Hoaxing as movie marketing?!

[Rev. Rye]

Actually, the story of The Exorcist was based on a real case, and his name was (at least in the literature written about this case) Roland Doe. That said, while we only have the priests' words for it, even one of the priests there admitted that there was still a distinct possibility that Roland was either mentally ill or just making the whole thing up. You can read more in Thomas Allen's Possessed, and while the narrative itself is, of course, dodgy, it's still a cracking good read.

Also, on a side note, since I just rewatched The Exorcist, I should mention this little scene:



Apparently, back in 1973, this scene was actually a lot scarier than many of the possession scenes (seriously, the vomit looked a lot more realistic when it was being poured on people on Nickelodeon), and looking at the Youtube comments, it seems it still is that way. Admittedly, the horrors may have dulled a bit for me after watching every episode of The Knick multiple times through (which has its medical technology about seven decades behind this), but one thing that makes this even more disturbing: the X-Ray technician with the beard actually turned out to be a serial killer.

And no, I'm not just repeating some creepypasta. This is actually part of the historical record. His name was Paul Bateson, and at the time of the film's making, he was an honest-to-Jah X-Ray technician at NYU Medical and got to play himself. However, four years after this film was released, New York's gay community was terrorised by a "Bag murderer" mutilating and dismembering gay men, stuffing their remains in bags and dumping the bags into the Hudson River. Eventually, Variety reporter Addison Verrill was murdered, Bateson was convicted of said murder, and confessed to the murder of the other six victims of the "Bag Murders," though he admitted that he didn't remember doing them. And, surprisingly, William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist, came back to him and was inspired to come back to a project he had been attached to and would later film. It was called Cruising, and it bombed on release. Bateson was released in 2004. He's still a free man, as far as I can tell.

Back to the OP, I can remember the Blair Witch Project, the film that kicked off the Found Footage Film craze, and really committed to the idea to the extent that they put out information about the real "Blair Witch" and three "filmmakers" that, for a while, everyone seemed to assume that it was real, and at the time, even the IMDb pages for Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams all stated they were "missing, presumed dead" sometime around 1994. Of course, when the film actually came out, it turned out to all be fake, but that didn't stop the film from being the most profitable film ever made, making $10,931 for every dollar spent. Simply put: it works.