This week's "Women We Love" kicks off a month long Halloween salute to our favorite movie "scream queens":It's not every child star that gets their big break by spewing pea green vomit on a priest and masturbating with a crucifix. But then again, not every child star is Linda Blair.
The movie was (in case you couldn't figure it out) The Exorcist, and the then 14-year-old Blair won acclaim and an Oscar nomination for her shocking portrayal of little Regan MacNeil, possessed by Satan himself. Blair would reprise the role four years later in the less successful Exorcist II: The Heretic, and the movies' youngest scream queen was born.
A string of TV movies (Born Innocent, Stranger in Our House) and exploitation flicks (Hell Night, Grotesque) with lurid titles evocative of her breakthrough movie pepper her filmography, but it wasn't all just blood and guts for Blair. She had a memorable part in the disaster favorite Airport 1975 and "grew up" on screen as the title character in the TV movie Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. She even took on a musical, Roller Boogie, with unintentionally hilarious results, and single-handedly brought the "women in prison" genre to a whole new level with the camptastic Chained Heat.
Although she never quite broke out of the B-movie ghetto (co-starring with such icons of the form as Vincent Van Patten, David Hasselhoff and Wings Hauser will do that to you), she has embraced her place in cinematic history; in fact, later years saw her lampooning her most famous character in the Exorcist spoof Repossessed and cashing in on her cult status with cameo roles (Scream) and TV guest spots (PSI Factor, Supernatural). She even starred, as the titular role, no less, in the Blair Witch take off, The Blair Bitch Project.
Links via Imdb.com and YouTube.com.
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