Today is Halloween but I enjoy monster movies year-round. Mostly the Universal ones, but I am also a devotee of Val Lewton and am unable to get enough 1950s and 1960s schlock.

I do not extend this affinity to The Exorcist. I just don’t get it. It tops several lists of the most frightening movies ever and I wouldn’t have it in my top 100. The only scene that freaks me out at all is when a floating Regan has her head grotesquely rotated at an unnatural angle. But everyone has their likes, neutralities, and dislikes. The concern here is with an urban legend that a single frame, when frozen, reveals genuine demonic activity as to the Hollywood kind.

Vanity Fair writer Anthony Breznican reports that he and some cronies about 30 years ago, presumably with too much time on their hands, slowed the William Friedkin film down in search of subliminal messaging. Eventually, they hit a voila moment, in a scene where Father Karras dreams about his dead mother. When slowed to a cinematic crawl, the shot reveals what Breznican describes as the “appearance of a horrid white face, sneering with decayed teeth, eyes pooling in red sores.”

This seems not terribly surprising for a movie with The Exorcist’s theme, but the amateur detectives were sure they had hit on something. Enthused, they kept going, and came to a scene where the possessed Regan convulses in her bedroom and easily overpowers the adults trying to help her. During the frame-by-frame investigation, Breznican and his compatriots come across one where Regan’s eyes seem to disappear, leaving only vacant sockets. Again, nothing unexpected from this type of flick. However, Breznican wrote that he didn’t think the technology to pull this off existed in the mid-1970s and that, “It didn’t look like a makeup effect. There was no discernible editing cut either. It just appeared that her face changed.”

What would seem to be a chilling discovery to middle schoolers can be recognized as condition-setting, expectation, and pareidolia by the skeptic. Breznican eventually realized that, but he still wanted answers as to how the scene was managed. He had the chance when he interviewed William Friedkin 20 years after the frightful viewing.

The answer was simple. The director told him, “What’s used there, those quick shots, were the tests that (makeup artist) Dick Smith did on Linda Blair’s double. She had an all-white face and red lips, and I didn’t like it as the makeup for the demon, but viewed that way, as a quick cut, it’s very frightening.”

Not to me. But I do appreciated a good mystery solved.