Making Exorcist movies has always been a nightmare, but they’ve all been great

polygon.com:

Making an Exorcist movie isn’t easy. Up until the most recent entry, released in theaters this week, every movie in the series has suffered from a tumultuous shoot, copious rewrites, or entire recuts.

But that’s not all that special. Many franchises, especially horror franchises, have had messy productions throughout their history. What makes The Exorcist unique is that, for all the production chaos, all of its entries, in one version or another, are actually good — save for the newly released The Exorcist: Believer.

Fully capturing all of the bizarre, horrifying, tragic, and disastrous things that have happened on the sets of Exorcist movies would rival the Bible in length. But we’re not going to let that stop us from talking about the history of one of the strangest and best horror franchises there is. With that in mind, here’s a brief history of the strange production tales behind the Exorcist franchise.

By many accounts, the set of The Exorcist was haunted. The first movie in the series, with a screenplay adapted by original Exorcist novel author William Peter Blatty and directed by the famously prickly William Friedkin, was a smash hit and an instant horror classic. But it was plagued by problems before it even got off the ground.

The first of its many issues was a bird flying into a circuit box, starting a fire that burned down the entire set. That is, everything except for Regan’s bedroom, of course — the place where most of the movie’s demonic activity takes place. Because of this and other production issues, the production schedule ballooned from 85 days to 200.

Worse still are the actual injuries that happened during the making of the movie. Stars Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair suffered back injuries on set