Film · 1973 · Films · 1970s
The Exorcist
Scored from 1,113 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Chris MacNeil, an actress shooting a film in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., watches her twelve-year-old daughter Regan turn from a cheerful child into something violent and unrecognizable. Medical and psychiatric testing produces nothing, and Chris eventually approaches Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist whose faith is faltering after his mother's death, about seeking permission for an exorcism. The Church sends the elderly Father Lankester Merrin, who has confronted this presence once before, to lead the rite. William Friedkin's supernatural horror film, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, plays the possession as clinical procedure before it becomes a contest of wills.
The Exorcist is a 1973 horror film. It is rated R. The runtime is 122 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. 1,113 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 1,170 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Exorcist lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1970s (2,406 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 1,113.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
