mid-1990s when I was a teenager. I grew up in a Catholic household as my late father was a devout Roman Catholic. He attended the old rite of mass said in Latin every Sunday. He was never without a rosary in his pocket. And he owned quite a library of books on various religious topics including demonic possession.
I've read a few of these books on actual exorcism cases - Hostage to the Devil by Fr. Malachi Martin S.J., Begone Satan by Carl Vogl- an account of demonic possession involving a girl back in the 1920s in Erling, Iowa which lasted nearly a month - and An Exorcist Tells His Story by the Vatican's Chief Exorcist, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, to name a few. I found all these books to be very compelling. And of course there's accounts of possession and exorcism recorded in Scripture. So, being raised Catholic meant a belief that these things can and have happened.

And with that belief about exorcism, I was initially scared to watch The Exorcist. But that was me.
For others, it boils down to personal religious beliefs. Are demons real? Is there an eternal Hell where the souls of unrepentant sinners go? And can demons possess the living?
There's a lot to be said about the intense reactions audiences had when The Exorcist first came out. Some people vomited and passed out in theaters. Others ran out crying. Some non-Catholics ran straight to Catholic confessionals. What other horror/thriller movie had such an impact before 1973?
But audiences are used to seeing the sub-genre portrayed over and over again. For the most part, audiences have become desensitized to exorcism movies.
It's that documentary style in The Exorcist  that still holds up and helps set the movie apart from other such films. What also stands out is the focus within the movie of how the events surrounding Regan are effecting the two priests performing the exorcism makes the movie work. One of the priests is in the middle of a battle against doubt regarding his faith. The other priest is suffering from a heart condition. And now they both have to take on the devil himself.
It's not just a scary movie. There's a lot more to the story. There is so, so much for audiences to take away from The Exorcist.
Exorcism has effected real people beyond those who are supposedly possessed by demons. This movie addresses that, and that depiction is a scary thing in itself.
As Friedkin said in an interview, "It's not a movie about Dracula. It's not a film about the alien. It's a film about a real street in a real town, and upstairs on the third floor of this house is a real little girl who happens to possessed by a demon."
Meanwhile, other exorcism movies lean towards being monster movies. Despite my general dislike, there have been some good ones. Hereditary (2018) definitely pops into mind as a memorable and truly scary possession movie. But even that movie is more of a monster movie than The Exorcist. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. Movies like that, and most other exorcism movies, are meant to scare the audience more than make them ponder the reality behind the phenomenon. The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Rose have a much more educational undertone than most other sub-genre films.
But perceptions have certainly shifted over time. Compared to recent horror films not necessarily centered on exorcism but with scary visuals and such, maybe The Exorcist is a product of its day. However,  with the reality of the movie, along with knowledge that many religions (Catholicism particularly) deal with problems like this in real life, other possession horror movies just don't compare story-wise.
Maybe for non-religious individuals, the movie may lack in scariness. I've heard one non-religious person claim the scary aspect for them was how the mother in the film, Chris MacNeil, who isn't religious at all in the movie, and thinks her daughter is literally loosing her mind, finally has to appeal to a Catholic priest out of desperation because no medical expert could tell her what's wrong with her daughter. She places her trust in an institution (the Catholic Church) which she is completely unfamiliar with. Otherwise, for religious folks (Christians especially) it still holds true that it's the scariest movie ever. Demons and the possibility (though rare) of possession is a very real part of Abrahamic religions.