Why 1973 Audiences Fainted at The Exorcist — And 2025 TikTokers Laugh at It: Generational Horror vs. Horror-Comedy
[OPENING SCENE: FADE IN]
INT. MOVIE THEATER — 1973 — NIGHT
A packed house. Faces illuminated by flickering light. Then: the head spin. The crucifix. The vomit. Someone faints in Row K. An ambulance is called. A priest is consulted. America collectively loses its mind.
CUT TO:
INT. BEDROOM — 2025 — 2:47 AM
A teenager watches the same scene on their phone. Takes a screenshot. Captions it: “she’s so me when Mercury’s in retrograde lmaooo 💀” Posts it. Goes viral. Nobody calls a priest.
Same movie. Different century. Completely opposite reactions.
What the hell happened?
Act I: When America Actually Lost Its Lunch Over a Movie
Let’s get one thing straight: The Exorcist didn’t just scare people in 1973. It hospitalized them.
We’re talking documented reports of audience members vomiting in the aisles. Fainting spells. Heart palpitations. One poor soul allegedly had a miscarriage. Theater owners kept smelling salts on hand like they were running a Victorian fainting couch emporium. The film came with a literal health warning in some cities. People lined up around the block in the freezing cold just to get traumatized for two hours and $3.50.
This wasn’t your standard “ooh, scary!” reaction. This was a full-blown cultural panic attack.
Why? Because in 1973, nobody had seen anything like it. The special effects were groundbreaking. The subject matter—demonic possession, religious terror, a child’s body as a battlefield between good and evil—was deeply taboo. And crucially, the culture hadn’t built up antibodies to this kind of horror yet. There was no meme culture to defang it, no ironic distance to hide behind, no comment section to scroll through while the scary parts played out.
“1973 audiences came for popcorn. They left questioning God, reality, and whether their popcorn was still in their stomach.”
Plus, let’s be real: 1973 America was a hot mess. Watergate. Vietnam. Oil crisis. Existential dread on every channel. The Exorcist arrived at exactly the moment when people were already terrified of losing control—and here comes a movie where a twelve-year-old girl gets hijacked by an ancient demon who makes her head spin like a busted carnival ride.
Perfect timing. Terrifying resonance.
Act II: The Great Desensitization — Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gore
Fast-forward fifty years, and Gen Z is watching Regan MacNeil projectile-vomit pea soup while eating actual soup and laughing.
What changed? Everything and nothing.
The Internet Happened
By the time today’s TikTokers were old enough to scroll, they’d already seen things that would make William Friedkin weep. Gore memes. True crime podcasts. Jumpscares edited into cooking tutorials. The entire collected works of A24. Horror became ambient. It’s wallpaper. It’s content. It’s what autoplays while you’re trying to fall asleep.
Your brain can only clutch its pearls so many times before it just shrugs and orders another iced coffee.
Irony Became Our Emotional Armor
Millennials and Gen Z grew up in a world that felt perpetually on fire—climate catastrophe, school shootings, economic collapse, pandemics, the general sense that the world is a garbage fire wrapped in a student loan bill. Sincerity became risky. Earnestness felt naive. So we coped with humor. Dark humor. Meta humor. Humor that says, “I’m laughing because if I don’t, I’ll cry, and crying won’t fix my credit score.”
When you watch The Exorcist through that lens, it’s not scary—it’s camp. It’s vintage. It’s practically cosplay. “Pazuzu said WHAT? Icon behavior, honestly.”
We Know the Tricks Now
In 1973, practical effects were black magic. In 2025, we’ve all watched behind-the-scenes YouTube videos explaining exactly how they made Linda Blair’s head rotate. We know about the harnesses, the makeup, the fake vomit recipes. The mystery is gone. The spell is broken. We’re not watching horror—we’re watching craftsmanship, and craftsmanship doesn’t make you faint. It makes you appreciate the hustle.
The Mock Trial: Horror vs. Humor — The People v. Cultural Evolution
PROSECUTION (HORROR): Your Honor, The Exorcist was meant to terrify! To shake audiences to their core! To confront them with ultimate evil! These TikTokers are disrespecting the entire genre by turning sacred terror into meme fodder!
DEFENSE (HUMOR): Objection—relevance. Horror evolves. What terrified one generation always becomes parody for the next. It’s not disrespect; it’s cultural metabolism. Every generation processes fear differently. Our clients are simply refusing to be controlled by the same fears their grandparents had.
JUDGE: But what about the craft? The artistry?
DEFENSE: They appreciate the craft! That’s WHY they meme it. You don’t meme things you don’t care about. You meme things you love. These kids have watched The Exorcist fifteen times. They’ve done more for its cultural longevity than ten film studies classes.
PROSECUTION: …I’ll allow it.
JUDGE: Case dismissed. But seriously, y’all need to watch more Ari Aster.
The Ranking Nobody Asked For: Horror’s Half-Life by Generation
| Generation | Their “Scary” Movie | What They Do Now | Cultural Fear Meter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boomers | The Exorcist (1973) | Quote it at dinner parties | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 |
| Gen X | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | “It puts the lotion…” jokes | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 |
| Millennials | The Ring (2002) | “Seven days” memes | 🔥🔥🔥 |
| Gen Z | Hereditary (2018) | “tongue click 😏” | 🔥🔥 |
| Gen Alpha | TBD (probably AI-generated) | Will meme it before it even drops | 🔥 |
Each generation’s terror becomes the next generation’s punchline. It’s the circle of life, Simba.
What We’re ACTUALLY Afraid Of Now (Spoiler: It’s Not Demons)
Here’s the plot twist: We’re not less scared than our parents. We’re scared of different things.
1973 feared demonic possession because it represented loss of control, violation of innocence, and the collapse of religious certainty. Those were the big anxieties of the era.
2025? We’re terrified of:
- Being perceived incorrectly online
- Never owning a home
- Surveillance capitalism
- Climate apocalypse (but make it slow and bureaucratic)
- The AI that’s going to take our jobs while we’re mid-scroll
- Missing out on authentic experiences because we’re too busy performing them
Demons are straightforward. You call a priest. You get an exorcism. Problem solved.
But how do you exorcise existential dread about late-stage capitalism? There’s no holy water for that.
“We’re not laughing at The Exorcist because we’re fearless. We’re laughing because laughing at possessed children feels easier than confronting the fact that we’re all possessed by our phones.”
The Conspiracy Theory That’s Actually Just Psychology
Here’s my theory, and hear me out: We’re not desensitized to horror. We’re recontextualizing it.
The Exorcist worked in 1973 because it tapped into specific cultural anxieties about religion, authority, and the nuclear family. But in 2025, those aren’t our core fears anymore. We don’t worry about losing our souls to Satan—we worry about losing our attention spans to TikTok. We don’t fear demonic possession—we fear algorithm possession.
So when we watch The Exorcist now, our brains aren’t registering it as a threat. It’s a historical document. It’s a time capsule of someone else’s fears. And when something isn’t threatening us personally, humor rushes in to fill the space.
It’s not disrespect. It’s emotional distance. It’s the same reason you can laugh at your high school yearbook photo but wanted to die when it was taken.
Time turns terror into nostalgia.
The Alternate Universe Where The Exorcist Drops in 2025
INT. STREAMING SERVICE HOMEPAGE — 2025
The Exorcist premieres. Instead of theater lines, there are Discord servers. Instead of ambulances, there are Reddit threads debating whether the possession is a metaphor for neurodivergence. BuzzFeed publishes “Which Exorcist Character Are You Based On Your Birth Chart?” Within 48 hours, there are fifteen TikTok dances to “Tubular Bells.”
Someone edits Regan’s spider-walk into a Charli XCX music video.
The cultural impact? Massive. The terror? Minimal.
Because horror doesn’t live in the content anymore. It lives in the context.
Mini-Quiz: What’s Your Horror Generation?
If you could only watch ONE of these scenarios, which would genuinely unsettle you most?
A) A demon possesses a child and priests try to save her soul
B) Your phone shows you a video of yourself sleeping that you didn’t record
C) You’re stuck in a time loop where every day is a Zoom meeting that could’ve been an email
D) Everyone you love is replaced by AI chatbots, but they’re slightly better conversationalists
(Answer at the end)
Director’s Notes for Your Life: What The Exorcist Actually Teaches Us
The real lesson here isn’t about horror movies. It’s about how we process fear.
Every generation inherits the previous generation’s monsters and turns them into metaphors. Vampires became sparkly. Zombies became social commentary. Demons became memes. It’s not evolution or devolution—it’s transformation.
And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe the point isn’t that we’re harder to scare. Maybe it’s that we’re learning to look fear in the face and say, “Yeah, I see you. You’re not the boss of me anymore.”
Or maybe we’re just so overwhelmed by real-world horror that fictional horror feels like a vacation.
Either way, here we are: a generation that laughs at spinning heads while doomscrolling through actual apocalypse footage. Ironic? Definitely. Unhealthy? Probably. Human? Absolutely.
The Moment of Truth
Here’s what keeps me up at night:
We mock The Exorcist because we think we’re brave. We think we’re evolved. We think we’ve outgrown those old fears.
But what if we’re just numb?
What if the reason nothing scares us anymore isn’t because we’re stronger—it’s because we’re exhausted? What if irony isn’t armor; it’s just emotional frostbite?
What scares me isn’t that Gen Z laughs at The Exorcist. What scares me is that we might’ve forgotten how to be genuinely moved by anything. How to feel fear that isn’t performative. How to experience art that shakes us awake instead of lulling us into content-fed numbness.
Maybe the real possession isn’t demonic. Maybe it’s algorithmic.
Questions to Haunt You (In a Fun Way)
- When was the last time a movie genuinely scared you—not jumpscared you, but made you lie awake questioning reality?
- If horror movies are cultural anxiety translated into entertainment, what will Gen Alpha’s horror look like? (And will we laugh at it?)
- Is it possible to reclaim sincerity in a culture built on ironic distance—or have we scrolled past the point of no return?
Your Extremely Low-Pressure Call to Action
Next time you watch a “classic” scary movie, try this: Turn off your phone. Sit in the dark. Let yourself feel whatever comes up—even if it’s not fear. Even if it’s boredom. Even if it’s laughter.
Then ask yourself: What am I actually afraid of right now?
Chances are, it’s not demons.
But it’s definitely something.
Roll credits. Now go live like your story matters.
Quiz Answer:
If you picked B, you’re Peak Modern Horror (we see you, Black Mirror generation). C means you’ve achieved existential dread enlightenment. D means you’ve been on the internet too long. A means you’re either a Boomer or you really commit to vintage aesthetics. All answers are valid. All answers are terrifying.
🎬 Mic-Drop Discussion Question:
If every generation’s horror becomes the next generation’s comedy, what does that say about collective trauma—and are we healing or just coping?
Discover more from Lifestyle Record
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.