[A]s we continued to parse the movie, we found something our minds couldn’t explain as easily.
It happens about 49 minutes into the film, when the possessed young girl, Regan (played by Linda Blair), thrashes on her bed as a team of doctors visit her home. Her eyes roll back and her throat bulges grotesquely (both effectively creepy makeup effects). Then she vaults onto her feet, hauls back her hand, and knocks one of the approaching doctors across the room.
There are a lot of rapid cuts in the sequence, and as we paused and unpaused, looking for hidden images, we saw the young girl’s face suddenly distort. Her eyes became fathomless black pits, her hair appeared to curl into horns, and her face suddenly became more stoic and imposing. We halted on the image, staring at those empty sockets. ...
That was 30 years ago. I don’t really believe in supernatural phenomena, and any notion that we had witnessed an actual satanic cameo now seems absurd. It probably felt ridiculous to us even then, once the spell of the movie had lifted. We were kids who had allowed a legitimately scary film to get under our skin and into our heads.
I knew I had seen something, however, and in the decades since, I’ve sometimes wondered whether it was an accidental image or something created intentionally by the filmmakers to instill an unconscious moment of dread.
