themes or plot elements and cast established stars, who until then had often avoided the genre until their later years. Friedkin's use of work like Polymorphia in the film's score also led to the use of similar modern avant-garde composers like Penderecki in later horror films like The Shining, and composers of original music for those films adopted some of their techniques, like dissonant intervals such as (particularly) tritones, sound massing and tone clusters, to create unease and tension. The film's success led Warner to initiate a sequel, one of the first times a studio had done that with a major film that had not been planned to have one, launching a franchise. While many of the classic horror films of the 1930s, like Frankenstein and King Kong had spawned series of films, the practice had declined in the 60s, and although there had been exceptions like Bride of Frankenstein, most sequels had been secondary properties for the studios. The other big-budget horror films made in the wake of The Exorcist also led to sequels and franchises. Amy Chambers observes that Friedkin also set a precedent not only by extensively consulting with technical experts in the subject matter, in The Exorcists case physicians and priests, but foregrounding that reliance on expertise by including those experts' names and credentials in the film's credits and press kit, a practice now common. Cultural reference point The Exorcist has become a cultural reference point in the years since its release. Its imagery, particularly Regan in her bedroom, has been used by political cartoonists like Mike Luckovich and Mike Peters. In 1998, ​【51 m】New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd invoked the film when criticizing the nation's apparent indulgence of President Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions: "[P]eople are saying things so bizarre they could have come out of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. ... You expect the feminists' heads to start rotating on their necks any moment now." Father Merrin's arrival scene has also been referenced. In an early episode of the 1982-83 CBS sitcom Square Pegs, Don Novello as his Saturday Night Live (SNL) character Father Guido Sarducci enters a classroom, similarly backlit amidst fog, in order to exorcise a character from possession by the Pac-Man video game. In an episode set on Halloween 2019, a first-season episode of Evil, another CBS series, paid homage to the scene by a meticulous recreation in which the black-clad