2008, the film was selected by Empire as one of The 500 Greatest Movies Ever Made. It was also placed on a similar list of a thousand films by The New York Times. John Carpenter listed The Exorcist as one of his top eight scariest horror classics and listed the film as an influence in his 1980 supernatural horror film The Fog. When the film was re-released theatrically in 2000 as "The Version You've Never Seen", some critics reconsidered whether it was still capable of affecting contemporary audiences, since it had been so widely imitated and emulated by other films since then. The Hartford Courants Malcolm Johnson described it as a "somewhat creaky antique [that] ... in some ways, feels a little old hat in 2000." Some scenes, such as Ritalin being proposed as a treatment for Regan, provoked laughter from modern audiences that had not been intended in 1973. But the film's performances were still effective, and the longer version made the medical professionals seem like "witch doctors". But the Tribune found it "even better than it was in 1973 ... it actually seems a deeper movie now." Friedkin, who had seemed an odd choice to direct at the time, now seemed to have been the best. "[He] made the story real—and more terrifying", critic Michael Wilmington wrote. "[He] knows how to make the improbable real, how to convey a convincing atmosphere of modern chaos and dread." Critical and scholarly analysis and commentary The Exorcists surprising commercial success has evoked critical ponderings over its deeper social resonance. Many of those critics have mentioned the anxiety of the American population over developments at the time, just after the cultural, political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. "The Exorcist communicates an image of a United States in an unstable state of change that can no longer avoid its real and historical systemic evils", writes Amy Chambers. Kermode similarly noted that by stylistically distancing itself from the more Gothic horror films that had dominated the genre in the 1960s, the film "presented a credible portrait of the modern urban world ripped apart by an obscene, ancient evil." Stephen King, whose horror novels would sell well in the wake of the film and generate film adaptations of their own (one of which, the 2017 version of It, would eventually dethrone The Exorcist as the all-time highest-grossing R-rated horror film), calls The Exorcist