William Friedkin created unforgettable horror and pleasure with equal brilliance

William Friedkin was a director who created so many visceral, unforgettable experiences for moviegoers; he was a film-maker who could offer films with the thrillingly intravenous excitement of hard drugs. For some reason, the one that stands out for me is his neo-noir corrupt-cop drama To Live and Die in LA (1985) and, the first time I saw it, almost rising from my seat during the airport car chase and a particularly gasp-inducing high-fall stunt.

Friedkin gave us a number of classics in the early 1970s, but his queasy and diabolically inspired masterpiece was surely The Exorcist from 1973, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his original novel. This was the quintessential horror-pleasure of that period, the era of people lining up around the block to get into the cinema to see something that they hoped, expected and feared would scare them half to death, a roller-coaster ride out into the void. Just as Steven Spielberg was to give the Roger Corman schlock-horror fantasies about evil creatures a sophisticated upgrade with Jaws, so Friedkin effectively did with horror, making it thrillingly contemporary and respectable.

Like porn, horror had been turbocharging cinema’s fortunes since the medium was invented, but which was considered marginal. But horror, and perhaps specifically Satanic horror, had often been associated with something exotic, strange, foreign: a world of Transylvanian castles and elegant vampires with British accents. The Exorcist was so devastating because it brought Satan and evil into the modern-day American suburb (albeit a well-heeled American suburb) in a film which in its opening scenes could as well be a heartrending drama about family dysfunction, or about political intrigue, about ordinary Americans. (Even Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which emerged a few years before, involved a Hammer-style cast of alien devil-acolytes.)

Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair were outstanding as the mother and daughter Chris and Regan MacNeil, the pre-teen daughter behaving strangely and the mother worried, and looking for help. Exquisitely, The Exorcist contains what could be the premise for a TV movie of the week about drug abuse or eating disorders. With diabolic ingenuity and flair, Friedkin made it the springboard for the incursion of pure evil. Regan is possessed by an evil spirit and they need a professional; and here you have to admit that only someone from the haunted Old Europe will do: Max von Sydow’s gaunt and frowning Father Merrin.

Horror films are often now admired for how funny they are – but there was nothing funny about The Exorcist which took the existence of Satan with a seriousness that was unfashionable in the movies, then as now. I remember being afraid, genuinely afraid, at what I was going to experience in Regan’s bedroom and it never occurred to me then to dismiss it all as an allegory for anxious sexual awakening. The evil spirit in The Exorcist is not a metaphor; it is an evil spirit.

William Friedkin, Gene Hackman, Jane Fonda and Philip D’Antoni at the 1971 Oscars Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Similarly compelling was Friedkin’s The French Connection from 1971, the true-crime thriller which introduced Brit audiences to the scuzzy world of New York, which really was grittier, nastier and scarier than any British city, and whose squalors tourists really could come across quite easily – just like in the movies. It also gave birth to celluloid’s version of the New York underworld in Lumet’s Serpico and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. There’s a gripping car v subway chase (though, as I say, the car chase in To Live And Die In LA bears comparison), an amazing lead performance from Gene Hackman as “Popeye” Doyle (Friedkin leaves his nickname and backstory coolly unexplored and unexplained), and an incomparably brutal evocation of normalised racism in the NYPD.

But what is often forgotten about The French Connection is Friedkin’s masterly and restrained controlled use of pace. A modern-day cop thriller would have to bust out some tasty action violence quite soon after the opening credits, or even before the credits, but Friedkin takes everything very slow, very downbeat, as Popeye and his partner brood and roam around the New York streets. It is fully 1hr before any gunshots are fired. And the film’s unhurried surveillance scenes are surely an inspiration for the TV classic The Wire.

Friedkin’s 1977 gem Sorcerer, set in South America – critically ignored at the time due to the avalanche of attention going elsewhere, mostly to George Lucas’s Star Wars – was an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel The Wages of Fear, which had already been famously filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot with Yves Montand. Perhaps the idea of it being a remake (which Friedkin disputed) contributed to the film’s relative neglect. It’s an intriguing slow-burner of a film, content with its own inordinately long fuse, fizzing menacingly away; appropriately so, in fact, because it’s about four desperate guys driving a truckload of nitroglycerin which could explode at the slightest unanticipated jolt. Yet Friedkin’s genius for strangeness, loneliness and existential fear comes out when the truck is marooned in a sinister Conradian wasteland. It’s a fiercely austere film to which Friedkin brings his piercing film-making intelligence.

Elsewhere, his underworld drama Cruising from 1980, with Al Pacino as the cop going undercover to find a gay serial killer, has perhaps been derided for expressing not much more than the straight world’s fear of gay sexuality. But there are some extraordinary moments in it: such as when Pacino’s boss – played by a young Paul Sorvino, later to gain immortality in Scorsese’s GoodFellas – calmly asks him: “Have you ever had your cock sucked by a man?” and Pacino calmly says no, though without insisting he is straight. It is a brutal, rough-edged drama which scrapes tactlessly against the guardrails of what a 21st century audience would consider good taste. Meanwhile Bug, from 2006, was a piece of pure pulp craziness and insect horror from screenwriter and dramatist Tracy Letts, while Letts also gave him the basis for his violent and amoral cop drama Killer Joe, which gave Matthew McConaughey his “McConaissance”. Friedkin was a master of cinema and a magus of pure celluloid sensation.