this film". "The camera pointedly does not express the horror of Regan's experience with modern medicine, it only records it, allowing the audience to take away from it what it will", writes critic John Kenneth Muir of this scene in Horror Films of the 1970s. "In some ways, the hospital interlude is the most terrifying scene in the film because it looks, sounds and feels totally real ... For a time, it is medicine that possesses Regan, not the Devil, it seems." Kermode says it "seems like an Inquisitional torture, perverse in its precision and horribly sexual in its execution." In a 2021 article in the journal History of the Human Sciences, Amy C. Chambers of Manchester Metropolitan University similarly observes that "[t]he medical space is made spectacular and horrific in The Exorcist not through the presentation of Regan's behaviour or the demon, but through the clinical nature of her treatment and how this is communicated through shots and sound." She quotes Finnish media professor Frans Ilkka Mäyrä on how the scientific suggests the spiritual here: "The violent movements and noises of arteriographic machinery reach diabolical dimensions. The names of medication gain occult resonances: Ritalin, Librium." Medical professionals have described the scene, not in the novel but added to the film to reflect changes in medical technology, as a realistic depiction of the procedure. It is also of historical interest in the field, as around the time of the film's release, radiologists had begun to stop using the carotid artery for the puncture (as they do in the film) in favor of a more distant artery. It has also been described as the most realistic depiction of a medical procedure in a popular film. In his 2012 commentary on the DVD release of the 2000 cut, Friedkin claimed that the scene was used as a training film for radiologists for years after the film's release. Roizman recalled the challenges of filming the scene in his American Cinematographer interview. It was shot with limited time available on a Saturday afternoon, in one of the actual rooms used for the procedure. "The space was cramped and there was really no room for rigging lighting equipment, so I decided to shoot the whole thing with available light, which, in this case, meant fluorescent light." Unlike most of the other interiors in the film, that was more than enough light to be adequate and