Thalian Hall sells out for premiere of Wilmington-shot film, with a celebrity guest or two

Wilmington packed a sold-out Thalian Hall Wednesday night for what was a rare occasion: the premiere of a locally shot feature film starring an Oscar-winning actor.

Horror fans, at least one of them dressed as a priest, waited in a "rush" line outside the hall to score tickets to "The Exorcism," which shot in Wilmington in 2019. It stars Russell Crowe ("Gladiator," "A Beautiful Mind") as a dissolute actor playing an evil-battling Catholic priest.

The movie transfixed the assembled crowd, which gasped at the jump scares, laughed at the right times (most of them pithy lines delivered by the actor David Hyde Pierce of "Frasier," who plays a good-hearted priest) and cheered at the end credits when the words "filmed in North Carolina" appeared.

It was the first paying audience to see "The Exorcism," which hits theaters nationwide June 21. The movie was co-produced by Outerbanks Entertainment, the production company of writer Kevin Williamson ("Dawson's Creek," "Scream"), who will be back in Wilmington to shoot his new Netflix series, "The Waterfront," later this summer.

The cast of "The Exorcism" includes Sam Worthington ("Avatar: The Way of Water"), Chloe Bailey ("Praise This") and Adam Goldberg ("The Equalizer").

In pre-screening remarks, Thalian Hall director Shane Fernando said it was "a special night for our city."

The premiere's unlikely celebrity guest was Dee Snider, best known as the flamboyant singer of '80s hair metal band Twisted Sister. Snider is also the president of new North Carolina-based production company Defiant Artists.

"It's a done deal," Snider said during a pre-screening red carpet interview. "We're going to be making a lot of movies," he said, mostly action, thriller and horror flicks.

Snider, who doesn't have a direct connection to "The Exorcism," said he was in town with Defiant's chief operating officer, Michael Arrieta, to make connections and establish relationships for potential future shoots. Arrieta said Defiant hopes to start shooting its first film in North Carolina next year.

Addressing the crowd before the movie, Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo said that while some locally shot TV shows, including "Under the Dome" and "Sleepy Hollow," have premiered at Thalian Hall, "The Exorcism" is thought to be the first studio-produced, non-independent feature film to premiere there in some 40-odd years of Wilmington movie making.

"'The Exorcist' scared the hell out of me when I saw it in the '70s and I'm sure I'm about to get scared again right now," Saffo said.

The film's director and co-writer, Joshua John Miller, has said "The Exorcism" was inspired by harrowing tales that his father, the Oscar-nominated actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jason Miller, would tell about working on acclaimed 1973 horror film "The Exorcist." (Miller's half-brother is the actor, Jason Patric.)

"The Exorcism" shot in Wilmington under working title "The Georgetown Project," a reference to the Washington, D.C., setting of "The Exorcist." "The Georgetown Project" is also the title of the film-within-a-film that drives the plot of "The Exorcism."

There's not much Port City scenery in the film, which shot mostly at Cinespace Studios on 23rd Street, which was EUE/Screen Gems Studios back when the film was made. There are lots of shots of an impressive house set built on a sound stage there, as well as some shots of the studio lot and the studio's intimate screening room.

Two characters walk on downtown Wilmington streets in one short, nighttime scene.

In a post-screening Q&A with director Miller, actor David Hyde Pierce and co-writer M.A. Fortin conducted via projected Zoom call, Miller thanked the cast and crew, many of whom were in the audience, for "helping us create this crazy nightmare. … Hollywood, a little less generous. North Carolina, just the opposite."

Five years is an unusually long time from shooting to premiere, and in response to an audience question Miller likened getting the film completed to "a sisyphean ordeal."

"I guess you could say the movie was cursed," Miller said. "At one point it almost didn't get finished."

After the film wrapped in Wilmington in fall of 2019, Miller said, the shooting of additional scenes was delayed by the pandemic "and it took forever to get everyone back together." Shoots in New York, Los Angeles and Australia, where Crowe lives, didn't happen until last year, and the movie wasn't recut until January of this year.

Crowe also stars in another exorcism-themed film, "The Pope's Exorcist," which came out last year. Miller said that meeting the formidable actor was "terrifying," while co-writer Fortin told a story about meeting Crowe for the first time as the actor was completing a bike ride while smoking a cigarette and wearing "Tour de France Spandex."

Even then he was intimidating, Fortin said, adding that Crowe "thrives on tension."

During the Zoom Q&A, Pierce charmed the audience with tales of how the staff at St. James Episcopal church in downtown Wilmington allowed him to play the pipe organ in the church sanctuary, and how he wore weights on his feet so that his character's gait would be more like an older man's.

"If there are any young actors in the audience, don't do that," Pierce joked, to laughs from the crowd.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: The Exorcism movie starring Russell Crowe premieres in Wilmington, NC