The deranged, rejected The Exorcist score that the director literally threw out the window

It was used in a 'banned' trailer that reportedly made some audience members sick

Unusually for a horror film, there isn’t a huge amount of music in The Exorcist.

A bold decision by director William Friedkin, it served to make the surreal and satanic events of the movie seem as though they were somehow happening in a real space, but it wasn’t always going to be so mute.

Before Friedkin settled on Mike Oldfield’s now iconic 'Tubular Bells' to bookend the film, a full score was being worked on by Lalo Schifrin, the man behind the Mission Impossible theme and the Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry soundtracks.

It sounded a little something like this (soul-wrenching right from the opening, and note the jarring smooth jazz at the finish):

His abstract, atonal score was used in the advanced “banned” trailer for the movie which, so the story goes, made audiences sick (though this probably had as much to do with the intense flashing images):

Though the director, according to Neil Lerner’s Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, had asked Schifrin for a score that “did not sound like music” and which was “atonal and moody”, it seems he wasn’t happy with it. So much so in fact, that he reportedly threw it out of the studio window (not unlike the fates of characters Burke Dennings and Father Karras in the film).

Schifrin once discussed his work on The Exorcist with Score magazine, an interesting footnote to a strange story:

"The truth is that it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, but I have recently read that in order to triumph in your life, you may previously have some fails. What happened is that the director, William Friedkin, hired me to write the music for the trailer, six minutes were recorded for the Warner’s edition of the trailer. The people who saw the trailer reacted against the film, because the scenes were heavy and frightening, so most of them went to the toilet to vomit. The trailer was terrific, but the mix of those frightening scenes and my music, which was also a very difficult and heavy score, scared the audiences away. So, the Warner Brothers executives said Friedkin to tell me that I must write less dramatic and softer score. I could easily and perfectly do what they wanted because it was way too simple in relevance to what I have previously written, but Friedkin didn’t tell me what they said. I´m sure he did it deliberately. In the past we had an incident, caused by other reasons, and I think he wanted vengeance. This is my theory. This is the first time I speak of this matter, my attorney recommended me not to talk about it, but I think this is a good time to reveal the truth.

“Finally, I wrote the music for the film in the same vein as that of the trailer. In fact, when I wrote the trailer I was in the studio with Friedkin and he congratulated me for it. So, I thought i was in the right way… but the truth was very different.”

(via Dangerous Minds)