Thus did Washington’s most immediately identifiable edifices end up on the cutting room floor. But Friedkin, who died Monday at 87, wound up creating a monument every bit as iconic. Over the past five decades, the “Exorcist Steps,” at 36th and Prospect streets in Georgetown, have become an enormously popular destination for both locals and tourists: Joggers regularly use the 75 stairs as a challenging workout; fans treat them as a filmgoer’s mecca, a reminder of the most hauntingly frightening time Washington played itself.
In fact, the Exorcist Steps became so popular that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser designated them an official Washington, D.C. tourist attraction in 2015, an honor Friedkin cherished. “I have an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director [“The French Connection”], and a number of nominations,” he told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “There are probably hundreds of people who have won an Academy Award, but I don’t think there are any who have a dedication like that on one of their locations.”
As a site of cinematic pilgrimage, the Exorcist Steps are right up there with Bodega Bay from “The Birds,” the Dyersville, Iowa, baseball diamond from “Field of Dreams,” the Griffith Observatory from “Rebel Without a Cause” and at least two other sets of famous steps: at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (“Rocky”) and at 167th Street in the Bronx (“Joker”).
Maybe it’s something about stairways: their architectural open-endedness, the way they invite either aspirational ascension or hell-bound descent. For filmmakers, a dark, shadowy stairway represents both the tantalizing (What’s up there?) and the terrifying (What’s down there?). Along with parking garages, bell towers, basements and attics, stairways are the ultimate liminal space; depending on the angle, they’re either filled with possibility or fraught with peril. (The sequence Friedkin was best known for, the car chase in 1971’s “The French Connection,” was a function of superb shooting, framing and editing; in “The Exorcist,” the steps, at once implacable and destabilizing, generated a frisson of tension all on their own.)
In “The Exorcist,” staircases serve as a subtle but foreboding visual motif. At the beginning of the movie, Burstyn’s character, an actress in town to do a movie, can be seen lightly tripping down a set of wide, gracefully welcoming steps on the Georgetown University campus, then passing tidily uniform steps in front of the neighborhood’s stately 18th-century townhouses. The first glimpse of the Exorcist Steps is a fleeting one, arriving nearly an hour into the movie; several minutes later, we get our first full-fledged view, when a police detective played by Lee J. Cobb investigates the death of a character who has taken a tumble with fatal and grotesque results. The steps look vertiginously steep and oppressively narrow, hemmed in on one side by a looming wall of Georgetown’s distinctive granite stonework.
It’s a chilling moment, and one that foreshadows “The Exorcist’s” climactic sequence, when the conflicted Father Karras (Jason Miller) spiritually wins but physically loses his epic battle with the demonic force that has possessed the 12-year-old girl played by Blair. By the end of the film — whose final image is taken at the top of the stairs, with a sweeping view of Georgetown’s Key Bridge — the Exorcist Steps have become the film’s most potent symbol of the evil that lurks at life’s most mundane turns, just waiting to give someone a push.
The Exorcist Steps made their first appearance in William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, which was based on a real-life possession that occurred in 1949, and whose locations were based on Blatty’s real life in Georgetown as a student. In the book, Blatty described the steps as “a precipitous plunge of old stone steps” that “fell away to M Street far below.” In Friedkin’s 2013 memoir, “The Friedkin Connection,” the director recalled seeing the actual steps while location scouting: “North of the university is a tall cliff, atop which you can see the backs of Federalist houses that face onto Prospect Avenue. At the northern tip of Prospect is the multi-tiered stairwell called the Hitchcock Steps, named after the designer who built them.” (Other accounts maintain that Blatty and his friends called them the “Hitchcock Steps” because they exuded a creepiness worthy of the horror-film auteur.)
Thankfully, Friedkin insisted on keeping Blatty’s backdrop, with its intimations of gothic mystery and Jesuitical inquiry. Plenty of other recognizable institutions had cameos in “The Exorcist,” including the university’s Healy Hall, Holy Trinity Church and the Tombs restaurant. But it was the Exorcist Steps that would become the most improbable avatar of the most improbable movie to become part of Washington’s cinematic canon.
Friedkin once said he considered “The Exorcist” a hymn to Georgetown, and he was right: Other movies were and would be filmed in the legendarily well-heeled enclave, but it was “The Exorcist” in which the neighborhood became a character in its own right. “I don’t think the story would be anywhere near as effective if it was set in Los Angeles,” Friedkin said in the 2010 featurette compilation “The Making of ‘The Exorcist.’” “Georgetown, the university, the church, the tradition, the old buildings, the flight of steps next to a house which appear dangerous and where later something horrendous happens, all of these are little visual pieces of a larger puzzle that, when you start to explore them, they begin to add up in the audience’s subconscious and create the mood of the film.”
The “little visual pieces” Friedkin talked about, and what the Exorcist Steps exemplify, are expressive tools of filmmaking often relegated to the “background” — locations, sets, props, visual and aural design elements — that play a deceptively crucial role in turning a two-dimensional screen story into something so immersive that it becomes a world unto itself, engulfing the viewer in ways that endure over a lifetime.
Those were the puzzle pieces Friedkin assembled in “The Exorcist,” nowhere more effectively than an otherwise banal Georgetown stairway. As the director said, paraphrasing George Gershwin at a screening of “The Exorcist” after the 2015 commemoration: “In time, the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble. They’re only made of clay. But these steps are here to stay.”